Factorio 1.1 stable
factorio.com
factorio.com
The gameplay is simple (aka: it requires few kind of user interactions), and the physic engine (source of most bugs in big budget open-world games) is far far far simpler as well.
Yes Factorio is complex. No it's not more complex than a Witcher/Skyrim/Cyberpunk/whatever big budget game you can think of.
When i say complex, I talk about code, architecture, gameplay mechanics. Not play time...
(Also, there is a saying that it takes a genius to do something in a simple way. So even if the resulting code might be simple, arriving to that point can be actually pretty complex endeavor.)
Compare this to average bug ridden AAA game that has half of game mechanics falling apart in visible ways in single player spawning and despawning stuff randomly in failed hopes of keeping an illusion that the systems are sort of working!
A lot of triple A studios are havening trouble of implementing inventory game mechanics without introducing few item duplication glitches. Guys who are building Factorio are on another level they really made implementing game mechanics their core priority. For triple As their core priority is how to budget for making tons of assets and cramming them into the game.
I imagine Grand Theft Auto doesn't simulate any cars that are more than slightly farther than the render distance.
I've seen videos showing that Cyberpunk 2077 will even not simulate things just because they left your view. People and cars will just disappear after you turn around for a second.
In comparison collision detection and AI need to rely on a lot of trickery (and thus bugs) because naïve approaches explode in complexity.
Plus, each item on a conveyor belt has collision as well - they can tell when they run up against each other and will stop. Inserters can't put items on a full belt, but if there's a space they will sneak the item in (moving items around it if necessary).
Compare [0] to [1]. Being 2D makes factorio many many times simpler than an equivalent 3d game.
None of that has any bearing on the quality of the game,it's an excellent game, and a great technical product to boot.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Games/Techniques/2D...
It's a damned shame nobody's written some kind of amalgamation of libraries, let's call it an engine, so every game developers out there doesn't have to write the same collision code a thousand times. /s
It's bugging me away how many folks are confusing pretty 3D graphics with technically complex and efficient simulations (such as piped fluids) on billions of objects.
- User interaction/controls are much simpler in 2d than 3d. In 2d, inputs are (mostly) mapped to a fixed axis, in 3d, those inputs are relative to your perspective which often changes. This leads to awkward situations like Gimbal Lock, and other issues similar to it that can leave a user confused about what their input is going to do
- Implementing gameplay features is generally simpler in 2d than in 3d. A simple example of firing a weapon is straightforward in 2d, in 3d you have issues like where does the projectile start, (from the camera or the player?), how does that interact with animations/the player model itself? Those issues are practically non-existant in 2d, but can ruin a 3d game.
- Anything that deals with rotations in 2d is an order of magnitude more complicated in 3d.
Taking it farther, factorio isn't a "general purpose" sim, it's constrained to a grid with very little in the way of external forces to be considered continuously. There's no gravity, the player walking on a belt doesn't interrupt production, etc. Factorio (to it's credit) leans into this from a gameplay perspective.
> It's a damned shame nobody's written some kind of amalgamation of libraries, let's call it an engine, so every game developers out there doesn't have to write the same collision code a thousand times. /s
Factorio isn't using one of those "engines" you speak of. They've been pretty vocal about how they've hand rolled the game and the engine underneath it.
> It's bugging me away how many folks are confusing pretty 3D graphics with technically complex and efficient simulations (such as piped fluids) on billions of objects.
Actually, I didn't mention graphics, you did. _You're_ the person who is "confusing pretty 3d graphics". At the most fundamental level, simulating an extra dimension adds 50% more of a cost, but in reality the algorithms change and become orders of magnitude more complicated. Collision detection is a textbook example of this, hence me using it in the parent post.
Factorio is a technically impressive game, there is no doubt about that. But it's likely that if factorio was implemented in 3d it either wouldn't exist, or would be a substantially less polished experience (see Satisfactory for the closest example).
There are absolutely optimizations that can be made to process items that aren't visible on the screen. Everything is deterministic, cyclical and can be represented as a graph. Given the initial number of resource at a node in the graph, and a time duration, you can calculate exactly where each resource will be at any time.
Really, most of the budget of AAA is spent on art and level design. They have sophisticated tech, but often it is not on an unreachable level.
