Factorio Future Plans
factorio.com
factorio.com
I'd love to see their take on something like Universal Paperclips or Dyson Sphere. So many homages have been built to Factorio; they could return the favor.
They could add different planet types (like a water/island world, train world, restricted/small world, variants like that), or increase the difficulty and challenges as you progress to different planets. I'm pretty sure this already exists as a mod though.
Imho Factorio's next step should be into 3d. I don't mean a 3d game render, I mean factories biuld on different planes, or even a spherical planet. There is a game out there (I shall not name) that is claiming to be a multi-planet 3d version of factorio. People do want more.
I like Kerbal because of the scale of the systems that are possible, and because of the challenge of planning out the logistics of a cross-solar-system flight. Setting up a scientific "colony" on a far flung planet is just a cool thing. I certainly don't come to Kerbal for its flight mechanics - not saying they're bad for what they are. It's just that the game's physics are built around the requirements of time accel.
Also, I've heard the broad strokes of that story about Squad before and always wished I knew the specifics. Getting an ad agency to financially support a video game to get an employee to stay - that's gotta be an interesting story.
He explained that when you are making airplanes in MS Flight Sim, the aerodynamics is manually defined, is a pain in the ass to define, require a ton of manual labor, and not necessarily will work as expected.
He said then his dream was a game that was like MS Flight Sim, except players would be able to design airplanes in whatever way they wanted, and the game would calculate all aerodynamics for them.
Any particular reason you don't want to name it? I mean, I know what it is, and I've sunk 12 hours into it so far. While it still has a lot of polish left to do (It's only been in Early Access for two weeks!), it shows a lot of promise. I like it because it allows me to stack belts to more than two levels which makes dealing with spaghetti a lot easier.
I have the "other", more eh..."satisfying" factory game as well. It's beautiful, but placing objects in first-person is actually rather frustrating.
As to the GP comment, that’s actually what I came here to say. Original IP is a big risk when Factorio is that tough an act to follow. Sometimes you make something groundbreaking, but then your sophomore effort takes you to the stratosphere. Like the leap from Final Fantasy IV to VI. Other times you have that one period of genius that you can never really top, like Minecraft.
Additionally, the assets, algorithms, experiences and engine are optimized for factorio-like genre, it's logical that they want to utilize them more or less.
If they start into 3d like Satisfactory or Dyson Space, I won't be that optimist. Even if they can do it, it'll take much time. It'll be amazing if they can pull it though.
I think big expansion pack will be the best course for them, bonus point if they can really expand the gameplay.
Programmatically, it's not that different from what Factorio is - isometric, moving stuff on conveyors = moving cars on roads, etc. They have the talent to make this genre more than "balance residential, commercial, and industry".
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic Transport Fever 2
I'm thinking they may get inspired by some of the mods out there; there's a mod to go into space (build a factory inside of a spaceship) and land on other planets, for example. They could reach out to those and buy it, iirc that's what happened with some of the KSP features and addons as well.
I wouldn't mind if they'd do something big with the enemies / monsters. Maybe introduce a new antagonist entirely.
Or a whole new class of sea and/or undersea base buildings, with unique resources that have to be launched up to the surface for your main base to process.
Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
I've always thought that factorio should have bulk transports, things that arrive after multi-hour trips. There are a handful of mods that tie the character into an external economy. Rather than the survival scenario, I think Factorio 2.0 could be based on taskings surrounding the arrival/departure of transports. Rather than "build the rocket" the task could be "have 200k of blue circuits ready for the arrival of a transport in X days." Changing up the tasking would allow for truly different factories to be developed. I'd love it if the game suddenly told me that I needed to switch from one end product to another, any excuse to delete an entire factory and build a new one optimized for a different goal.
I like this idea. imo the core of factorio is conquering scale. the base game is already very polished. at this point I just want more stuff to do post launch. taking the scale up another order of magnitude (huge ships, point to point air transport for latency sensitive goods, etc.). would also provide the opportunity to expand combat a bit to provide automated defenses for far away shipments. I want my robot navy, now shut up and take my money!
From the blog post:
> One of the steps we have already taken is hiring a concept artist, he might be known to you under the nick of Earendel
Earendel's list of mods for those curious: https://mods.factorio.com/user/Earendel
> Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
There's one thing that could work with this idea that I haven't seen in any game so far. You've built this complex factory and have it running like clockwork. The game should be able to observe it - to notice that the flow of inputs, intermediate products and outputs has been stable (even if cyclic, because you built a solar-powered factory or have some intermittent backpressure on the conveyors) - and then abstract away your factory, simulate its matter balance via closed-form mathematical functions closely approximating the steady-state behavior. This way, you could have many complex factories running nearly for free, while your attention is focused elsewhere.
