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Comment by scubbo | Hacker News Reader

I look forward to the inevitable two camps of comments on anything related to Factorio: "This is just software engineering, why would I do that in my free time?" and "This is just software engineering, but without all the distractions, frustrations, meetings, and dependencies - how can I do this all the time?"

(FWIW, I'm in the latter camp)

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>how can I do this all the time?

Make a factorio-themed reskin of labview.

If it took me 100 hours to complete a coding project of the magnitude of a factorio playthrough I would say I'm pretty bad at coding.

I'm of the former of your two listed camps, but I don't try to look at how the game is like coding and look at it how it is like modded minecraft. Learning rules and discovering tricks and being creative is a fun way to spend free time. Maybe coding can have a similar track, but it often feels heavy on the grind.

There's a third camp: "This is just software engineering, I might as well code something useful and equally fun".

The problem with doing something useful is that you might end up with users.

Good point, but you could make something that's useful for yourself, or to learn something new, or even something like an art piece. Recently when I had some time I implemented a Minesweeper solver. Not useful to anybody, except perhaps rural Cambodian farmers, but it was great fun, and probably more satisfying than playing a game.

^^^ That's my camp by and large unless I'm playing multiplayer with friends it just makes me feel like I should be working on my side project.

When SVG was young someone made a graph game where a bunch of points are placed on a field. Each point has two edges leading to other points. You 'win' the game when no edges cross.

It was pretty fun for the first half hour. Then for the next fifteen minutes something didn't feel right. To quote Robert Zemeckis, it felt like kissing your brother.

The other thing that was hot around that time was UML, and it feels like half of UML is just trying to get lines not to cross each other. Ding! I was doing some of my least favorite work 'for fun'. Closed that window, pushed away from my desk dramatically, and went for a cup of coffee and a bit of perspective.

Like Untangle from https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ ?

Yes, a clone of that, but I suspect GP meant the implementation at http://planarity.net/

"This is just software engineering, why would I do that in my free time?"

I was of this opinion until I realized I was basically doing digital logic in minecraft. You're right in that engineering without crud is very fun.

"Just" software engineering is a rare thing.

If you want to make real software, you have to do your software engineering in the middle of a sandwich with tooling and dependencies on one side and your platform on the other.

Dealing with either of these can sometimes be satisfying, but they both tend to require a lot more effort than is desired.

Software engineering with angry aliens.

Literal bugs!

That would be me in approx 2006 in Second Life, in-game coding using the Linden Scripting Language [0]. I have vague recollections of trying to script some sort of scanner object and explaining what I was doing to a curious gothic vampire demon who was passing by. I think she lost interest (and flew away) when I got to quarternions [1]

[0] http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal

[1] http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Quaternion

Angry aliens, or angry end-users?

I call it circuit design. "How can I fit this efficiently into the space I have allotted and protect it from outside influences (biters)?"

I never felt space (with normal game settings) was an issue in the game. The infinite map even means it’s literally impossible to run out of space.

Space becomes an issue when trying to minimize your buffers. During a casual playthrough, it won't really matter, but if you're dealing with megabases, the distances and buffers can really impact how the smoothly a factory works, how quickly it can respond to changes. For example, not all of the "infinite research" technologies have the same science pack requirements, which changes what your base has to produce.

The biters of clan cholg-un tphol have requested a meeting about the planned nuclear plant expansion into their sacred ancestral territory.

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