Zenith 0.2.1: Playability and Simulation

Everything since 0.2.0.

Highlights

• Lighter on big bases: the bridge and the client both do much less work. On a copy of a big
  base the bridge takes 13-23% less time a tick, the middle frame is 13-23% quicker and the graphics
  card's time 17-24% lower, at 60 UPS as before.
• Mining and picking up you can feel: what you mine flies to you the moment the game mines it,
  with the thing's own sound, and F picks items up off belts too, as in Factorio.
• Building as in Factorio 2.x: belt drags along the held belt's line (backwards too, R bends
  them), undergrounds that turn in pairs and show their reach, poles' supply areas, splitters over
  belts, blueprints that show their buildings, repair packs that work.
• Biters, pentapods and trees from Factorio's own pictures: every enemy and creature coloured
  from its frames in its tier's colours, with knees, bites and deaths that blend; trees and rocks
  shaped from their pictures, in Factorio's heights, colours and leaves.
• A camera that stays on you: the character stays in the middle of the screen in every view, on
  the hills too, and first person works on whatever the crosshair is on.
• Lights as in Factorio: the flashlight is Factorio's cone, lamps glow on their glass, and every
  light works on Terrain Elevation's hills.

Upgrading

Use the bridge mod in the download (0.2.1). The new mining feedback, picking items off belts,
Alt-mode's chests, modules and lab packs, the quick warnings, coloured and always-on lamps, repair
packs, new belts drawn at once and the research notice need it.

An extra Windows download, Zenith-0.2.1-dev-windows.zip, is the same build plus the debug menu
(Ctrl+F12 in a game) and the main menu's performance test. The debug menu's time, speed, pause and
teleport controls follow Factorio's console rule: in a multiplayer game only admins can use them.

Performance

Measured on a copy of a big base, the 0.2.0 download against this one, the builds taking turns
(the middle of two runs each). Both held 60 UPS.

• Running laps round its busy belts: the middle frame went from 12.1 to 9.3 ms and the slowest
  1% of frames from 24.4 to 21.3 ms; frames over 16.7 ms fell from 601 to 338, and the graphics
  card's time a frame from 11.6 to 8.8 ms. The bridge's time a tick went from 6.3 to 5.5 ms.
  Worse: frames over 33 ms went from 10 to 22, and the bridge's slowest tick from 55.6 to 66.8 ms.

• Standing at them: the middle frame went from 10.4 to 9.0 ms and the graphics card's time from
  9.8 to 8.1 ms. The bridge's time a tick went from 5.9 to 4.5 ms, its slowest 1% of ticks from 20.7
  to 17.7 ms. Worse: the slowest frame went from 18.5 to 22.4 ms.

• The bridge does less each tick: chunks written as text, lightning looked for only on planets
  that have it, wires watched in turn, unchanged minimap pictures not sent again, decoratives only as
  far as you draw them, one search for every kind of moving thing.

• The graphics card does less: belt items no longer cast the lantern's and flashlight's shadows,
  empty pixels of ground clutter are skipped, Vasillo's belt tops are drawn solid, models share their
  textures, and on very large screens far models simplify where they would at 1440p. Trees' leaves
  are cheaper to draw.

• The Cinematic look is cheaper (Cinematic shaders 0.4.5): clouds read from a texture, no SMAA
  under its TAA, no smog or cloud-shadow pass when there is nothing to draw.

• Belts are the last thing slowed down: when Hold 60 UPS has to ask for less, belts far away
  slow only at its last step, and belt updates are handled first.

• The hitch when a new kind of ground appears is gone, and there are fewer long frames right
  after joining: the loading screen waits while models and shaders are prepared.

• Fewer belt re-reads: the client asks the bridge to read belt lanes again much less often.

• Giving the server the CPU first works on Windows 11 again.

Mining and picking up

• What you mine is taken away the moment the game mines it, and its items (a chest's contents, a
  belt's items) fly to you (issue #19).
• Each swing plays the mined thing's own sound, from the click on.
• The character stands still while it mines, and a sweep with the button held mines every belt the
  cursor passes.
• F picks up items on belts too: everything in reach, nearest first, as Factorio's Pick up items
  does; the items fly to you (issue #18).
• The right button picks up an item lying on the ground.
• A belt you put items on or take them off is read again right away.

