Factorio Dev Tracker
This thread was added on January 23, 2020, with posts from Klonan.
Factorio is always a cpu bottleneck. Most modern gpus would have tons of pixel shader headroom to handle this. You would get basically the same fps.
And all our players on laptops and older hardware would struggle with choppy gameplay, or not even be able to load at all depending on the VRAM requirement increases.
Lol. The file sizes we are talking about would be tiny. Honestly this pixel shader load could be run by cards that came out 14 years ago. And if you really cant run it toggling it would be a simple solution. This wouldn't be some crazy complex programming. This is a technique that was simple when it came out a LONG time ago.
The only real cost would be making the normalmaps in the first place as they would need to be generated and touched up for every object.
But as for the matter you and everyone else is talking about. Performance... I'm afraid that anyone who thinks this would be a performance related issue simply doesn't actually understand how this technique works in the code and hardware.
Having normal maps for all sprites would not be tiny