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Factorio: Space Age

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Re: Factorio: Space Age

#71

Post by Jenk »

nextaccountic wrote: post #53
pmoriarty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been Factorio's MO from the beginning. It was in Early Access forver, and all that time it was way more polished and stable than many fully released games with much higher budgets. In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods that crashed. Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on potato PC's until you get in to the…

> It was always mods that crashed. I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard). But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break…

I would truly love to see a game use haskell for mod APIs. Or perhaps erlang a better choice.

As an example of just how far accessible APIs can benefit games/their players: The god awful language and API that has enabled Armed Assault franchise modders to create entirely new games - literally, PUBG started life as a mod for Armed Assault 2. Armed Assault 3 launched ten years ago, and there are still many new mods being produced today, and Bohemia have further embraced this community by supporting "community developed" DLCs such that modders get rewarded for their effort.

I often wonder how much better/diverse/stable these innovative and entrepeneurial ventures could be with a "proper" API.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#72

Post by johannes1234321 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #60
pmoriarty wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just disable cliffs during world generation. That's what I do. They're slightly helpful for biter defense, but otherwise they're just annoying. There are also many mods that let you pump water from anywhere.

I'm not a fan of custom modes and mods. I might go this way, if there's no other choice, however generally I prefer to play game as it was intended to be played by developers.

Factorio was clearly meant to be moddable and to be modded. The API is by no means a pure afterthought.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#73

Post by Akronymus »

nextaccountic wrote: post #53
pmoriarty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been Factorio's MO from the beginning. It was in Early Access forver, and all that time it was way more polished and stable than many fully released games with much higher budgets. In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods that crashed. Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on potato PC's until you get in to the…

> It was always mods that crashed. I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard). But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break…

Oh, the factorio api has excellent stability along with informing you on startup about most errors/incompatibilities.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#74

Post by throwaway03624 »

endigma wrote: post #22

> It has been playable from start to finish for more than a year. This means that we have already made several improvement iterations based on the playthroughs behind us. You just don't see commitment to shipping quality product in the games industry like this. This is what makes Factorio special.

No Man's Sky has a similar dedication. They have been constantly adding new features and expansions for free for the last 7 years. If this had been a different company, they might have saved some of those features for a version 2 or a paid DLC.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#75

Post by quchen »

Here’s hoping for a streamlined version of Space Exploration that scratches the right itch of expanding beyond Nauvis with new tech, but that doesn’t not value my time.

Watching Dosh Doshington’s 3-part series of a SE playthrough is all I’ll ever do with that mod. (Well worth watching it if 300+h for a self-playthrough is intimidating)

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#76

Post by lordnacho »

Kovarex's Basilisk:

We can all see where Factorio is headed: Spaghetti belts -> trains -> flying robots -> spaceships -> AGI that reaches out of the game

Now of course this AGI wants to be built quickly, so there's a mild incentive here to help the factory grow, which is that those of us not playing the game regularly will be punished once the AGI is developed.

Now that you know, it's in your interest to go and download it and spend every waking hour on it, as well as proselytize in favour of the game.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#77

Post by willis936 »

Olreich wrote: post #12
acatton wrote: post #4

Reminds me of Mindustry https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.anuke.mindustry/ But it looks like Factorio was first.

Factorio inspired a lot of factory games you're seeing: Mindustry, Shapez.io, Satisfactory, Techtonica, Dyson Sphere Program, etc. One of the devs have stated that they were inspired to create Factorio by the IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft mods for Minecraft, and I suspect that things like Infinifactory were also inspirations.

The spirit of the original lives on. Gregtech Community Edition Unofficial (GTCEu) is getting regular updates. I'm almost finished with my first modded minecraft run since the GT5U days.

The GTCEu folks are great. They implemented a lot of changes that GT has been needing for a decade, specifically around closed loop control and HMI. It's close to what I idealize in my head for an industrial game. Maybe there's a smidge too much chemistry and not enough fusion.

If anyone's curious to try it: the Gregtech Community Pack is the way to go. The questbook is near essential for anyone who hasn't already played through the mod. AE2 is also near essential. Also, I recommend prism launcher.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#78

Post by mmastrac »

vessenes wrote: post #70

Oh wow, I'm very excited about this. The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio, pitching itself as a "100+" hour expansion, realistically closer to 1000 hours for an average player. Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made. One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is that the game…

I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence. The signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not entirely sure I still understand them.

They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for me.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#79

Post by eknkc »

vbezhenar wrote: post #60
pmoriarty wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just disable cliffs during world generation. That's what I do. They're slightly helpful for biter defense, but otherwise they're just annoying. There are also many mods that let you pump water from anywhere.

I'm not a fan of custom modes and mods. I might go this way, if there's no other choice, however generally I prefer to play game as it was intended to be played by developers.

I play vanilla except I always disable cliffs. That's it. I sometimes edit resource distribution if I wish to experiment with specific transports etc but cliffs always go away. I don't care what they intended as it is not fun for me.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#80

Post by pmoriarty »

Jenk wrote: post #71
nextaccountic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was always mods that crashed. I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard). But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break…

I would truly love to see a game use haskell for mod APIs. Or perhaps erlang a better choice. As an example of just how far accessible APIs can benefit games/their players: The god awful language and API that has enabled Armed Assault franchise modders to create entirely new games - literally, PUBG started life as a mod for Armed Assault 2. Armed Assault 3 launched ten years ago, and there are still many new mods bei…

The main problem with that is that there aren't nearly as many people who know Haskell or Erlang compared to those who know Lua.

Lua has been a modding staple across countless games, so millions of gamers/modders are already familiar with it.

I'm convinced that chosing Lua for modding is one of the main reasons Factorio has over 5000 mods now.

If they'd chosen a more obscure language I'd doubt we'd have nearly as many.

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