Building

• Blueprints show their buildings: a held blueprint, or what you are pasting, shows every
  building as a see-through blue model where it will go, red where it can't; R turns it, H and V
  flip it. A blueprint's tooltip has its picture.
• Repair packs work: hold one and press the left button on a damaged building to mend it, with
  the swing, the building's repair sound and the pack wearing down.
• Belt drags follow Factorio 2.x: along the held belt's line, backwards too, and R bends the line.
• Underground belts and pipes turn in pairs, and holding one shows its connection and how far it
  reaches (red past it).
• Holding or hovering a pole tints its supply area blue, and the poles' round it. Dragged poles
  follow the cursor at any angle.
• Splitters and undergrounds over belts show as buildable and replace the belts under them.
• R over a square building Factorio can't turn turns its look in Zenith only, and one turned in the
  cursor before placing stays turned.
• The offshore pump's preview colours each tile green or red, with the reason.
• Ghosts are removed the moment the right button is on them, and drawn as one clean see-through
  layer.

Inventory, crafting and hands

• Ctrl+click: the item's own sound and its icon flying to the building or to you. A Ctrl+click
  that empties your hand refills it from the inventory, as in Factorio, and no ghost cursor is left
  (issue #19).
• A stack picked up in a machine's window stays in your hand when the window closes.
• The right half of the inventory has Crafting and Logistics tabs (Logistics once researched).
• The inventory sorts itself as it changes.
• A long crafting queue ends in "+N"; hover it to see the rest and cancel crafts there.
• An assembler's recipe chooser shows Factorio's recipe tooltip; ingredients are red only when you
  can't make them.
• The research window opens on the research in progress, scrolled to it.
• Finishing a research plays Factorio's chime, says so in the console and shows "... finished.
  Press T." on the research panel.
• The quickbar works as in Factorio: a slot's key or a click picks its item, or puts the hand
  back, also with the inventory open; a click with something in your hand no longer overwrites a
  slot's item (only an empty slot takes it).

Alt-mode, hover and warnings

• An idle furnace shows the last recipe it made.
• Chests show what they hold most of, as in Factorio.
• Machines show the modules in them and labs the science packs in them, laid out as Factorio 2.1
  lays them out.
• Hovering a machine, chest, wagon or vehicle lists what is inside; hovering an assembler shows its
  inputs and outputs per second. Crafting and fuel bars run smoothly.
• No ammo, no fuel and unplugged warnings show within a second, not 10-40 s late.
• Drills with nothing left to mine get Factorio's No minable resources icon.

Camera and first person

• The character stays in the middle of the screen in every view and at every zoom, on Terrain
  Elevation's hills too, and the camera never goes into the ground: where a hill comes between, it
  tilts up over it (issue #17). Settings' Camera follows the hills is gone: it always does.
• First person works on what the crosshair is on: the first machine, belt, tree or car its line
  meets, not the ground behind it, so a level look picks what is in front of you. A held building
  goes against the side you look at.
• In first person the flashlight follows the crosshair.
• Each view keeps its own projection (F7 changes the one in use).

Graphics

• Biters, spitters, worms and spawners are coloured from Factorio's own frames, each tier in its
  own colours, with knees that bend, and bites, spits and deaths that blend from the walk.
• Pentapods, demolishers and Gleba's spawners the same: skins from their frames in their tiers'
  colours, the wriggler's knees, strike and corpse, spawners breathing as in Factorio.
• Trees grow in Factorio's variations (young and fallen ones too) and leaf colours, wear their
  own leaves from your install, and bark and rocks have their pictures' grain. Crowns are rebuilt
  from their pictures: clumps of leaves with the gaps the sprites have, the spruce in drooping tiers;
  rocks are shaped to their pictures. Dead trees have no green cone on top any more, and a polluted
  tree that lost its leaves no longer keeps its crown's dark core or shadow.
• Pollution: trees grey, thin and die, lakes turn green, and smog hangs over polluted ground
  (Settings > Graphics > Smog).
• Ground: matte, with the tile pictures' own bumps and cracks.
• Lights: the flashlight is Factorio's cone, warm white like the lantern, and buildings no longer
  cut it short; lamps glow on their glass (no white ball over them) in their circuit network's or
  their own colour, and lamps set to Always on shine by day; lamps, headlights, machines' glow,
  turret flashes and beams, rockets, explosions and fires all work on Terrain Elevation's hills,
  as do territory borders and build previews.
• A dead demolisher's territory goes from the map, and the rocket's smoke rises with it.
• Chunks load in the direction you look first, and ones you walked away from are kept.
• With Vasillo's belts, a belt that feeds into the side of another gets its end piece, and the
  belt's return run shows under the rollers.

