I haven’t even read the article yet and I’m at full sail.
Edit after reading:
The new rails look gorgeous, and I need those new S-bends immediately. And those smooth curves!
And this:
We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this.
is how you know a game dev is in touch with their audience.
Although this confirms my suspicions from last week that 1.1.x maps will be incompatible with the 2.x update, which is a shame but completely understandable. That just means that I have to hurry up and launch my first rocket before that happens! (I swear I’m making actual progress and not just staring blankly at my machines at work)
It says that you can still use the old rails but you won’t be able to build them the same way. You can just rebuild the trails you really need or want the other way
As you can probably guess, the new rail curves will be incompatible with the old ones. Savegames from 1.1 can be opened and trains will still run on previously built rails just like normal, but you won’t be able to construct the old rails at all anymore. In some future Factorio update when we decide to drop 1.1 savegame compatibility (Let’s say 2.1), we will eventually get rid of the old rail shapes completely.
Ah, I misinterpreted that, it seems you’re right. Still, it looks like there will come a point where 1.1.x maps will no longer be supported, which is again understandable.
It sounds more like you’d have to load the savegame in 2.0, then load it from 2.1. Theoretically they aren’t changing Nauvis all that much, so I can’t see why it would be unsupported just yet.
I’m sure it will come with a way to update the map like opening with the second to last update to reformat it. It would be a shame for some megabases I’ve seen to just stop being able to play them
Full rail*
If they’re going to rework how rails work, wouldn’t it be better to get a bit closer to Transport Tycoon in this aspect? I think that it’s close to perfect: simple but deep. It’s relatively effortless to get a train route done, and you basically only have diagonal and straight rails, but it’s damn hard to make your route efficient.
I think you answered your own question.
If I understood the FFF correctly, that is not what they’re doing; they aren’t working with a half dozen straight sections, each fitting a single “square” (in this case a 2x2), and leaving curves up to the player. Instead they’re adding a new curve (the half-S) to be used with the other pieces.
For reference here’s how it works in Transport Tycoon / OpenTTD:
If implementing something similar in Factorio (note: the colours mean nothing, they’re just to distinguish the pieces of rail):
The later can be smoothed out to look a bit more like curves, but the basic units are all straight and diagonal rails.
