OT: Anyone here played "Dyson Sphere Program"?
Is it good? How does it compare to Factorio?
Is it good? How does it compare to Factorio?
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.
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 :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.....
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.