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Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

factorio.com

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Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#311

Post by mnsc »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #93
chitowneats wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange that nowhere on this landing page does Mindustry advertise itself as "free software". In fact, there is a very prominent link to buy it on steam for $9.99. A bit off-putting. As developers of course we associate GitHub with FOSS, but would a layman? I guess the thinking is anyone who doesn't know to visit the repo and `git clone` probably requires the steam installation? $9.99 however is not cheap many places…

OSS developer finds way to get people to pay for their software, other OSS developers furious. Film at 11. Like seriously, they made a game and made it open source and free (there's even a prominent $0 itch.io link just under the Steam one !), and allow people to pay them money for it using the most popular and successful game distribution platform in the history of mankind, and people are put off by it?

Am I furious? No. Am I "put off". Yes. And the reason I get put off is that when there is someone or someones involved that has money in focus and are "creative" with securing funding for their work I get worried about possible future decisions and get wary of investing time/effort in the game/software. But that's just me and I know myself, that I get upset when individuals uses their full right to eg close source and start a business based on their successful software. It's not rational but I tend to gravitate to projects driven by very idealistic individuals. Of which there seem to be less and less of as time goes.

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#312

Post by PebblesRox »

323 wrote: post #61

There was a funny but insightful take about how Factorio is about a colonizing force going to a planet and taking all of it's natural resources while suppressing all the native inhabitants and how the player identifies with this evil entity as if a good thing.

When I explained the game to my 5yo, I told him that we are the bad guy in the game.

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#313

Post by PebblesRox »

kevinventullo wrote: post #70
323 wrote: post #61

There was a funny but insightful take about how Factorio is about a colonizing force going to a planet and taking all of it's natural resources while suppressing all the native inhabitants and how the player identifies with this evil entity as if a good thing.

I definitely felt evil the first time I told my bot army to harvest a forest and they cleared the whole thing in about 2 seconds.

Or when I first built an auto-targetting missile-train to wipe out their nests from afar while I sat in my tank at a very safe distance.

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#314

Post by ehnto »

lake_vincent wrote: post #10

Please no. Someone tell me it's just an unconfirmed rumor. Why would they do such a thing? I am at very high risk for Factorio addiction, and the only reason I haven't played it yet is because I don't play PC games anymore. But I do have a Switch, and having Civ VI on there was enough of a problem, thank you very much. Goodbye everyone!

I avoided it until this year, and it was every bit as addictive as I thought it would be. Fortunately, I'm also older and busier now, so there was actually a hard stop for me.

When it came to developing nuclear powered infrastructure, it was going to take a huge refactor of my factory in order to not have "spaghetti infrastructure" criscrossing my factory. I started estimating the time to abstract resource production and modularize the delivery network, I was looking at a good few hours of focused work to get it done. Maybe I could split it into sub-tasks and approach it that way? Gosh, that sounds a lot like my job. So I stopped.

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#315

Post by neilparikh »

deskamess wrote: post #179

Its time for some Zachtronics game to make the migration. If Factorio can happen, then I would think the Zachtronics games can do it too (performance wise).

It's not a "Zach-Like", but Eliza by Zachtronics is on the Switch. It's a visual novel with an interesting story about AI and the gig economy. I recommend it highly, I really enjoyed it.

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#316

Post by ehnto »

darkteflon wrote: post #240
pkulak wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried Skylines a few times, but it always just devolves into traffic simulation, and I hate traffic. Last go I tried to set up a subway system, but lines can't even cross each other and I gave up. They should really call the game "American Suburb Skylines".

This is spot on. I’ve got some 50+ hours in C:S and it always degenerates into traffic management grind. Every time I come back to it I have another dig through the menus, thinking I must be missing something, but there’s no “car-free city” option. As far as I understand, the new Plazas & Promenades DLC does not actually address this either. Am I missing something? Why does the end-game always have to be traffic? See…

There are strategies to remove cars and you can make effectively car free suburbs, but I'm not sure you can make an entirely car free city. The biggest issue is trucks, everything needs to be planned around getting trucks out of the places everyone else is driving.

