What should the developer’s priority be for the next 2 weeks?
0 voters
What would you like to see as the development priority starting with build 1.10 and moving onwards through the next two weeks?
Currently the best thing that should be worked on would be the resource routing + car routing. Still see cars rather wait in line that pop into an open station.
On a side note, I would also like some sort of roadmap or planned features list, no ETA’s needed in them, just so we get some sort of a clue of what direction you are planning to take the game.
I will keep voting for whatever goes as “UI”.
There are a lot of things with the GUI that would make the game a ton more enjoyable to play. Things like drag/box-to-delete, repeated placement of assembly steps, moving steps and things like rebindable keys (especially the mouse drag scroll button, I need a keyboard to play with a huge factory) would just improve the game so much. Improving UI elements like the ability to set values directly instead of sliders, filtering/sorting options for lists, copying settings like auto-filling requests for stockpiles, copying upgrades between assembly steps and these kind of quality of life fixes would be (relatively) simple to implement with huge gains in player enjoyment.
Other than that, the most pressing things should be performance and pathfinding/resource routing. I haven’t personally hit performance issues but I can guess that with ridiculously large factories the performance can suffer a bit. Also the resource routing can be a difficulty feature and with proper factory design can be worked around for. Instead with too much optimization, I’m afraid that the best way will be to just carpet the whole factory with resource conveyors. Right now the bugs make it more of a challenge to design a well-optimized factory.
The car-sales financial model, tech tree expansion, charts/stats and scenarios/achievements are content that would be more fitting to the game nearing release.
Better resource import logic, the ability to control which importers are bringing in which materials, and better stockpile management are big issues at the moment.
The ability to see more fine grained information about your factory as a whole, such as which slots have the highest average run time, which have the lowest, what raw materials/components are costing you the most, and so on would be great information to have.
On a slot level, if it’s waiting for resources, I’d like to know what resource it’s waiting for. All of this information is important for optimizing factories.
FWIW, this is done pending the next update, and its super-handy!
I have found it hard to keep track of resource-routing issues, in terms of knowing what is still causing problems for people. Is it actual bugs? or is it a case of resources coming from the wrong place, and not the optimal route?
I do intend to introduce the same GUI for supply stockpiles and ‘make’ slots as exists for normal production slots, where you can see all of the outgoing/incoming stuff highlighted when you select the slot.
That should at least make it clearer what is going where.
When it comes to resource routing, perhaps something like a “check” could work.
Like when a station needs a component it 1st checks Stock Piles along the line for it, if none or not enough are found it will check if there are manufacturers of it with stock on it and if not, it will pull the components from the wall import.
I think the “problems” users have are not really bug/issue-related, but design-based and relate to several suggestions, especially the following:
Main reason for those request? We currently partly have to build our shopfloor with space around the production facilities because we don’t want Resource Conveyors to mix/connect. So its not actually an issue/bug, but a burden to (currently) live with.
For some parts you can’t go around having dedicated lines. For instance, when you want to put electric windows in your car you need components you can’t make yourself, so you will need to have that station also linked to a resource import. Resulting in that same import to also pull in windows even though you have a stockpile sitting right next to it with windows on it.
Yep, but then - by limiting the import window to “electric components” or whatever - and having the same line connected there is no issue (the issue otherwise would be that we import the windows, which we exclusively want to produce ourselves).
But this really is a good example for what people’s issues are with the routing: why not having two dedicated lines going into one production slot? Do you think, in a car company the window parts and the electric components hang on the same “conveyor”? No, most probably some are e.g. feeded directly by a truck from the ramp and the other components by an internal supply route.
I agree with Dagobert… now it mostly seems like players aren’t designing their factories very well and rather expect the resource importers to do all the magic of resource balancing for them.
That said the similar sounding notorious “Resource Pending 167/171” bug/crash is gone since 1.10. Haven’t seen it happen ever since and there also hasn’t anyone been reporting it lately, so it seems like that issue is finally fixed.