Think about the sheer scale of a 10 rocket per minute megabase. The amount of inserters, robots, belts, factories, the pollution involved, the number of biters attacking the base constantly… The number of entities on such a base is enormous, yet they still manage to compute it all in real time at 60 ticks per seconds. That feat of engineering is just as impressive as a 3D physics engine — perhaps even a 3D rendering engine.
(Of course, a AAA game is more than just a physics/rendering engine.)
Than Skyrim, easily. Crowd mechanics in Witcher/Cyberpunk give me a pause, but still probably more complex than those.
Popular "simulation" games like Factorio, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress and Kerbal Space Program are deceptively heavy.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/644930/They_Are_Billions/
It's easy to deal with a few zombies, since they're very slow and stupid, but as you get more and more of them all over the place, and then huge swarming waves of them, it's insanely challenging!
I love this game, but it's incredibly difficult, even on the easiest setting.
They Are Billions Gameplay - Zombie Defense Post Apocalyptic City Building
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmVx_OMojSY&ab_channel=Splat...
It's fun to use cheats and sandbox mode to play around with the swarming simulation in extreme situations:
1 TRILLION ZOMBIES - They Are Billions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeczMg3lMdQ&ab_channel=Sergi...
Check out the dynamics of how the waves of different kinds of zombies interact:
It unleashes and mixes layers of different kinds of zombies with different abilities and attacks. (@ 43:00)
The lighter ranged spell casting zombies are maintaining a distance, but then holes form in their layer, and phalanxes of darker hand-to-hand melee zombies squirt through and fill in the gap. (@ 45:00)
At 1:18:30 he admits that it's obvious the zombie waves will never end, so he lets them win!
It reminds me of slime mold hunting an oat flake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elqwn7k2Wwk&ab_channel=Journ...
I'd love to play SimSlimeMold.
In Factorio, you have a very large number of active objects with very dense, complex, time-critical and deterministic interactions. In most other games, you have relatively few active entities. The game gives you the illusion of a rich living world, but a lot of the graphical bits floating around can't actually be interacted with. The physics system is a complex bit of math but is fairly isolated from the rest of the engine and has relatively few entities to process. If it gets things "wrong" in minor ways, the player is unlikely to tell.
Also, many AAA game physics and graphics engines work the same enough that engines can even be reused. There's a relatively small amount of bespoke system design. It's just following the same well-tread paths. Factorio's gameplay has enough novelty that the engine has to solve challenging somewhat unique problems.
Source: Senior software engineer at EA for eight years and wrote a best-selling book on software architecture for games.
I think this is maybe true, but it's not a fair comparison. The real comparison is how much effort would go into making factorio with all of its polish in a 3d world rather than a 2d world.
Factorio's technical impressiveness (?) Comes from how well it's designed and implemented. The limitations that it imposes are part of the reason it runs so well, and also what make it such a great game.
> The physics system is a complex bit of math but is fairly isolated from the rest of the engine and has relatively few entities to process. If it gets things "wrong" in minor ways, the player is unlikely to tell.
The difference between doing the above for physics and graphics is orders of magnitude in how expensive they are, and how complicated they are to implement. You're right that most people don't notice when they go slightly wrong, but they often go catastrophicly wrong. (Much more often in 3d than in 2d). Factorio skirts around this by not running a general purpose physics sim for the game logic, and constraining the problem space (which to me is even more impressive than getting a 3d physics engine right)
It's a great game, but quite different than Factorio in many ways, and much simpler along certain dimensions, with less abstraction and meta-programming: no drones, no blueprints, etc.
The fact that Factorio is based on a two-dimensional grid vastly simplifies it and makes it more like a precise programming language or spreadsheet, than a free-form 3d graphics editor. I do love them both, though.
Don't get me wrong: 3D adds a lot of cool stuff, like the ability to make layers and build vertically way up into the sky. And you have much more freedom about where you place objects. But that makes it practically impossible to implement the kind of precise grid-based blueprints and drone construction and logistics system that Factorio has.
To its credit, Satisfactory would be practically unusable if it weren't for the wonderfully easy-to-use well designed construction tools, that make it a snap to route and connect conveyer belts and pipes in 3D. But that's a much messier user interface problem that the precise grid of tightly constrained tiles that Factorio uses. But it does live up to its name: building and connecting 3D conveyor belts and especially pipes is quite satisfying!
Here's a great example of how you can abuse the fantastic degree of freedom that Satisfactory provides -- but that freedom comes at a cost of user interface complexity and the lack of higher level automation and abstraction -- the features that make Factorio such addictive "programmer crack".