Factorio itself, in its current form, may be a tad too complex for this idea to work (at the very least, there's extra complexity in managing finite resource deposits), but I think it's doable in principle. But for some reason, as far as I'm aware, nobody ever tried it.
(Even in Kerbal Space Program, the closed-form math only applies to stable orbits; internal state is not processed. There are mods that try to simulate e.g. life support or power flow for such craft traveling "on rails", but as far as I know, they all do that by running numerical simulations and have problems with error at high time accelerations - whereas my idea would be to approximate a continuous function of time for relevant values, and use it instead of numerical integration.)
I don't think you can retrofit an efficient closed-form model onto an existing simulation; it has to be designed in from the beginning. I suspect that's a big part of why KSP only simulates two-body conic section orbits. They knew they wanted to include time acceleration as a gameplay feature, and so they limited the simulation to closed-form orbits for which that could be implemented stably and reliably.
In Factorio, a well-designed factory can be approximated by its steady-state behavior. But part of the reason it's an interesting and challenging game is that it's not always obvious how well a factory satisfies that criterion. You can have bottlenecks that only show up in unexpected conditions, or systems whose throughput depends on the details of inserter positioning, or feedback loops that switch from controlled negative feedback to runaway positive feedback when some parameter crosses a threshold.
Given how easy it is for these kinds of simulations to accidentally end up being NP-complete or even Turing-complete, I'm very skeptical of the idea that an algorithm could make reliable decisions about when it's safe to "optimize" an entire factory without drastically changing its behavior. I think any game simple enough to make that tractable would effectively be an entirely different genre. (I would be pleased to be proven wrong, though!)
That said, you could certainly optimize the simulation of individual components that are themselves simple enough to not have chaotic behavior. In fact, Factorio does some of this already. For example, long transport belts are simulated by tracking the position of items relative to the belt, rather than their actual coordinates. So an item's "movement" isn't simulated on every frame; only when it reaches the end of the belt, or gets picked up by something, or if you're actually looking at it. (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176)
An idea I've had bouncing around for 20+ years was a variation on Transport Tycoon where you could "zoom in" on towns/farms and play them as if you were in Sim City/Sim Farm, or "zoom out" to connect to other regions run by other players, with trading or even combat. A universal format for "simulation stuff" would mean you could have it extensible, so you could have a dedicated farming simulator if you wanted, else it would be treated as a box with an average output, with the same logic applying to sub-elements, so if someone wants to micro-optimise a plowing algorithm, they can have a "plow management" simulator which plugs into the farming simulator, which plugs into the transport simulator. At the other extreme, someone who was only interested in country level trading could have the country outputs boxed based on an average level of output.
Might be too complex for any one player to handle everything, but even so!
I fully endorse this idea. Like a blend of factorio + sim city + Civ VI -- though the complexity might make it unplayable, i would absolutely buy it and try anyway!
I think the challenge is that there's a tension that comes from having lots of optional, interacting systems that the player both a) can make meaningful improvements to a system that contribute to the rest of their game experience ("If i make farming better, my town will have less food") and b) can ignore systems they aren't interested in without crippling their gameplay (or, conversely, improving one system making the rest of the game too easy).
The tension is almost tangible in games like the Paradox grand strategy games: if you pick up something like EUIV as a novice now, it's very difficult to figure out which systems are actually important to moving the game forward in a meaningful way.
Edit to add: this does sound like an awesome idea though
2.7 → 0.42 → 0.34 lines of code per one buyer
0 → 2.3 → 4.4 years of playtime per resolved bug report
0 → 4 → 8 months of Steam playtime per one commit
0 → 9.1 → 37 days of Steam play for each line of code
But I would have liked to see what else this amazing team could have done. Like maybe a city building simulation game, optimized as well as Factorio? Would have been amazing for sure.
Check out biffa plays YouTube channel for some great traffic optimisation.
On the other hand Cities skyline has a lot of other cool factors but traffic simulation comes really short. It is just derived from statistics of the city but there is no 1:1 link to be found, so you can just guess what aspects of the city has some coefficient on the traffic algorithm, and the worst part is that if you happen to plan something really wrong, well, nothing happens. Cars and utility veichles litterally start to DESPAWN from the road and the traffic jam goes puff. Yes the statistics go down a bit, but everything else goes on like nothing ever happened. That was the deal breaker for me
Despawning can be thought of as what happens in any city when the traffic grid is overwhelmed: some travel simply does not occur at all. People stay home or they do not transact business because traffic is too bad.
It's not a perfect traffic model - for instance, residents don't really need to get to work or school; they are just teleported there if there's no route. Cars do not need to be parked. So a city sim with the Factorio devs' obsession with optimization would be great. But it's not accurate to say that Skylines traffic is just derived from the statistics of the city.
