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What is interesting about Factorio

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Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#281

You know what else is interesting? Their "no sales" sales philosophy. For me its the reason never to buy it. I actually revolt when I hear their reasons. I feel like it comes down to: we are willing to hurt our options for making more profit to prevent people with lesser budgets from buying it. But its very interesting since a lot of people have the opposite reaction. They feel it is more valuable if it doesn't go on…

You can play Factorio's demo for free.

There's actually quite a lot you can do in it, and it's what hooked me on the game. You might feel different about paying full price for it after you play the demo.

For me, Factorio is easily worth twice or even three times the price they're charging. I've pissed away so much money on half-baked, low effort, insanely buggy games, and even "cheap" games are usually not worth the money. With some games, I feel the developers should have been paying me for what amounted to beta-testing their buggy, poorly conceived and executed product and wasting my time.

Factorio is different. It's true work of love. The developers could have abandoned the game years ago and it still would have been one of the most feature rich, well thought-out, and stable game ever made. But they've kept working on it and adding new things to it without charging anything extra, in contrast to what many other game studios have done when they've released content or new versions of their game and charged for it.

Factorio just keeps getting better and better, and all I've paid was the initial $30 for the game.

Factorio's modding community is also absolutely fantastic, and they've enriched the game many fold as their mods exponentially increase the possibilities in the game and give you tons of new content.. for free.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#282
post #270

I've played it for many hours, and the thing that still asthonishes me the most is how incredibly efficient the code must be. While I haven't played with that specific purpose in mind, I've never managed to create a factory big enough where you'd notice a slowdown in the simulation. Thousands of grabbers, trains, drones, belts, factories, aliens, environmental effects, different sorts of networks, all with their own…

The developers frequently blog about how they're doing it, often going into immense detail. Without spoiling too much, I have no qualms about calling them some of the best in the industry. The entire industry, that is, not just in games.

Their blog posts are great. They sometimes blog about really obscure parts of game development. It’s interesting to read even if you are not building games.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#283
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti If you only design factories from scratch by yourself, that's akin to being handed an assembler programming manual as your only reading material and building up every programming abstraction yourself. You likely won't discover the best abstractions. After a while playing factorio I decided to watch experts play…

That's why I love it. I just went back to play last night and I got my Red and Green science built in a way with zero excess. All the miners lead straight into a furnace which fed straight into an automation factory which fed straight into the Red and Green science. The only thing I used belts for was getting the sciences to the Labs. Then I unlocked the the next level of science and it all instantly became spaghetti…

"If you can get clean whole numbers for a majority of your ratios, then you have a nearly perfect automation process even if it's all spaghetti belts."

Another way to go is to use robots for delivery. That way there's no spaghetti of belts because there are no belts.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#284
post #6

As someone that stopped playing games in university, I've found it weirdly hard to get back into games many years later. Factorio seems like the type of game I would've liked as a teenager, but now it just feels like work to me. As do most interesting games. It seems like there's a learning curve to games that I don't want to spend the time dealing with anymore.

I understand the need to treat life as a dichotomy between work and play, but I feel you might have lost some of the magic of your childhood. For me it's the opposite, I hated complex games as a child but really enjoy them today. For me, the best feeling is working hard for something and really getting into the details and enjoying all the complexity of the experience / challenge. I think that most human beings are w…

Wait, if you don't want to do anything once a week you're diagnosed as depressed? How many people don't want to just sit around even once every week?!

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#285
post #6

As someone that stopped playing games in university, I've found it weirdly hard to get back into games many years later. Factorio seems like the type of game I would've liked as a teenager, but now it just feels like work to me. As do most interesting games. It seems like there's a learning curve to games that I don't want to spend the time dealing with anymore.

I've had a hard time as well, but I think the reason is different.

Software work feels very similar to the games I enjoy and I do that 6-10 hours a day. Games effectively trained me to be able to understand and build complex systems, which is great, but now they're just games.

I prefer hobbies that get me away from a computer. It's a pretty limiting constraint -- computers are super useful.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the need to treat life as a dichotomy between work and play, but I feel you might have lost some of the magic of your childhood. For me it's the opposite, I hated complex games as a child but really enjoy them today. For me, the best feeling is working hard for something and really getting into the details and enjoying all the complexity of the experience / challenge. I think that most human beings are w…

Wait, if you don't want to do anything once a week you're diagnosed as depressed? How many people don't want to just sit around even once every week?!

Me for one. I find it hard to sit down and watch TV for more than an hour at a time.

I have a foot injury right now and the mental adjustment to sitting more instead of being up and around is...significant.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, if you don't want to do anything once a week you're diagnosed as depressed? How many people don't want to just sit around even once every week?!

Me for one. I find it hard to sit down and watch TV for more than an hour at a time. I have a foot injury right now and the mental adjustment to sitting more instead of being up and around is...significant.

Not even once a week?

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#288

I think the biggest hook for Factorio is that it's an _actual_ visual programming language. So much of what we do day to day ignores this (dominant!) mode of perception. It's extremely refreshing to be able to simply look at a system to reason about it. (as an aside, I think this is also why the Zachtronics games are so effective)

I seriously struggle with factorio, You have to have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti. I always end up having to scale up things and then having no room. I find text based programming to be much much simpler. If I need to add more somewhere, I can, my text editor will push everything else out of the way.

Hah, and that is my biggest complaint about real visual programming languages, like LabView. They are fine for writing simple software from scratch, and the dataflow aspects have some neat features like trivial parallelization. But man are they a pain to maintain software in. You either spend massive amounts of time rearranging blocks, and rerouting wires, or your code becomes visual spaghetti.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#289
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I guess the idea behind engineering at home for fun is that it doesn’t have to be boring tasks. And I tend to work on completely unnecessary things such that there’s no time pressure. That makes it a lot more fun and rewarding than working at the office. Like I recently designed a pair of headphones from scratch. They sound better than any of my other headphones which are all a bit cheap. It totally didn’t need…

(I know nearly nothing about audio equipment). Weren't you afraid that you'll somehow botch the headphones and they'll play an excessively loud sound, which will permanently damage your hearing or give you tinnitus? Or can that risk be ruled out somehow?

I wasn’t worried about that. I tend to assume I’ll figure things out. And indeed the wiring for the headphones is “cut a 3.5mm cable, solder the leads to the purchased headphone speakers.” The only thing I brought to the table was design of the enclosure for the headphone driver, which can’t really create bad loud sounds.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#290
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You regret it now when you have more than half of your life ahead of you. But when you have nearly all of it behind you do you think you'll still regret it? I don't think I will.

What do you think you will regret? Is it not something that could have been changed with more time? Or are you trying to imply you won't have any regrets... and wouldn't that make the question kind of meaningless? As for me, that depends... I might end up a lonely bitter old man who constantly/wistfully mourns the wasted potential cause of all the whishes/goals I had but never worked on. Getting away from spending th…

I think I'll regret not using more of my time to do things that bring me joy. I think I'll regret the times in my life when I was doing something other than exactly what I wanted to do that moment.

I can't be sure though because at 41 I don't regret time spent working because it wasn't that bad and money earned allowed me to have a lot of fun gaming. Also I don't regret time spent with people. So I can't be sure if I regret anything on my deathbed, other than that I don't have more time to enjoy things. I'm pretty sure I won't regret wasted potential, because I know how unique it is to realize it in any spectacular manner. I could as well regret not winning the lottery, and I'm at ease with that.

My life might be meaningless in any objective sense. But some people have drawn some utility from it and it's absolutely meaningful for me because I'm the one living it. It's the only thing I got and I'll never have anything else.

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