I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8&ab_channel=Let%2...
The Satisfactory developers must have been equally horrified and gratified to see how people abused their beautiful game in unintended ways, but they responded by optimizing it a lot so it still runs smoothly. But the scale of Factorio's world is still much larger than Satisfactory, even though it's more constrained.
And another thing about Satisfactory is that the world is hand designed and breathtakingly rich and beautiful, unlike Factorio's procedurally generated world (which has beautiful 2D graphics, but no human touch). But that makes it even more tragic that the goal is to cut down all the trees, peel up all the glowing slugs, and ruin the bucolic countryside with mega-factories belching out pollution and waste.
More about Satisfactory:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156912
>Satisfactory is like a 3D version of Factorio, which lets you build huge multi-layer mega factories up into the sky. But it's not as deep and sophisticated as Factorio, and doesn't have drones or blueprints. (That would be a lot more difficult to accomplish in free-form 3D, than with Factorio's 2D tile grid.) It's kind of like the giant simple Legos for younger kids, as opposed to Factorio that's more like Lego Technic.
>Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D version of Factorio, but I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and sophistication. Satisfactory's world is breathtakingly beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of procedurally generated, which makes it all the more satisfying to despoil and ruin with huge mega-factories belching out smoke and radiation.
But Factorio is like a pinball machine with MILLIONS of balls in play at the same time, and it perfectly and efficiently tracks each and every one of them.
There is one sad aspect to Factorio: There is only one character: you. Alone. On a planet. All by yourself. Destroying the environment. But once you get over that depressing aspect, it's great fun! ;)
There is a good xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/1425/
Interacting with the simulation is the majority of the gameplay - and the majority of the simulation is spent on that.
The thing that is interesting about Factorio is it is entirely deterministic (similar to old games that could "record demos" such as Doom or the original Starcraft) - this simplifies some things and complicates others.
Nobody is arguing that Factorio doesn't have complexity. But do you really think a one-man team could create Cyberpunk 2077?
A one-man team built Minecraft which includes Redstone, which allows for some amazing complexity. But that doesn't make it more complex (dev time wise) than an AAA FPS.
I think a naive implementation of factorio would be reasonably straightforward. But that implementation would have no chance to scale to the size of bases factorio manages. The complexity of factorio’s implementation comes from its simulation’s optimizations, particularly in the face of its hard determinism requirement. (Something most physics engines and rain shaders never need to think about.)
Making a good rain shader takes expertise but probably not a lot of time when you know what you’re doing (months not years). Making a game like factorio probably doesn’t take more specialised expertise than many devs here have, but even with all the requisite knowledge it would still take me years to implement something as feature rich, correct and performant as factorio’s simulator.
More devs does not mean less bugs, it does not mean faster development, in fact, it does not mean anything.
An AAA game may need 500+ games, because that's what the technological constraint requires in terms of brain matter.
If big studio could launch an AAA game with only 10 devs, they would do it.
But more dev to have less bugs, or to develop faster is like saying that with 9 pregnant women, you can deliver a baby in 1 month.
I'm thinking about say DICE. DICE has made essentially the same game (battlefield/battlefront) about 10 times. The 3d engine does get upgraded game to game, but clearly the majority of the delta between games is simply the art.
They could, if they gave themselves 8 years. Factorio has been in development since 2012.
AAA games ship on a deadline; naturally the work is divided as much as possible among many teams. More devs can in fact mean faster development if you're OK compromising on quality.
AAA games like Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) only have 50-60 developers.
But then they'll have another 50-60 designers. 15 audio people. 40 animators. 90 artists.
Most of that large team size is caused by the realistic graphics, which Factorio (and most other indie games) simply don't have.
How long do you think it would take a 4-person dev team to build something the scope of Cyberpunk 2077?
It pains me to recall how crude and primitive it was even a year and a half before the release (check out the awful flamingo and telephone and fish tank graphics, not to mention the characters and animations themselves, like pot-bellied Archie Bunker always holding a cigar in his hand, and the naughty scenario description text @ 40:44) -- a whole lot of content and user interface and tuning was done at the very last moment:
The Sims Steering Committee - June 4 1998. A demo of an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sims Steering Committee at EA, developed June 4 1998.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY&ab_channel=DonHo...
Chris Trottier, one of the designers, calls it "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20772916
Here's an interview with Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims, in which she describes "Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion".
Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion
https://web.archive.org/web/20110408034710/https://www.donho...
>Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.
>The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!
>In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.
>If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!
For example, graphic of factorio is very basic. Level-design is not really existing, nor is there any story, music, highly optimized cutscenes, a quest-system or a constantly balanced battle-system. Multiplayer is rather basic, not some high level infrastructure with dozens of servers for 100k+ players. There is also no big marketing where you deliver some stuff outside the game. And Factorio is running only on PC, not consoles or mobiles.
Basically, Factorio is 95% high level code which makes it successful because people enjoy the gameplay coming from this code; while AAA games are successful because of the 95% of things which are not code. People enjoy the gameplay, but even more do they like what is on top and around the engine. The story, the interaction, the atmosphere...
IMO, the AAA titles would be better if less time was spent on a bleeding edge physics system, and more time spent on other aspects.
It’s okay that AAA games exist, because there is still room in the market for games like Factorio, which has experienced a long and successful life.
They would be better games but wouldn't sell as well. Video game sales are driven heavily by screenshots, trailers, and "Let's Play" videos. Graphics and physics look good in those media, actual personal fun experiences less so.
There's probably some higher level business principle here that products end up designed to optimize for the property that most heavily constrains sales instead of the properties that maximize customer satisfaction.
See also: Hollywood movies, book covers, synthesizer presets, house flippers, car interior widgets, etc.
No. Very no. It isn't a graphical game, but that means nothing to complexity. The number of objects and behaviors that the game engine must track, and track perfectly every clock tick, blows away most graphics engines. There is no room for the trickery that graphics/physics engines use to determine which objects need to be tracked. Factorio must track everything always, whether it is on screen or not. Each of those objects is also interactable. The character builds and maintains bespoke systems layered atop each other ad infinitum. The network of possible behaviors may be more akin to a giant excel document than a minecraft world, but that doesn't make it any less complex.
See also Prison Architect. Cartoonish 2d graphics, reminiscent of SouthPark imho, but nevertheless a very complex game. Even after a thousand hours with it, Prison Architect's AI still surprises me every time I play.
- move your character - mine stuff - craft buildings - place buildings
And a small bit of combat for the aliens.
I insist, the gameplay IS simple, the content allows for very complex designs.
Similar to programming languages, Assembly IS simple.
Keeping that alone bug free is quite the achievement.
Have you played the game? That is, maybe, the first hour of a game that lasts many many dozens even hundreds of hours. Mining only happens in the first five or ten minutes. There are a host of other interactions, from tweaking object settings, optimizing pathing layouts, planning, direction of bots, to deployment of the factorio equivalent of Redstone circuitry.
And mods. As with KSP or minecraft, a greater number of possible interactions comes from the modding community rather than the stock game.
craft/place buildings implies a very discrete action and does not encapsulate the sum of the parts, the interaction between all these systems.
Simple building blocks don't mean simple programs. Heavily interacting components leads to complexity and significant bugs. That's just software engineering 101.
"Simple gameplay" does not mean that the experience of playing the game is simple. Chess has very simple gameplay (basically just: learning how 6 different piece types move, pieces capture each other, and protect the King) but the emergent complexity from those simple rules is truly impressive.
Compare this to say Monopoly, which has a lot more rules than chess, but is mind-numbingly not complex in terms of strategy and the overall play experience.
That is what linkdd is trying to say.
As to your assertion about the game play of Factorio, it is not mine, craft, and place like in a normal RTS. In order to succeed at the game you must design which is a far cry from base building in StarCraft II, for example. Blueprints are indicative of this design requirement.
There are games where you design ships and save templates for them. But playing Factorio all the way through is a much more complicated experience than movement and crafting. Unless your assertion is that complexity of gameplay is measured by input mechanics, which I think is demonstrably incorrect.
That is of course not to say that the developer is worse for it, far from it: a developer that can create a complex game based on simple rules is a better developer imo. But that doesn't mean the rules (and therefore programming them) aren't simple.
Still, the scale of the mechanics leads to more complexity than your average crafting game. If your interpretation of what linkdd wrote is correct, his point is directly controverted when considering that threading discussion in the article. If you know the history of Factorio, then you also know there are many underlying, interlinked systems like that in the simulation that are complex. The software must handle all the ways in which those subsystems could possible interact.