Vehicles will despawn, though I'm not sure what it's based on. Dunno if it's total time on the road, or if it's based on being stuck in a jam for too long, or what.
In any case, a vehicle that despawns is a cancelled trip. A commercial building won't receive its goods. A worker won't get to work. If your city's traffic is bad, a significant number of trips won't complete, and your commercial districts will abandon due to lack of workers or lack of goods, industries will abandon due to lack of buyers or lack of raw materials, and residential will abandon due to unemployment.
Despawning affects service vehicles too, so if they're frequently being despawned, garbage piles up, people get sick and die, crime goes up, etc.
There are mods that will disable despawning. But in a large city, this will likely make your roads turn into gridlock. Once this happens, nobody reaches their destination, and your city quickly goes to shit.
https://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Network_Add...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=16376...
Link for the interested
There are plenty of mods in this game that increase the number of resources, buildings, technologies, etc by a factor of 5 or more and I personally find this is far too complex and takes the fun out of the game and makes it too repetitive and clinical. Fragmenting the small-ish user community between "base game" and "DLC game" would possibly make the multiplayer experience non-existent due to low player numbers.
I suspect they'll go off in a different direction, Factorio is more of a pure sandbox make your own fun kind of game but I think you could do some fun campaign stuff.
My 6+ year old computer can't handle the enormous factory complexes I like to build.
Now I have switched over to my next hard drug addiction:
-> Mindustry. <- https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry
Factorio + tower defence: it's awesome and runs on a potato.
Why did it have to have an Android version. Nice game though!
You must be hire-able in EU, because they can't afford to sponsor people.
Sadly this doesn't include me :(
Along with that, I'd like to see more green energy. Wind power, for instance, could be an early game technology that competes with boilers. Naturally it would need to cost more and / or produce less. Perhaps also geothermal power that must be generated at a particular location.
Of course, more could be done with water. Boats, offshore resources, aquatic biters? Depletion of water resources so you don't have a one tile pond cooling 4 nuclear reactors? Or making the water less useful the more polluted it is.
So many possibilities.
Or weather, for that matter. Adding snow weather would be a big job (snowy variants for all sprites), but causing nuclear winter from using nukes, or ash snow from burning the forests, or everything going sooty from the coal or glowy from radiation would be a really nice addition. Not much in terms of game depth though, I guess.
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[0] - Assuming they can coexist in the same geographical location, IANAGeologist.
Every problem that needs to be overcome, every obstacle in the path, every idiotic decision I curse is something I did previously just to get things working. Then I run out of space. Or I need to pipe water in. Or a factory is outputting to the left when outputting to the right would be a better decision .... hmm ... do I move 200 componenets or just ... slap a train station in? Or 1,000 belts? ARGH! I've done it again!
Robot Odyssey re-imagined in Factorio!
I mean it basically runs doom already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM
Ah, good old extensionFactoryFactory, I knew that Java would come in handy one day
The premise of the game is excellent. You have crashlanded on a remote planet and have to start from nothing, acquire resources, build tools, build machines, automate the acquisition of resources, etc., until you have developed enough technology that you can build a spaceship and flee the planet. Wow.
There are 2 things I don't like.
Firstly, I don't like the "biters" that come and destroy your base. I don't really think this adds to the game in any way. It feels like it was added to the game to make it appeal to the "gamer" demographic rather than the "programmer" demographic. If I'm working away on one corner of my base trying to solve automation problems, I don't want to have to run away and piss about shooting some pointless biters who are trying to destroy my stuff. I know the answer is "that's an automation problem too! build turrets!". But I just want to calmly play the game at my own pace, I don't want to have to be attending to urgent biter problems.
I stopped playing the other day after biters destroyed a load of my stuff and I no longer felt invested in the game. That's not fun for me. I want to play the game, but I don't want my stuff getting destroyed if I do a subpar job of defending it.
Secondly, (and this is partly related to the biters, but not completely), I find the game surprisingly stressful. I think this comes from the interplay between short-term and long-term problems. I don't know exactly what game mechanic causes it, but I think I would find it much more enjoyable if I could calmly work on problems without having to run around topping up coal and otherwise putting out non-automatable fires. Perhaps it's just the visuals of loads of materials stacking up on conveyor belts and going to the wrong places, and the kind of visceral feeling that the problem is getting worse for every second that it's not solved. I don't know. I don't find that relaxing.
I will have another go though. I love the concept, and I haven't actually got to the end of the tutorial yet. I understand that when you start the proper game you can ask for "peaceful" mode which turns off biters, which sounds ideal for me.
I think they are intended to push you along with development. Since they continue multiplying and evolve to become stronger if you don't destroy their bases, you need to make sure your tech develops and that you deal with them. It's meant to push you towards constantly improving your tech, rather than focusing on e.g. optimising your copper plate assembly lines for hours on end.