I’ve voted for “Proper music or GUI design”, but it’s really the GUI - I have the music turned off 
JM2c
Designing a factory now, giving every station it’s own manufacture station and/or import line. Half way through I am experiencing very bad lag and I don’t even have the production line running yet.
While the game is only using 60% of my GPU, 15% of my CPU and 6% of my RAM. So I have no clue what is causing the lag, but it’s so bad, it made it unplayable. So definitely something that needs to be worked on too.
Yup thats fixed for the next build. (performance)
The biggest issue I am seeing is that if I have a lot of demand for tires for example, and I build a lot of tire manufacturing, after a certain number of tire manufacturers tires will not be sent from the furthest away tire manufacturers, even if there is still demand for tires on that line. Counting the tires in flight it doesn’t look like there are enough en-route to meet all the tire fitter demand, and there aren’t any tires in stock on the other manufacturers - it just seems that a certain number are just sitting there not routing resources (no export message). Adding in stockpiles asking for max tires still can’t get those manufacturers to empty, even when next to them and not getting tires from other manufacturers (I’m assuming that stockpiles should get resources from manufacturers with stock?).
This is all on a closed resource line with no imports, so it’s not like it’s getting tires from anywhere else. This happens with other components as well (such as wheels) and feels like a limit on the number of sources that will be queried for resources?
It’s also worth noting that these manufacturers can have been exporting manufactured goods perfectly fine (so it’s not an issue hooking them up to the resource lines), until I built more units closer to the installers, at which point the furthest ones stop exporting. If I go and delete the exporting manufacturers then the furthest ones which were ‘stuck’ start exporting again.
is that with MASSIVE factories? if so I think I’ve fixed it for the next build.
It’s pretty big, but not as big as some of the factories in your blogs. I’ll test with the next build and will report back if it’s not fixed.
I know it’s not on the development list, and I’ve kind of hung out in the background reading what I can here and there. There’s an option I’d personally like to see added to the list:
Make the game a game.
Before I get slammed, I know it’s in alpha. My concern is that I don’t see where any of the fundamental components for my concern are. Currently, there’s basically 3 stages (barring resource arrival concerns and the like).
First: Build one of everything you can for the bare money you can squeeze it in, and then hit fast forward for a little while until you can do something else. While you’re building cash, build some research centers and let them get to work for phase 2.
Next: Optimize your plant. Start building out time savers to improve throughput. Do what you can to abuse the market.
Finally: Go nuts until you overload the resource controls making variants to avoid overwhelming the market for a single car type.
There’s no decisions, there’s no real challenge other than not shooting yourself in the foot by not biding your time. There’s nothing to base yourself against besides time trials. I adore Big Pharma which is what led me to come here and try out the Alpha version and to try to keep up with the development of this, but Big Pharma had the fundamentals of decisions.
Here’s a few examples of what I mean by decisions. I don’t mean “Do I go left or right with the production line”.
A) Opening moves. Do I husband up some cash to open another early production line with the current ingredients, or do I send off an explorer out of the gate, which pretty much guarantees I have to take a loan?
B) Do you chase the level 1 items, or do you risk going for level 2 out of the gate with large expensive lines that may, or may not, end up crashing their rating?
C) In your research, do you go after marketing/patenting or new ingredient area research heavily to control markets, or do you go up the tree towards new components to get more out of the ingredients you have to get ahead of the competition in new markets for old ingredients?
These are just a few examples. A lot of Big Pharma also involved “What the heck can I squeeze into this space” as well, which would influence your decisions based on what the factory building layout ended up looking like.
A while back I had asked about a roadmap for the development, this was part of why. I’m quite sure that you have the ideas there in the background, Cliff, but it’s more fun being a Pro Bono QA tester when the game has a bit more game to it.
I agree with your statement above!.
But before hitting the markets and competition, the vehicle assembly option gui needs to be done (control module to set variants) right now its to random what output you will make, after that i agree with you 100%
BR