The comparison to Dwarf Fortress is apt. Another similarly complex game that comes to mind is Distant Worlds: Universe, a 4X game that, with all the managers turned on, plays itself.
I don't think most games struggle because their UI is complex, or because user behavior is complex (there's really only so many things a player can do, especially general ones -- most variety of interactions are "scenes", entirely captured within themselves). At least, most AAA bugginess isn't usually found in their UI. And graphics aren't the complexity generally -- they're just visual artifacts of the engine itself failing.
It isn't. There is significant depth to menus and displays. The way that players can interact with information is very complex, more complex than something as simple as FPS or flight simulator. If we wanted to get very simplistic, Factrio has a much wider variety of button presses than most every FPS.
As such AAA games favor independent systems which add as close to linear complexity as they can achieve. 3D models are a great example where extreme detail is largely irrelevant to every other part of the game.
That said, depending on what you’re measuring AAA games end up having wildly different levels of complexity.
However Factorio seems to have done everything from scratch. the game engine, the UI, etc.
And don't forget the (non-technical) complexity of developing out in the open with their blog and alpha testers.
If your alpha release is full of bugs, the type of feedback you'll be getting from users of the alpha is "this thing doesn't work" rather than "this thing is too easy/hard".
[0] Just look at Edmund McMillen (The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy), Eric Barone (Stardew valley), Cardboard Computer (Kentucky Route Zero), Scott Cawthon (Five Nights at Freddy), Extremely OK Games (TowerFall, Celeste) or The Fullbright Company (Gone Home) to mention a few.
All depends on budget and quantity of course, but this is what's usually planned for from my personal experience working in that sector.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-62 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-186
Since the 1.0 release last year Wube has published what, 2 or 3 blog entries including the 1.1 release announcement?
Why does that matter, surely it's pipelined. If you feed in RC packages to a 48h QA twice daily then after 2 days lag you're getting tested code twice daily.
I'm not suggesting that's realistic for large software houses, just that the logic seems wrong?
It would be easy to test changes to the design of Level 3 at the same time as changes to the design of Level 5, but it would be hard to test changes to the way inserters work at the same time as testing changes to the way conveyor belts work.
This is so unfortunate. I've never used any software, game or otherwise that has been as bug free as Factorio. I guess it must have been "journalists" who didn't want to put in any time playing the game.
Congrats to them on reaching 0 bugs and 0 open issues - I can only dream of achieving that one day!
For people wondering why they see Factorio updates on HN when no other game makes it, I wrote about what makes this game appeal so much to HN users - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-enginee...
I'm not really sure what you mean. I'm not even sure what the main article meant, because I could only find four mainstream reviews covering the 1.0 release. The first one by RockPaperShotgun[0] is essentially glowing and mentions how they've closed so many bugs. The second one by Game Enthusiast which seems pretty happy about it, the only reference to the word "bug" in the review is:
Let’s just say, Factorio has always been a diamond in
the rough. Or more like just a lump of promising coal.
And after 8.5 years, 18,855 bug reports, 5,603 mods,
and probably thousands of man hours, we can finally
conclude that Factorio has become a spectacular
diamond. Albeit, a diamond for gamers with a highly
specific acquired taste.
- GameEnthusiast review[1]
The rush to get it out a month early does mean that the
1.0 build is still a bit on the buggy side. According to
Wube, there are around 150 reported bugs and 80 internal
tasks that still need to be tackled, but they're
apparently smaller issues rather than critical ones. You
can see the known issues and current bug reports on the
official forum. They'll hopefully be dealt with in the 1.1
update, which will focus on fixes and "filling the most
obvious gaps" rather than adding new stuff.
Factorio was pretty much feature-complete already—though
Wube was also planning a campaign and some UI improvements
that have been cut [...]
- PCgamer review [2]
Factorio has been in early access for four years, so
most of its creases have been ironed out. There are some
minor flaws. Visually it isn't the most exciting game,
with an odd penchant for beige and brown. The top-down
perspective can also obscure potential spanners in your
works, like a missing piece of conveyor belt or an
inserter facing the wrong way.
- PCgamer review[3]
Let's skip the preamble, shall we? Factorio is
brilliant. If you're remotely interested in games about
management, construction, and above all production
chains, then hop aboard the nearest conveyor belt and
grab yourself a copy of Factorio this instant. Then
pick up another copy for the most important person in
your life, because they won't be seeing you for a
while, and at least this way they'll understand why.