You're looking for "peaceful mode".
I've played on both peaceful mode and normal settings. The advantage of biters existing is that they act as a check on runaway expansion and encourage you to move to cleaner energy sources. When you replace coal plants with solar or nuclear, you'll find that biters aren't annoyed by your base so much.
There's .. enough complexity to the game such that I can see it'd be better to start with non-peaceful.
Comparing non-peaceful mode to peaceful mode, a bit more of your time goes into setting up and maintaining defenses; but once a good set of defenses is established, playing is ~roughly~ the same as what peaceful would be. Peaceful is fun. Non-peaceful is also fun. But the powerful weapons at the end aren't as enticing on peaceful as they are on non-peaceful.
I happen to like the biters. They give a nice "pay off" for all the industry you're creating. They're a chaotic externality that changes how you have to design things.
I think they're a bit too binary though. Either they're brick walls or cotton candy.
Then I went back and tried with biters there, and enjoyed it. There is definitely an extra element with them present.
Every time I start a game now, I customise it and keep the biters, but make them weaker and less aggressive so they're not a constant pain in the arse, but still present.
I totally get the anxiety around "things piling up", but that is something you learn how to deal with. One of the things I found useful is the concept that a stockpile sitting on a conveyor belt is as valid as a sitting in a chest. And rate-limiting production by "there's no more room on the belt" is also perfectly valid.
It does get more fun when you get to the flying robot stage, and there's a screen full of whizzing robots making everything happen.
I feel like the demo levels were setup to teach to to fear and deal with the biters. As a result when I played the real game they were no big problem in the early game because I immediately invested in building walls and appropriate armaments. In the demos I felt like they were too much to handle and too easily overpowered me.
In the real game things are staged so the biters are initially weak, far away, and attack infrequently giving you plenty of time to prepare for them. Biters causing damage disproportionate to my ability to blink off just wasn't a problem in the real game for me. They caused more damage over time, but by the time they did I had endless supplies of the things they were breaking and automated repair, etc.
Once I automated defences (and cleared out nearby nests-- which kind of acts like a useful arcade minigame with its own strategic elements-- e.g. inching turret outposts closer to the nests), it's unusual that biter attacks took any of my attention at all -- maybe just a glance on the map if it told me something other than a wall had been destroyed.
Later in the game, pressure from the biters created logistic challenges that kept the game interesting. Basically when you've mastered the ratios and the supply chains, and deployed logic to balance your fluids, and whatever-- the game can get a little grindy without some kind of hazard here and there. And keeping the weapons/repair supply chains satisfied at your outposts is a significant engineering challenge itself.
Some people I've seen complaining about the biters I think didn't play the tutorial/demo levels and were just caught completely by surprise by them and massively under-invested in defence/offence.
As you note-- there is peaceful mode. From reading the subreddit I understand some number of people run without the biters. I believe there are also settings you can adjust to make them less of a problem without turning them off completely.
I found that some of those stressed you experienced get better as I went on, because I learn how to fix them ("oh, this again?") and aren't too starved for the basic resources needed to do so. Some tools, like construction robots also make some annoying problems a LOT easier to deal with.
I felt I'd basically mastered the game once my solution to a problem in an area could be to sweep it with the demolition tool, remove everything, than rapidly churn out some novel blueprints, tile them all over the place... then be back up in running quickly and not feel like I was losing anything by wiping away the prior work.
Then, give Death World a try. It's the most compelling challenge in video games I've ever found. Bring a friend or two and you're guaranteed to make memories.
Subnatucia: gather resources and build things so you can get off the planet you've crashed on. Encouraged to respect the environment. Actually get to leave the planet. No automation.
Factorio: gather resources and build things so you can gather resources and build things so you can gather resources and built things so you can... Environment is just a resource. Build a rocket, but instead of leaving just keep building more rockets.
I thoroughly enjoyed Subnautica despite some resource grind. The experiences it creates, culminating in what I can only describe as "leaving your first apartment for the last time", were well worth the investment to me. I put it in my top 5 games of all time.
I stopped playing Factorio immediately after launching the rocket, and didn't enjoy the time I spent doing it. I think I only kept playing because I could slog through and finish it and I was "working" from home with the goddamn plague anyway. In a lot of ways it is like Universal Paperclips: the automation exists for its own sake to the extent that you'd destroy the universe just to keep the score going up.
With UP, a lot of people talked about the dangers of AI, but seeing what Factorio does to people maybe we don't even need the AI. We have developers out there right now optimizing for "engagement", looping people into their own little recursive realities to efficiently harvest their eyeballs for advertisers. We know this is harmful to them. We know this is harmful to society. But the factory must grow. We need more paperclips.
