Trains on another level
factorio.com
factorio.com
Oh. Oh no.
No, I'm not ready for this.
The restrictions on rail placement keep train layouts sane. There has to be a demarcation point between your rail and belt network. Now I can just fly in a train over top of my factory and drop materials everywhere. Now I can overlay two distinct rail networks in the same space.
I already have 1800 hours in Factorio. What more do the devs want from me?! My body can't take any more abuse!
I don't think I've ever been as excited about a game update as this new Factorio. I can't wait to make unholy train abominations floating atop my normal belt abominations
Yes, it's a game, yes there are many things that are real world simplifications, all that I can live with.
Trains going up short one story high ramps with no slippage or rack railway hurts my brain - laden freight trains even more so.
> I can't wait to make unholy train abominations
Blessings be upon you and may you not end up in hell.
It's a game, it's fun, I really don't care deeply beyond the craic of taking a position.
Changing the graphics to show a rack and pinion on the ramps (and short sections before and after the ramps) would be a knowing nod in the right direction that I'd endorse, sure.
IRL, however, we're not going to see a rack and pinion lift a 250 wagon x 100 tonne load 2.5 kilometre long iron ore train up a short one story high incline (throw in the engine and the wagon weight that's ~ 30,000 metric tonne).
A 2.5km iron ore train? What are you talking about? A 2-8 train in Factorio is 10 wagon-lengths, and each wagon is 7 tiles = 7 meters, so a large iron train is only 70m long.
You can see video if you look for Pilbara ore trains.
In game - short ramps lifting 30 feet are cute and look like fun in a tile based game. In real physics the inclines are much more gradual, especially for loded ore cars.
Although I do recognise the awesomeness of early victorian wide valley crossing bridges (which didn't come cheap, then or now) and the jaw dropping bridging a valley with a canal (water ain't light .. but at least it doesn't vibrate).
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1303/
https://www.countrylife.co.uk/out-and-about/the-pontcysyllte...
It’s already a low gravity planet and I’ve seen electric rail climb some annoying steep roads.
I've played Factorio for 1800 hours. I'm already in hell.
Not saying this is the only possible explanation for 7000 hours. It's just something I noticed when my "time played" was way higher than what is plausible.
This happens to me with every game eventually but with Factorio it happened so fast, I had to stop.
I'm still bummed out about that, and I want to give it another chance, but I can't be dreaming about it. I'll die.
We made a vertical train factory automation game. Railgrade. And we had to solve many or the exact same complexities. I remember the exact moment we too built the track builder to route off A*.
We release October 13th so maybe we'll survive by being faster?
Edit: Screenshot for proof: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1355090/ss...
I'm not such a crazy fanboy as that sentence should make me seem, but factorio has definitely made the management/building genre much more interesting for me, and while i never have a patience for a megafactory, i do enjoy the other games inspired by factorio, and will likely try yours
Chin up, and good luck with launch!
Thanks eh, yeah the launch is close so if anything this might bring more attention to us.
It helps that game ads are a lot nicer to look at, so our cost per click is lower than the typical business or crypto centric ad on twitter.
Plus as an indie the biggest hurdle is "getting a chance to say something" not "what to say". As players give attention to what is popular, and any attention small devs like us get need to be focused on why our game should exist at all.
A request, please: Would you please consider adding Geforce Now support so those of us on Macs and underpowered PCs can play it too? That tends to work better than the Rosettaing of Intel binaries. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming
We already support cloud saves so enabling Geforce Now is for sure something I want to do.
It helps that our game is 3d so you can rotate the camera to see things below at different angles. With Factorio being 2d they'd have a horrible visibility problem going even 3 layers up.
I think you can rest easy if you're worried that factorio might implement more than 2 layers. I like the sound of a mission-oriented problem solving core loop. Maybe allow players to create and share their own missions, that could add an engaging social element. Good luck!
True, weaving up and down can get you far but you still need to mix tracks. I think a big difference is Factorio's trains use basically infinite-frieght-cars-of-holding and thus achieve freight high density. In our game each freight car holds 1 freight. Thus players build a ton more trains and network efficiency is more about capacity than simply connecting two points.
I don't mind the look of Factorio, personally, but being able to rotate stuff around and see different angles of the factory was very helpful for routing in DSP. Then of course you can take it to a first person view too, like Satisfactory, but then I spent too much time trying to move myself (the player) through my maze of conveyer belts.
Satisfactory shows the pros/ cons of a full 3d world vs a 2d factorio.
I got into Satisfactory really hard this year (450+ hours played) after seeing a friend play it. I previously tried Factorio based on a similar personal recommendation and a general sense of "I ought to like this", but put it down after 2 hours thinking mostly just "meh". In hindsight, I really do think it is the graphics.
I'm now somewhat "over" Satisfactory (at least until they add more stuff in the next updates) and thinking about how to explore the factory builder genre more. Factorio is still in my library, yet I feel no desire to go back to it, mostly based on visual appeal. If I want to see something that's just 90% grey and brown, I can just go see any DC or Marvel movie from the last decade, thank you very much. In fact, looking at the games I recently played, one of the connecting facets seems to be a vibrant color palette (Hollow Knight, Ori 1+2, Webbed, Bug Fables, A Short Hike, Fez, Chicory, to name a few).
Same reason why I don't plan on playing any of the From Software games, even though 250 hours of Hollow Knight confirms that I'm a glutton for punishment and thus in the main demographic for Dark Souls and friends. But if I'm going to die 100 times in one sitting, at least I want something pretty to look at as I do so.
This game does something terrible to my brain
Factorio is more of a throughput optimizer as it really doesn't have that much in the way of tech, and nothing really becomes outdated beyond a few early game items.
I’m hooked and honestly surprised at how smooth it’s running with the Java 20 support on such an old version of Minecraft.
10/10 would recommend.
NEI with "regex" support? Yes please.
It won't end, thats the problem
I'm not gonna get hooked on this until I'm retired.
And the scale is massive, from simple obvious problems at the start, to huge, factory wide ones that emerge from the solutions you implemented before, that require carefully planing and phased execution to avoid breaking things.
And then you discover the circuit network, and the complexity of the solution space available to you suddenly becomes exponential.
Graphics wise, I think it's mostly working, but, and it feels bad to say this with the 9 months they've apparently spent on it, I think some of the sprites are not clearly elevated enough? Like the X crossing in the second has my brain really want to see it as ground level rails, and similiarly there's a second about two thirds across and one third down on the final image which doesn't read as elevated to me.
I think in the X at least they've had to make some balance between visual noise and how supported it looks, since the support rails terminate early rather than joining each other at angles, so I'm sure it's not easy to do.
OTOH, the diamond junction is an incredibly zoomed-in shot, so maybe we're overestimating from one picture the size of the portion without railings.
That is the premise to playing, but it's why I found minecraft a bore. Same with any survival game.
After that, I no longer think about radar power consumption. I just place them willy-nilly wherever they'll be useful. They're even spaced throughout my factory's interior just so I can see it working on the map from anywhere.
You can also muck with the world generation and make patches much richer and much more frequent. And I don't mean that like 'you can turn the difficulty down', its really more like increasing or decreasing emphasis on an aspect of the game to suit your preferences.
I have felt what you express about minecraft so I wanted to chip in my 2c, because it would be a shame if you missed out on factorio due to weird mapgen or the like.