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Show HN: Verilog2factorio

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71–76 of 76 posts

Re: Show HN: Verilog2factorio

#72

That's it, I am done. No more serious IT work for me. I am going to become a gamers consultant. If there are people who care enough to make things like this, there must be people who would pay decent money for "professionals" to come in and optimize their factorio game, or their minecraft builds, or to make them feel good about their solution to a Zachtronics puzzle.

You joke, but Factorio is a sufficiently "crunchy" logistics game that it has prompted me to study a number of serious topics, from learning linear programming to determine optimal production ratios, to dipping my toe into learning about the broader subject of systems dynamics, with stocks, flows, feedbacks, and so forth. I maintain that it's an excellent educational tool for these sorts of subjects.

Re: Show HN: Verilog2factorio

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing you’re mostly not serious, though I acknowledge there may be a market for what you describe. As a lifelong gamer since the Commodore 64 (since parenthood scaling it way back to mostly crewing a tank in Hell Let Loose with two friends, or a ttrpg with same), looking back it feels like I took refuge in a medium (single-player games) ultimately less valuable than other-format stories, like books, film, and…

Video games are just a younger medium than books and movies. Even TV needed more time to be seen at a similar level to movies in terms of art. We're getting there though. The past 15 years have given us many masterpieces of gaming that can absolutely be considered art, and they're becoming more and more common. As this happens more and more, the medium is taken more and more seriously. Many games still suffer from fe…

Thanks for reminding me about Portal, and for the TV analogy. It might have been a Gamasutra article about games also being works of art, and a young medium (tabletop games, too, have both come a long way and have room to grow). We certainly have a plethora of options for how we spent our time alive.

Re: Show HN: Verilog2factorio

#74
post #55
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some saw/earnt vhdl someone after it emerged. ~half? Verilog had a popularity ramp up time of a few years too. I'm going with a much smaller number than you there. Could be way wrong!

VHDL/Verilog is a bit like Pascal/C division used to be, with VHDL having more fans in Europe and Verilog on US, and then the respective countries that do business with them. At least that is how I understand the market division, it might also be that one of them has already won, not sure about that.

I decided to learn Verilog after reading of a different division. Namely that VHDL is the preferred option of defense industry applications in the US, Verilog preferred in non-MIC business. Given the advantages of VHDL over Verilog looked less than overwhelming and Verilog has some advantages of its own, (verilator, seemingly more RISC-V cores in verilog, open-source tool chain looks closer to being useful to me etc.) That's the call I made. It looks like it's not so hard to switch from one to the other if you need to do that though.

Re: Show HN: Verilog2factorio

#75

I did not expect this to be written in TypeScript. The intersection of people who really understand Factorio, Verilog, and TypeScript has to be less than 250,000 people on entire planet -- in the entire universe.

But the number of people who understand verilog, but not typescript (or at least javascript), is probably close to zero.

There are dozens of us.

Re: Show HN: Verilog2factorio

#76
Note that factorio data propagation in circuit is not fast.

In factorio, it will take one frame for two objects connected by the circuit to synchronize. The game runs at 60fps. So, if you connect 60 components in a series, it will take 1 second to propagate a change.

This is the basis of how clock circuits work, but I guess is not perfect for the more complex circuits.

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