If I had enjoyed my time with it and been one of these people who continues to strip the planet bare in order to launch rockets for its own sake, then I would say that the game's theme was an incomplete thought since I was never confronted with the weight of my actions. I'm not sure how that would be accomplished, maybe at some point the biters cease to exist, the plants all rot and die, the day time gets darker and darker as the sky is obscured with smog. Something like that.
It’s not a theme the game actually wants to address, but it’s there, and it bugged me.
Also I feel like I'm spending too much time on basic survival maintenance right now, grabbing food and water resources over and over again.
It gets better, right? I like some things about the game but I'm not really into it yet.
I heard it compared to Outer Wilds a few times, and that's why I jumped into it, because Outer Wilds is a masterpiece, in my opinion, but I'm not seeing it right now. Of course part of what I liked so much about Outer Wilds was how strange everything was and piecing together the mystery of a story scattered across its solar system, and how you're basically collecting knowledge, not resources.
I played Subnautica on PC with a mouse and keyboard and without the survival mechanics. But to the extent I've watched other players play with survival, it becomes much less of a factor. Base building helps because you can set up water purifiers, aquariums, and little farms. Things really take off once you get the Seamoth (your first sub). I would say that literally any FPS game is going to suffer from not playing with mouse and keyboard though, I don't know how people playing with controllers can stand them.
How long have you been playing that you haven't yet built your first base? As I recall that becomes available pretty quickly as all the minimum necessary blueprints are pretty close.
I think I just haven't really started down the base-building path yet. I built a... purifier, I think, a small motorized thing, that's just currently floating outside my escape pod. I thought I built the pipes but I might not have yet, I don't have anything else unlocked. Would building the pipes unlock more things or do I need to hunt for something in the sea?
I know I figured things out a little more slowly than the game expected me to. I kept thinking I was supposed to explore more at the beginning than it wanted me to. I actually almost killed myself trying to reach the ship and trying to find a non-radiated section to enter, since the game made it sound like I needed to explore it right away, and before that explosion happened (now I know I'll need at least a radiation suit).
Now that I know that food and water becomes less of a hassle once I get that base started, I'm definitely going to push down that path, and I expect it will make things more enjoyable. Hunting the fish is one of my least favorite things so far.
I play most FPS games with a controller, have since Halo (Counter-strike/Valorant are exceptions). I prefer playing these games while sitting on the couch. I played through all of Outer Wilds on the PS4 and had no issues, for example. Even the new Doom game with its twitchy gameplay is plenty fun on the consoles.
I think what you're describing is a floating air pump? I'm not aware of a water purifier that isn't base-interior equipment. You can use the pipes with the pump to give yourself access to air in deeper water, but my personal opinion is it isn't worth the effort.
A large portion of the game is finding and scanning debris from the Aurora, which unlocks blueprints of new equipment. The scanner is your friend, use it a lot.
A friend convinced me to give it another go later on in a multiplayer game and I got hooked.
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The biters are more enjoyable when you already know and understand the game systems.
I agree they're very stressful when you also don't really know what you're doing yet with the game. I would suggest leaving them off for a first game if you're feeling they're stressful.
I still prefer to play with them turned down, or to play a Rail World (where they exist, but don't expand back into cleared areas.), but I don't keep them off now.
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Anyway, in terms of progression, it's somewhat important to explain that you haven't learned all the types of automation in the game, and that also changes their impact.
There is also automated construction (and reconstruction) that eventually becomes possible. I don't have to piece back together some destroyed assembly line by hand because I missed an avenue for getting attacked, robots do it for me so long as I have repair packs or replacement materials in inventory they have access to.
The game at that point also supports things like copy/paste for entire designs and saving/importing blueprints. Have a great production setup and just need more of it? Copy-paste another row of it and hook up the inputs/outputs, not manually laying out 100 assembling machines, 200 inserters, etc.
Is it good? How does it compare to Factorio?
That said, here is my generic complaint for space games: could people please start making games where planets are the size of, well, planets? Or even 1/10 of a planet (like in Kerbal Space Program), but something that still reflects the sizes and distances of things in space?
Manipulating time might break other aspects of gameplay, so you are left with skewed scales of distance I guess?
Modelling a whole solar system may be tough - planets are really big, and really really far away. But I think that, at the very least, a moon system would work. A central planet with half a dozen moons of varying sizes. Moons can be small and much closer - but they'd be still three or four orders of magnitude greater than what we see in most space games.
I saw an model where the Earth was one pixel and I hand to scroll quite some time to get to Mars, let alone from Mars to Jupiter
You probably saw this: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.....
I wonder if this kind of idea, to scale the time of a game to last tens of years could be an experiment that would inspire people to participate.