- PCgamer review[3]
[0 (RPS review)]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-fantastic-factorio-has-...
[1 (GameEnthusiast)]: https://game-enthusiast.com/2020/08/18/factorio-review/
[2 (PCgamer)]: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/factorio-finally-leaves-early-acc...
[3 (PCgamer)]: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/factorio-review/
Factorio's bugs are swatted at high speed with gusto and grace. How do I know this? I use the experimental version for gameplay. Any bugs soon vanish into the changelog history.
In my experience, gaming journalists are often neither gamers nor journalists.
Are their any industries with quality journalists that have legitimate industry knowledge?
One that instantly comes to my mind is Matt Levine from Bloomberg, who writes on finance. People on HN seem to be holding him in high regard as well, whenever his name comes up.
I wouldn't say it is due to the industry of his choice commonly having quality journalists that have legitimate knowledge of the industry, though. Finance journalism is very densely packed with typical trash journos, just like other industries.
I have an armchair theory that higher barriers to entry in the industry (in terms of the pre-existing knowledge that target readers have) increases the likelihood of a quality journalist like Matt Levine appearing. Gaming journalism requires almost no prerequisite knowledge from readers aside from playing games, so the average quality of "game journalism" is abysmal, and people who read those articles are usually just all kinds of people. Same thing with "pop science", because everyone wants to jump on the next clickbait about some miracle drug or other futuristic sounding stuff. With finance journalism, most average people on the street have zero interest in reading those articles, so the audience self-selects mostly towards those who already have the pre-requisite knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, so the demand in terms of quality of the journalism from the target audience is higher on average. Which would increase the probability of someone like Matt Levine popping up, since those people are much more valued and sought after.
That's just my personal guess though, so I don't encourage anyone here to take the entire previous paragraph as a fact.
You can see some of the most popular at - https://mods.factorio.com/downloaded and https://mods.factorio.com/trending
If you're into really detailed and complex factories, Industrial Revolution might be for you.
I "completed" the game using a lot of these and thoroughly enjoyed it but it was incredibly addictive.
Bobs Mods is a good "new game plus" after beating the base game.
Space Exploration adds an amazing amount of depth, but it's somewhat intimidating.
FNEI is a very useful recipe browser.
Recursive blueprints are incredibly cool, but also hard to reason about. Fun to try though!
Factorissimo add recursive space (buildings that contain more space inside than their footprint).
Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with the game. It actually felt kind of weird to not recommend it since it was a pretty darned good execution of what it set out to be, I just couldn't ever actually suggest to someone that they play it. Either they wouldn't like dealing with the needlessly ever increasing in complexity goldbergian monstrosity, or worse they actually would.
I think the game's popularity among developers highlights a core problem with our industry. Look at Factorio, then look at all of the over engineering, the layers upon layers of abstraction, the obsessive need to keep making software larger and more complicated only to eventually tear it down and rebuild the exact same thing with the new-hotness widgets...
If you really want to see an offender of complexity for complexity’s sake: check out gregtech new horizons. They maintain a minecraft modpack based around needing gregtech recipes for all other mods. On paper that’s great. Hell, even I made a pack like that for personal play. They go pretty far with it though, to the point that the maintainers seem to have an expectation of grinding endlessly and never reaching the highest tiers. An outsider might dismiss it as chasing a dragon.
I actually haven't completed all that many of the packs I play, e.g. I finished Age of Engineering (even meticulously upgrading all my storage to infinity though I knew I'd probably never use it) but I didn't technically finish Agrarian Skies (I had a few of those stretch goal quests left) or Project Ozone 2 (got bored during the last of my singularities) or even Compact Claustrophobia (I've run it twice, I escape, and then I tend to lose interest before getting to the Moon)
I recently finished Star Factory and I realised that on the one hand it was nice to be able to look at it and say yup, I have ticked every box, almost anything you could want my setup now produces in unlimited quantities -- but on the other hand of course because it's so small it also felt cramped. I had to use very obviously bad solutions because the better options just weren't available in the pack.
One problem I had in Factorio was that it seemed like it was just doing one thing over and over, with different dress up - whereas I like how Minecraft packs teach me both new things I need to do, and entirely new ways to solve problems. Writing a Predicate that automatically processes my Astral Sorcery crystals goes from an idea that I'm obviously not the first to have, to something I can do almost by reflex... and then a pack says too bad, no Integrated Dynamics so figure out a different way.