Belts and inserters

• Inserter arms play Factorio's swing, in step with the belts, and a hand takes the belt's own item
  at the moment the game takes it.
• An inserter's hand holds its item between its pincers, and inserters far away keep their arms.
• Taking an item off a belt no longer throws the items behind it back to the belt's start, and
  items no longer jump about at the end of a backed-up line when an inserter takes from it.
• Items on packed belts keep their own turn as they slide (they seemed to spin as they moved).
• A belt you build is drawn running at once, and a belt you mine takes its items with it at once.
• Zoomed out, belts at middle distance are no longer drawn empty: they show their items or their
  icons all the way out.
• Items at the end of a belt line no longer jump or stop short when the next belt comes into range
  or goes out of it: the bridge tells Zenith which belt each lane leads on to, again whenever that
  changes.
• An item an inserter takes right at the end of a belt no longer leaves a copy of it on the next
  belt.
• Items inside an underground belt with no exit no longer spill onto the belt beside it and stand
  there.
• Belts are drawn more exactly at splitters and balancers (about 97% of the items in view).
• Walking on a big base no longer leaves the client minutes behind the game: belts stay about 99%
  right while walking, and new chunks come quickly.
• No more dropped network packets at busy spots.
• A new drill's or inserter's belt is watched from the start (its items had clumped and vanished),
  and a drill's output is read as it lands.

Sound

• Footsteps fall on the run cycle's steps, with each Space Age ground's own sound.
• The rocket silo has its own building sounds.

Server on another PC (new, untested between two PCs)

• server/relay.py runs beside a headless server on another PC; Zenith connects to it with Play >
  Connect to address (USER-GUIDE.md, "The server on another PC"; issue #20).
• Tried only on one PC so far: two real PCs, Wi-Fi and a busy base's traffic haven't been tried.

Add-ons

• Terrain Elevation 0.1.5 (in the download, off by default): no longer redraws its hills every
  few seconds while chunks load, and placing a belt redraws only what it changed. Checked in a test
  world only.
• Cinematic shaders 0.4.5: the same picture for less work (see Performance).

Fixes

• Zenith could freeze at start, before the main menu, on some PCs: it no longer does.
• A Zenith restarted quickly takes back its own character instead of a new one at the spawn.
• A wire changed within a few seconds of building a pole is no longer missed.
• An asteroid collector no longer counts a chunk its filters reject as caught.
• The exported game no longer logs errors about a missing texture compressor.
• The map view's title is no longer covered by the Show in Factorio button.
• Loading a save in the middle of a rocket ride no longer stops it with an error.
• The README of FUE5's models gives Zenith's licence as the GPL-3.0 (it still said MIT).

Reliable tests

• The public repo's test runs had failed on every release from 0.1.2 to 0.2.0. The causes are
  fixed (checks that walked into water and trees, waits that were too short, two real bridge bugs
  above), and the last full run against real Factorio passed all 402 of its checks.

Known issues

• Much of what's new hasn't been played by hand yet: it passed its tests, not a play session.
  Belt drags follow Factorio's published rules but weren't compared side by side with Factorio's
  own; first person's targeting, the camera, F on belts, the flashlight's cone, the lamps' glow and
  colours, Alt-mode's modules, the reshaped trees, the blueprint preview, repair packs, the
  quickbar and the latest belt fixes haven't been tried against a real game yet.
• Running laps at view distance 7 still has bursts of slow frames when a band of far chunks
  switches detail, and an occasional shader stall.
• Belts: the client's belt work is still heavy on big bases; close up, belt items drawn as models
  can merge into strips seen from above.
• Memory: the downloaded game keeps ground pictures uncompressed, so a base with many kinds of
  ground uses more memory than it should.
• Screenshots zoomed far out were reworked but haven't been tested in the game yet.
• Restart Zenith after changing anti-aliasing: changing it while playing can leave it much slower.
• Forests and long view distances still cost the graphics card the most.
• Zoomed in at a low tilt, the camera can still stand inside a tall building or a tree.
• Solar panels look grey at sunset in the Cinematic look.
• Mods' own windows are still off by default (use them in Factorio's window, Ctrl+F9), and Tips and
  tricks have no pictures.

Credits

• The textured belts, undergrounds, splitters, inserters and burner drill are David's (Vasillo's),
  in the download and used by default as in 0.2.0 (CREDITS.md).