Shapez.io: open-source base building game inspired by Factorio

Interesting, I'll be sure to try it out.

And yeah I actually found the first couple of hours actually more fun than Factorio (at least once you know how Factorio works) because you get started much faster. But yeah, Shapez loses steam a lot faster too, while Factorio keeps ramping up.

I think the main problem of Shapez is not so much that there aren't logic or wires though, it's that (with the exception of blueprints) you only build disposable components. In Factorio with the exception of science packs every production artifact can be useful on its own which means that you build to build to build to build... Whereas in shapez once you're done making your "blue stars in red squares with a purple circular corner" factory then you can forget about it completely.

I had the same issue the first time around. My solution was to spend some time building a massive wall (using cliffs to help provide a natural barrier) around the perimeter with a belt full of ammo that refilled all of the turrets. The defenses rarely engaged the enemy but when they did it helped that they destroyed a segment of the wall instead of my base. Made it far more enjoyable to fight the buggies.

I disable mob griefing in minecraft because some mods caused creepers to explode on their own and they also had bigger explosions so there were holes everywhere. Creeper explosions don't drop all destroyed blocks so you will never have enough material to fill the holes even if you wanted to. Finally, because they very rarely destroy my own structures and I don't want that.

It's not like there is any point in killing creepers in modded minecraft. The vast majority of monster loot in minecraft is worthless.

If it is annoying then turn it off. It's just pointless busywork. I've played a lot of games where adding a few tweaks here and there would have made it ten times more enjoyable.

I completely agree - 99% of the time, I play (and test) the game on Firefox. It looks like it runs there even better than on Chromium. I've tried to tell the main developer that it 100% works, but the badge is still there; you can ignore it.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted since it's completely true. Making a cross-browser game is hard.

For regular apps it hardly matters but when you need to run complicated logic 60 times a second differences between browsers and even nuances in implementations between platforms (Windows vs Mac, desktop vs mobile) start to matter. And then we have all the rendering and sound caveats.

That’s bananas. I write a lot of complex WebGL shaders, I had never heard that some devices have such a clear (and early) performance cliff.

Not sure how true this is, since both Chrome and Firefox use ANGLE as their default WebGL backend (at least on Windows).

https://github.com/google/angle

Have you tried any of the Zachtronics games? Magnum Opus, Spacechem, etc?

Still scratches the “programming puzzle” itch for me, still complex in the later stages, but more bite sized problems so no refactoring/maintenance to speak of (unless you want to try reimplementing to beat your previous score).

> Refactoring shouldn't exist in this hypothetical game

Without refactoring the factory planning phase would be more difficult since I don't want to fill the best places on the map with unmaintainable, non scalable factories. Refactoring should be very easy, e.g. like in Factorio with construction bots: just press ctrl + x and the bad part of the factory is gone.

If you want to build an abomination, try SeaBlock mod [1] for Factorio. You don't have to refactor anything, space and resources are infinite, so just build a new factory next to the old one after you research a new tier of technology.

[1]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock

I used Factorio to train myself to overcome psychological barriers to progressing my projects. It's easier to do it in Factorio because Factorio is more engaging and problems with overwhelming chaos and complexity and legacy barriers to progress and the needs for refactoring are the same.

I've heard Inifnifactory is like Factorio lite

You know what's funny? I'm a programmer and I think the same of XCOM 2. It's a game where everything's always on fire, everything always goes wrong for you to fix, and there's never enough time to sit back and relax. It was a game about grit and perserverance against overwhelming odds... and it felt exactly like my most previous job as as a Senior SE at a small startup.

No fucking thank you.

That depends on how you "code" your world. Sure, individual sprites aren't pretty, but then again it's supposed to be industrial.

Regardless, you can optimize your builds for symmetry or some other aesthetic goal and come up with some really beautiful designs. Though just like real world programming, lack of planning will result in spaghetti code.

Alrighty, what design philosophy would you apply to get millions of animated, individual objects to interact with an astonishingly high and constant tick rate on everything down to absolutely shitbox-laptops? Because that is what Factorio does!

Why would you expect to perceive GC stutters?

Much as I loathe Java-the-language, it continues to amuse me that the game that sold for $2.5B (and that's after extracting revenue from 60 million sales) was written entirely in Java.

I continue to suspect that GC concerns are mostly (but not entirely!) FUD. Can GC pauses cause some impact, certainly, but how much?

Console certification standards are very gruelling, so for a studio with a huge budget, no price is too high to avoid failing certification because two frames go bad in ten minutes. Otherwise, how big an issue is it really?

If there are a finite amount of large files:

https://myopswork.com/how-remove-files-completely-from-git-r...

This feedback seems to be incorporated already. Quick!

minecraft was inspired by infiniminer

https://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minec...

That's super cool, I never knew this but I always thought that it was very similar to Buildcraft.

That's a very fair point! I didn't realize there was a Linux option.

In that case, I'd also pay to be able to unlock all of the features on the web version.

Developer can certainly make build using Travis CI if someone decide to test it and contribute build configuration. It's open source after all.

There are a few sites that show step by step how you can run Mac on a VMWare on a PC. Yes it disregards some T&Cs but the dev will avoid the $1000 apple-tax.

It's a game, open source and free. This is not some SaaS trying to maximize conversions.

To clarify. The game looks terrific!

The “what a complete crap” belongs only to the shapez.io (mobile) home page. I just can’t believe that it was designed this way.