The game need not run on the original platform till end and the game could possibly evolve over time, but the actions of original players should have ever-lasting consequences.
Just a weird idea that popped into my head reading your comment.
Scale-wise, I'd like to make such game reward studying and building up your home solar system, vs. expanding everywhere.
On my list of ideas for such a game was also another thing I miss from most games: diverse and possibly unbalanced tech trees. No "rock paper scissors", no Pythonesque "there's one way to do it". For instance, there are at least three main types of FTL travel in science fiction: linear warp drives (ships can exit or change course at any point along the way, and can be intercepted and attacked during FTL - as in Star Trek), wormholes/starlanes (travel takes time, but you can't arbitrarily change course, or often even pick your destination), and jump drives (it takes time to spool up the drive, but the jump itself is instantaneous; see BSG). I'd like all three to coexist within a single universe, on equal footing, but with different mechanics and tactical implications.
Writing this makes me feel young again :). As a kid, I think I had a list of such ideas written down somewhere.
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Stellaris sort of gets this right. In a galaxy, the navies can take a game year or more to make a journey. But planets just feel tiny, and "pops" can immediately teleport from one planet to another even if the navy would take a year to make the trip.
Stellaris is a funny example, because I feel it has the reverse problem - the scale of the map is somewhat right (even if the galaxy is ridiculously small), but the speed of the game makes it hard to feel. On top of that, intra-system scale is completely wrong, and planets, as you said, feel super tiny. Also most planets are completely useless.
It would be fun - even if out of scope for Stellaris itself - to see a similar game where the solar system view is more of a schematic map, but planets actually orbit their Sun, and were real-scale - i.e. you could zoom into them Celestia-style. And see your puny little orbital habitat, with a huge Earth-sized planet in the background. Slow down game time to wall-clock rate, and you could almost imagine your empire's citizens living there, seeing what you see through the windows of their home. And perhaps you would then turn your camera towards flashes of light far beyond, knowing they come from a space battle millions of kilometers away.
It would be just a gimmick, but wonderfully immersive.
As an extreme example, you could complain that the planets in Super Mario Galaxy are way too small, but you'd also be missing the point of games.
Just like adding a hunger/thirst element to Halo doesn't make it more fun.
You need procgen to create truly large game universes. But I haven't seen a single game where procedural generation would create an immersive world. Or even an interesting one[0]. In all the games I played, I've seen one or both of the following immersion-destroying things:
- The mechanics are plain obvious. You see a few examples of a generated thing, and it's trivial to guess the pattern and know what you can expect in the future[1].
- There's no story. Stuff is randomly generated, but doesn't make sense. Creatures drop loot they don't use, or shouldn't even have, lore-wise. Dungeons are arranged at random, with no sense of purpose for the layout. Quests are closed loop, with no meaningful impact on anything else in the world.
The closest I've seen to an immersive procgen game is Rimworld, where if you squint just hard enough, you can live the story of your colonists. But if you open your eyes just a bit, mechanics still stick out like a sore thumb.
As an interesting data point, one of the most immersive experiences I ever had with fiction was throwing story prompts at GPT2/GPT3 and going along with the AI narrative. I think it's partly because mechanics of GPT3 are too complex to guess, and purpose/story pieces itself together from correlations in the training dataset. But textual medium also helps - you have to imagine things, and there are no visual inconsistencies to spot.
Right now, I'm casually exploring if the two points above - mechanics and story - couldn't be improved if the models used to generate content were much more complicated in causal sense: instead of few dice rolls, one could build deeper causal graphs and work with probabilities conditional on particular game state. That, and making enough randomizable parameters to ensure the categories aren't obvious.
(If you know of any game, in any genre, that you feel does procgen right, I'd like to know the titles. I'm also on the lookout for related scientific literature.)
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[0] - Case in point: Kerbal Space Program. Planets and moons are big (1/10th the size of the real things). You can go anywhere and it "feels right". But there's hardly anything to do once you get there. You could, as I tend to, install mods for extended base building and resource mining, but there's only so much fun you can have with it, and the physics engine goes out of its way to make establishing large bases impossible. Celestial bodies in KSPs are very much like checkboxes. After you get there, and tick the "been to $body" checkbox, there's no reason to stay there.
[1] - Example: Starbound. There are random quests, but they follow the same obvious pattern. Find a non sequitur something or someone somewhere, bring it to quest giver, for a non sequitur reward. There are random critters and weapons, but you can quickly tell the categories that are being randomized, and there isn't much variety in those.
there is also a "speed limit" which is one of my own major pet peeves in space games. there are mods to remove it, but this is very much at your own peril.
A lot of the amazing vehicles I have seen on Youtube are ultimately pointless because the player population on a server is never high enough to justify them.
For me at least it is fun, i like the "gigantic" target of building the dyson sphere as an end game and i enjoy the constraints of building on a 3D Ball with limited space but you can wrap logistics around the equator etc.
In a comparison i would say it's not as fleshed out and not as polished but as i said, not a lot of playtime and its early access. But for me at least it scratches the same itch as Factorio.
So if you think about buying it read some Steam Reviews and watch a couple of Videos, but for me at least it was worth buying :)
It's early access but very playable and feature complete, but it does feel less polished than factorio (obviously can't compare to an 8 year development effort!)
Satisfactory is another great play for fans of the genre.
Both games are 3D, and both use the additional dimension well. You can play them fine just like factorio (I did the first runthrough) and treat 3D as eye candy, but you'll do better if you 'cut with the grain' and learn how to build 3D factories.
DSP is good. It is definitely in the same vein as Factorio, but the challenges are different and it has a very cool flavor / story.
DSP is Early Access and expected to develop much further. The current state of the game is worth the price.
I feel like if they lean into the differences from factorio there could be an interesting game that's differenciated from factorio: factorio ultimately winds up building towards automating the automation: in the endgame you develop ways of building more and more parallel factory in an efficient manner, using blueprints and robots (and the megabases generally develop a standard pattern for placing these down, speeding up expansion even more). I feel like DSP could go in the other direction: instead of building more of the same basic components, have an upgrade path with more advanced buildings with higher throughput, perhaps with a more complex set of intermediates alongside to make for interesting automation without the repetition (this idea is already present in some of the minecraft mods which inspired factorio and some factorio mods: basically e.g. you can do one iron ore to one iron plate, or you can do one iron ore to two ground up iron ore to molten iron to 2 iron plates, and process 10 plates a second instead of 1). This would perhaps allow a bit more of an epic scale that comes with the idea of building a dyson sphere, as you could build up many orders or magnitude from where you started, as opposed to maybe three between start and end.
finite resources give me anxiety tho. even wrote a mod for factorio about it.
When you start your game in DSP, there's an option to make resource nodes unlimited.
Not even off the first planet yet but the motivation to reach other stars and check out the black hole is real but not pressing, because I have production lines to optimize!
One thing I am realizing is to spread things out more, there’s so much room on the planet and many ore deposits I am starting to give certain production lines their own resource harvesting systems.
Oh and the “hash rate” research mechanic is pretty satisfying, feels very crypto.
It’s cool that it’s so chill in that I can go afk while things are running and not worry about any devastation, I hope they don’t take that aspect of the game away... on my Minecraft server we disable those awful flying creatures for that reason. Totally ruined building at night and relaxing/idling in a well lit and secured base.
One thing that I personally don't like compared to Factorio are the basics of the logistics system to begin with.
DSP's belts are single lane, which can really limit their throughput and utility. So you can't run a combined belt of both coal and ore to your smelting array.
The inserter-alike that pushes/pulls to/from belts must start or end the belt, which back to our smelting array example means you can't trickle a single belt past a line of smelters you have to hit a splitter first (which is another level of research above belts) and build some real spaghetti monsters to scale your industry. On the upside, storage warehouses are 3x3 so you can use those as impromptu splitters as well as a buffer, at least.
The inserter-alike also has a transfer rate dependent upon the distance it covers (think normal vs long inserter throughput) and I have had trouble getting them to consistently snap to the closest belt segment, instead going one further and halving their transfer speed. Which has been maddening.
That said, I do like the 'Planetary Annihilation' style, that is the spheroid planets and solar systems to explore, and I haven't built beyond my first planet yet.
Another plus, your character starts with the equivalent to personal construction drones which was something I always beeline for in a new game of Factorio, its a nice quality of life thing.
What? This isn't true at all. You can definitely have a single belt going past your smelters:
https://preview.redd.it/zh1ezv02ule61.jpg?width=1920&format=...
> The inserter-alike also has a transfer rate dependent upon the distance it covers (think normal vs long inserter throughput) and I have had trouble getting them to consistently snap to the closest belt segment, instead going one further and halving their transfer speed. Which has been maddening.
12+ hours of DSP so far and I have never had that problem.
Are you playing with the grid turned off or something? I'm trying to understand why you're having trouble.
I was playing with grid on, but cause I hadn't been able to pull off belts to the side as in your picture I was dead-ending belts as close to buildings as I could and at times it would snap to the 2nd closest belt segment and not the closest.
I love the epicness and atmosphere of it.
With that said, I haven't played Factorio. Thought I wouldn't enjoy it as a programmer because I have enough of this stuff during the day. I will probably reconsider this and also try Factorio once I finish DSP.