The other problem I had is that I like to ignore our universe's rules, I like infinitely renewable everything, sure that's unrealistic but it's a video game. My Minecraft wins are generally powered by something ludicrous, like a single inexplicably efficient solar panel beaming energy from a world of eternal daylight, or a closed box which is somehow producing and burning unlimited amounts of Ethylene made from nothing. Factorio clearly doesn't want such shenanigans.
One thing that really allured me towards the end was the idea of voxel layouts. I found it fun to optimize pipe layouts between heat exchangers and boilers to maximize throughout and minimize resource cost.
Factorio has similar feelings with 2D layout optimization, but it feels comparatively simplistic. There is also never a crunch for resources in factorio. “Oh I need more iron” is very different than “I just spent an hour hunting down a chrome vein and I better carefully pick what I’ll make next”. This is a rather hardcore game mechanic and I can see it being very niche.
Factorio is a celebration of things as they are.
"Five: From the wheels-upon-wheels-upon-wheels evolution of computer programming dig out, systematize and display every feature that illuminates the level-upon-level-upon-level structure of physics." ~ JA Wheeler in "Information, Physics, Quantum: the Search for Links"
Take browser as example, it's a form of abstraction (imo, it's an abstraction done right). It abstract the http communication in form of html and represent as gui. Browsers are indeed, very, very complex.
That could be a sane evolutionary process. I'm not saying it is, of course there are problems with the tech industry, but this process of exploring a space of possibilities with the tools you have, then breaking them down and building up a better suited set of tools from the ground up doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.
Maybe what I mean is, what makes you think the game is unnecessarily complex? Playing it, I was always amazed with how you become capable of achieving more and more with less and less time and effort as the game goes on. I don't see that it is made artificially more complex, it seemed like there was a lot of effort put into making the emergent complexity manageable at larger and larger scales.
- Bots are introduced way too late in the game, forcing the player to manage the rapidly increasing complexity of their infrastructure manually for a large portion of it.
- Power distribution is a tedious non-problem you're forced to keep solving, again manually most of the time because bots come so late in the game.
To name a few. The natural argument here is that those things are required to motivate the player to make their automation faster and more efficient to progress the game, but the point is that they feel needlessly arbitrary. In a game like Subnautica, for instance, there are some big high-resource things you have to build with reasonably deep critical paths, but they are things you actually use instead of just melting them down to increase a number somewhere. They feel necessary, science-slurry doesn't.
Players also claim that yeah, that's all true, but the real game doesn't start until after you've researched everything and launched your first rocket anyway. Meaning all of that is essentially a 40 hour tutorial.
My first playthrough was a rube-goldberg spaghetti mess. Scaling out specific resources near the end became a very painful process.
I'm in my second playthrough, and the goal is to build a factory WITHOUT all the complexity. How can I cleanly scale out resource production without things becoming a hot mess? How can I build flexible re-usable subsystems that don't restrict systems downstream?
Solving simple problems with complex solutions is one thing (over-engineering) but solving a complex problem with an elegant solution is much harder. And factorio is full of complex problems.
My biggest problem with Factorio is that after a few hours it starts feeling like programming, which is why it attracts a lot of programmers, but it lacks any tooling or QoL features that remove some of the frustrations of programming.
I can't add tests to ensure that refactoring my belt system doesn't break some process on the other side of the map.
I can't place a breakpoint to trigger a debugger and step through a tricky piece of logic.
I can't raise exceptions on unexpected behavior and handle it in a sane way.
Some of these are contrived examples and I can't imagine what the UI would look like, and they might be achievable via debug mode or some mods, but I haven't explored much outside of the base game.
So as the factory grows (and it must grow!) the game doesn't have any mechanisms to help you deal with the complexity. After a while it becomes a chore to manage, and I usually end up thinking that I'd rather enjoy programming instead. Which after spending a work day doing at my day job, I rarely have the motivation to do in my spare time, and when I do, I'd rather invest it on side projects than on Factorio.
Still, it's one of the greatest games ever made, and the thrill of watching it all work when it does work is exhilirating, much like programming. :)
There's also Satisfactory, which is a 3d first-person-perspective factory builder.
I think building systems in DSP feels a lot more like Satisfactory, but it's much easier to get a good view of whats going on. Loved Satisfactory but found FPS perspective frustrating frequently.