The other strategy is getting everyone onto bikes and onto public transport. If they can do it, citizens will prioritize public transport and cycling over cars. So once you get rid of the trucks, and design the city in such a way that citizens can cycle/train to work/commercial then you'll reduce heaps of traffic.

Interestingly, I built high speed rail to a second town I built that's only connection is the railway, it's quite small but also very little traffic. Almost everyone takes the rail into the main city for work. I think better cities in the game would actually be to treat suburbs like a series of small towns, rather than lots of massive city blocks.

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#317

Post by danielheath »

solardev wrote: post #210
xani_ wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also in weird way analogue for development. You can just go for it and make a production chain for a product, but if next one needs same intermediates you'd be re-doing it. i.e. doing a spaghetti code. You can section off the each intermediate into separate factory and just chain them to eachother and have relatively nice order, but when you try to expand production of everything, there is no easy way to grow th…

I can't wait for the day we can ask a general-purpose gaming AI to optimize the production line for this game, learn from it, and then backport the theories to my codebase at work. Humans... or at least me... are so bad at this sort of multivariate optimization. Even if you cheat and give yourself infinite resources and all the technologies and set out to plan the perfect economy from the get-go, eventually something…

Constraint solvers have already been used to generate optimal belt balancers (and it's beautiful / incredible). The designs they come up with for 16-wide balancers are, I think, beyond anything a human could have realistically created in a single lifetime.

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#318

Post by ehnto »

pkulak wrote: post #231
dakial1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I also suggested City Skylines on the switch? It has a great addiction management feature called high RAM usage, so when your city reaches 200k citizens the game will force close repeatedly on you.

I've tried Skylines a few times, but it always just devolves into traffic simulation, and I hate traffic. Last go I tried to set up a subway system, but lines can't even cross each other and I gave up. They should really call the game "American Suburb Skylines".

On top of my other comment below, the game does lack medium to high density mixed zoning, and the transport and services used to serve that. Trucks also only do point to point deliveries which is not realistic. You end up with really tight city blocks, but instead of being full of foot traffic, bicycles and small delivery bikes or at least serial deliveries, it's full of cars and trucks moving a few loaves of bread between a factory and a deli.

I think you need to plan your cities more like a small country town, and expect less density per meter of road than the game actually lets you put down. Rather than playing to the games metrics of population and income, just expect less of the city and spread it out more.

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#319

Post by ikiris »

lake_vincent wrote: post #10

Please no. Someone tell me it's just an unconfirmed rumor. Why would they do such a thing? I am at very high risk for Factorio addiction, and the only reason I haven't played it yet is because I don't play PC games anymore. But I do have a Switch, and having Civ VI on there was enough of a problem, thank you very much. Goodbye everyone!

Check out Space Exploration mod :P

Re: Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch

#320

Post by danielheath »

danudey wrote: post #176
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #102

Even though it is many orders of magnitude simpler than the real-world equivalent, I find that there is no better way of grasping the logistics of modern civilization than playing Factorio. In fact, it's probably in the Goldilocks zone: easy enough to play, but complicated enough to convey the kind of resource, energy and transport logistics involved in scaling a multi-step production process. It is like an illustrat…

I always give up on Factorio playthroughs when I have to start shuttling different kind of research around on conveyor belts. Up until then it's exciting/exhausting.

Huh. That's one of the parts I enjoy most! There's so many ways to approach it.

One I haven't seen documented widely:

Use a slow belt holding two science types (one each side) to feed the left side of a faster belt (which then has a left lane that alternates between the two colors). Repeat for the right side (your fast belt now has four colors). You now have a four-color belt to feed your labs, but it backs up when you use more of one color than another, so at the end you add splitters to extract the individual colors into four belts, and feed them back into the start (with priority, so they don't block).

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