I have 50 hours in Factorio and 12 hours in DSP, and so far, I like DSP more simply because of the multi-planet/multi-factory thing, and the fact that I can stack my belts. I also prefer the brighter, more colorful, less gritty aesthetic.
I like Dyson Sphere Program but factorio is vastly superior in regards of gameplay IMHO.
I dare say Factorio is the best game in the genre!
Also not a fan of how hard it is to get around the terrain in the early game. The jet pack needs to come much much sooner in the progression.
Also the random undetectable mini elevation changes messing up your building placements making you unable to load stuff from them to the nearby belt are really really annoying.
But DLCs fragment the community and thats bad. So I think a big expansion DLC is indeed the best course.
Some games allow all players playing the DLC if the host has it installed. I think this is a nice way of doing it without fragmentation.
Wow, that's some real impact, seems crazy to me.
I like the idea of them, but I don't actually enjoy playing them. They feel so much like programming that I generally just go and actually work on programming projects. That way I get the same problem solving challenge, and the end result is something I can actually use.
Why would I want to spend time solving made up problems when I can solve real problems in my hobby projects?
These days, the games I find myself enjoying are games with a interesting story, or that are mechanically fun to play (e.g. twin stick shooters and similar).
This supports development of the game and introduces new exciting staff for me as a player gradually at a fast enough pace (~every 6 months).
Also other things that reduce gami-ness; Gaminess kills immersion in my view.
Either start a server from the GUI or setup a headless linux server. Against griefers there is a permission system (if you're not online yourself to watch out, and if you are, you could also do it the KISS way and roll back a few minutes with the non-blocking autosaves).
Not sure I ever typed a comment that must have sounded so much like an ad. Just a happy player... :-)
Also, it's so well optimised that it's very inclusive. Even friends who only had potatoes instead of PCs could join and play.
That evokes an article that Richard Potter wrote about "Just-in-Time Programming" in Alan Cypher's classic book (which is now online for free), "Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration", about when "the user attempts to write a program for a task that is already in progress":
Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Edited by Allen Cypher. Co-edited by Daniel C. Halbert, David Kurlander, Henry Lieberman, David Maulsby, Brad A. Myers, and Alan Turransky. 1993. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.
http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/27JITP.html
Chapter 27: Just-in-Time Programming. Richard Potter.
Introduction
Many of the other chapters have presented advancements in programming by demonstration (PBD) by presenting PBD systems and their innovations. In other words, these chapters have presented solutions. This chapter takes another tack by discussing PBD in the context of a problem. The problem is to create a new type of programming system that overcomes the obstacles users encounter when they attempt to use present-day programming systems for just-in-time programming. This chapter defines just-in-time programming and identifies five of these obstacles: inaccessible data and operators, the effort of entering the algorithm, limited computational generality, effort of invoking the algorithm, and risk. Just-in-time programming motivates PBD research because PBD can potentially overcome several of these obstacles.
Just-in-time programming is the implementing of algorithms during task-time, the time when the user is actually trying to accomplish the task. It can be characterized by a situation with the following components:
- a computer user who could be either a novice user or an experienced programmer,
- a task that the user is manually accomplishing and completion of which is the user's primary goal,
- a repetitive subtask[1] of the task that could potentially be automated, thereby making it easier for the user to complete the task,
- an algorithm that will accomplish the subtask and that the user envisioned while working on the task,
- and an attempt by the user to implement the algorithm for the purpose of more effectively completing the task.
In short, the goal of just-in-time programming is to allow users to profit from their task-time algorithmic insights by programming. Instead of automating with software that was carefully designed and implemented much earlier, the user recognizes an algorithm and then creates the software to take advantage of it just before it is needed, hence implementing it just in time.
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I purchased Factorio some years ago now, and have always had the feeling that I underpaid for it over that time despite playing a lot less than some friends I know. (I think I have a mere couple of hundred hours playtime which for any other game would be crazy high!)
The devs have continuously worked on it in all that time. It’s not as if they had a bunch of expensive DLC lined up from day one as some AAA titles seem to these days.
Whatever they price their expansion at, it'll be worth the money.
What do you even do? I only have 50 hours in Factorio. After I launched my rocket, I didn't know what to do next and just kinda stopped playing.
The overhaul mod packs can pretty drastically change the game experience. It scratches the programming itch while being a break from actual programming.
I’m sure the pandemic added a multiplier to those hours that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. But I’m quite enjoying it.
It's basically them saying we consider that the next version we will ship corresponds to the work we promised (which is more than true).
Now, they want to extend this base game and are announcing that they will come back in a while with an extension. There is no subscription shenanigan, no weird trickery with you surrendering your data. They sold us something and delivered and will now work to offer another thing at a price of their choosing. Something that people will be able to buy it if they do desire and knowing what they are buying.
That seems refreshingly straightforward and honest to me.