It's a aquarium business management simulator (think RollerCoaster Tycoon but indoors and with aquatic life.) Really enjoyed it as a relaxing casual game.
Looking forward to trying out Big Pharma.
Combat in factorio is an aside, almost a nuisance, but factorio could be better if it would copy some things from mindustry on that front.
- all buildings look the same, so it is hard to make out the layout of the factory from an overview
- (at least initial) levels are very small, and when you move on, you have to build from scratch. I love infinite worlds since Minecraft. It would also be ok, if levels preserved my previous setup when reentered.
- the pace is too high (maybe it is controllable, I haven't looked) to plan far ahead, which is exactly the most interesting problem in Factorio (and Satisfactory BTW)
I downloaded the demo at 10PM. When I looked back at the clock it was 4AM.
I’ve tried to get into Factorio twice in the past but I always eventually run into some annoying issue where oops, I need resources to be on the other lane of a belt, or a grabber arm that should obviously be able to reach something isn’t, or something of that ilk, and I now need to scrap and rebuild my entire design.
At that point, I feel less like I’m building a factory and more like I’m working around the game engine, and it just immediately kills my interest in going further.
I’d hate for this to be the nit that stops a person from going deeper into this amazing game.
Smaller and single-lane as in individual half-width belts that can be placed independently? I think it would be more of a pain to play with, because now only would you now have separate left- and right- belt items, but also have more complex rotations to be able to convert one belt into another at a corner. Eg to convert a right-belt going east into a left-belt going south, you need to rotate just the tip of the right-belt, not the whole right-belt.
---
>I need resources to be on the other lane of a belt
A single splitter and a little space around it can swap a belt around if you need to. Or better yet, find the place where you're mixing the two items on the same belt and make the change there.
A ╗
╠══ A/B
B ╝
A ══╗
╔═╬═ B/A
╚═╣
B ══╝
For single-item belts where everything's on one side and you want everything to be on the other side, it's even simpler.
═╦╗
A/- ═╝╚═ -/A
-/A ═╗╔═ A/-
═╩╝
Also - Awesome game!
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fimGkeVVASA&list=PLwehwVVQir...
Is it as simple as loading into 1.1 loading the old 1.0 map in single player, saving it as 1.1 then uploading to the server?
Factorio is a very stable game, do a backup and give it ago!
Factorio 1.0
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24155609
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-360
>Friday Facts #360 - 1.0 is here!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24163024
>Factorio (and also games like SimCity) are not actually pure CA rules, but they combine cellular automata techniques together with many other techniques like system dynamics, etc.
Will Wright gave a great explanation of how simulation games combine different techniques together in three intersection dimensions: Topologies (agents, networks, and layers), dynamics (propagation, growth, grouping, order, allocation, mapping, specialization, and nesting), and paradigms (cybernetics, system dynamics, cellular automata, chaos theory, adaptive systems, network theory).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo&t=35m50s
>Lessons in Game Design, lecture by Will Wright, Computer History Museum, November 20, 2003.
Understanding Kafka with Factorio (hackernoon.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362179
>When I saw this title, I first thought it was about understanding the cockroach-like aliens in Factorio, but it is actually about queuing and congestion and parallel processing with conveyor belts and factories!
https://hackernoon.com/understanding-kafka-with-factorio-74e...
Von Neumann Universal Constructor (wikipedia.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22727228
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...
DonHopkins 10 months ago | on: Von Neumann Universal Constructor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738598
>Factorio players will recognize these tapes of construction instructions as 2D "blueprints" that construction drones use to build patterns of factories and conveyor belts, etc. In Factorio, after your drones have build a blueprint in the unpowered, unsupplied state, you can connect it to the power grid, hook up pipes to deliver fluids, and run conveyor belts in and out of it to deliver resources and products, and it will immediately starts doing its thing. Playing Factorio is uncannily like von Neumann 29 state cellular automata programming, not by coincidence. So it's a great way to get your head around cellular automata programming, gpu programming, parallel programming, queuing systems, and data flow programming in general!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738268
>Here's some stuff about that I posted in an earlier discussion, and transcribed from John von Neumann's book, "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata".
>His concept of self-reproducing mutating probabilistic quantum mechanical machine evolution is quite fascinating and terrifying at the same time (or outside of time), potentially much more powerful and dangerous than mere physical nanotechnology "gray goo" and universe-infesting self replicating von Neumann probes: