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The Factorio Mindset

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Re: The Factorio Mindset

#121

Post by leetcrew »

dragontamer wrote: post #76
leetcrew wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as you unlock more technologies, it becomes increasingly easy to refactor/maintain a large factory. ex: bots are a major inflection point in the game. you could scale up petroleum processing and red circuits before getting bots (you need these two things to make them), but that involves a lot of manual effort. it's usually better to do a barely sufficient (but tileable!) petroleum and rc setup, then immediately fix i…

Cleanliness doesn't really matter, because space is infinite. ----------- So long as you've unlocked enough military (ie: shotgun in the early game, or tank in the mid-game), you can just clear out more room and then build there. (Shotgun has significant pierce-damage, enough to kill the alien bases. Tank also has significant pierce damage and impact-damage, allowing you to win against small / medium aliens through t…

maybe we are talking past each other, but I'd say clean interfaces and bots are very important even if you don't want to tear down the original factory. you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. can't really do this if you have some gnarly IO setup.

I agree clean layouts inside of functional units is unnecessary. land is cheap; just make something that works and cp it everywhere.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#123

Post by and0 »

MattRix wrote: post #93
lordnacho wrote: post #78

I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time. It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inser…

Dyson Sphere Program is a great Factorio-like that feels more optimistic and less dark. It’s still about harvesting every last resource though. On the other hand there’s Terra Nil, where the goal is to clean up a destroyed landscape and then leave it without a trace. It’s more of a puzzle game than a factory game, but still worth playing: https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil

DSP is excellent. I beat it before Factorio, and liked it a lot more, but I then went back to Factorio to scratch the same itch and after beating it think it's a bit better. The modding support and multiplayer, especially,

DSP is prettier, grander in scale, and also has a lot of niceties that come with being part of the second generation of the genre. Absolutely worth playing if you enjoy Factorio.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#124

Post by hathawsh »

I own a copy of Factorio, yet I never play it. Whenever I think about playing Factorio, I think what I really want to do is emulate biology, not industrial machinery. I want a game that lets me alter genomes slightly and try out several branches to see which ones are better for the world I'm trying to create. I want to fast forward through time so that evolution can run its course, then if I don't like the outcome, I want to be able to go back and try something else. I also want to be able to share evolutionary steps as code (in text form, not graphical!) with a community. The steps should be expressed in a functional language. Effectively, I want my quasi-biological world to take on a life of its own and I want to be able to run reversible experiments on both my worlds and other people's worlds.

That's probably too much to ask. :-)

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#125

Post by iszomer »

egypturnash wrote: post #108
julianeon wrote: post #20

I often encounter this issue when it comes to programming-like games. I’m wondering if I should adjust my thinking here. 1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it. 2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work & I can get done more work done, be more productive. 3) [stopped game, started programming]

There is a fine line between "this game exercises the same parts of my brain as my day job, but with a vastly different set of restrictions and consequences" and "I stare at a screen exercising this part of my brain all goddamn day and the last thing I want to do in my leisure time is stare at a screen using this part of my brain even more". I am an artist; I flirted briefly with Minecraft for a while, then looked up…

These games were my mobile companion during brief writer's block while learning C.

The Sequence, The Sequence 2, by One Man Band:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=640940791858937636...

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#126

Post by gknoy »

rustyminnow wrote: post #95
shane_b wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In software dev, my team has a “naive, naive, refactor” rule for this problem

Could you elaborate on this rule?

My guess is, it has to do with how you handle 1, 2, N. The first time we write something, we write it just for that specific case --- no point overengineering if you don't know you'll need it. (Hence the "YAGNI" advice that is common.)

Now, there are two things that code has to handle. You could put in a simple bit of special-case logic, or a case statement, and move on, OR you could instead spend time, codes, and tests making it robust to handle many different types of input, with a type-specific config system that makes it easy to add new type-specific behavior.

Our predilection on many teams is to skip the middle part, and write robust automation the first time we hit a special exception. ("This used to be about ordering burgers but now we want to also order shakes, and they don't have a cook-time.") It seems like the OP was suggesting that we do a "crappy" good-enough solution to that intermediate phase of complexity, as there's a chance you might not need more than that.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#127

Post by and0 »

foobarian wrote: post #117
lordnacho wrote: post #78

I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time. It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inser…

Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction. It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, si…

Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, let alone tightly optimal.

Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic lighting and how many objects are rendered.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#128

Post by aarmenaa »

foobarian wrote: post #117
lordnacho wrote: post #78

I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time. It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inser…

Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction. It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, si…

I got sucked into Satisfactory a while back. After about 100 hours in the game, I was standing at the top of a cliff looking at my creation and said to myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has ever seen."

I'm planning to start a new save soon, and I think I'm going to try playing with some self-imposed rules, like not removing vegetation. Not as much, anyways. I'm not exactly a budding architect; where I bothered with buildings at all they're mostly giant boxes filled with machines. But I've seen some pretty creative, inspiring buildings on the Satisfactory subreddit and I think the game is flexible enough that I could create a factory that incorporates the nature around it rather than just smashing everything flat.

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#129

Post by Matheus28 »

fragmede wrote: post #105
Aperocky wrote: post #25

Going to give a shoutout to https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry and https://songsofsyx.com/ In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you're going to like these 2 games.

Also http://factoryidle.com . There's no "person" that you're in control of and it plays different for other reasons, but it's definitely in the same category. There's also Satisfactory if you like a 1st person view of things.

Thanks for the recommendation! I loved that game

Re: The Factorio Mindset

#130

Post by mceachen »

rustyminnow wrote: post #95
shane_b wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In software dev, my team has a “naive, naive, refactor” rule for this problem

Could you elaborate on this rule?

It may be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_progra...

The idea is that you grit your teeth and let code be deduplicated twice (but no more), rather than immediately DRYing up code, so you'll (hopefully) have a better sense of what the common code should look like.

(I personally think it's too hard in practice, as common code can be written sufficiently differently to not be recognizable as common by the Engineers Of Tomorrow).

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