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Factorio: Space Age

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Re: Factorio: Space Age

#261

Post by EMM_386 »

mmastrac wrote: post #78
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.

> I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence.

I had over 500 hours in Factorio before I felt comfortable with signalling. I got so frusturated with it originally I just ignored it as best I could.

But the "chain in, rail out" thing as others are mentioning really is the key. It's not always as perfectly simple as that, but it's a very good starting point.

You break everything up into blocks ... if you place a chain signal right before an intersection and a rail signal on the way out, you'll be there for most situations.

Most.

My most complex map has about 50 trains running and all intersecting each other and so far, everything is running smoothly on that one. No trains slamming into each other and everything running efficiently as far as I can tell. Almost all of it is just that "chain in, rail out" thing.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#262

Post by zhynn »

throwaway03624 wrote: post #74
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.

They just released one of the largest updates ever adding a whole new NPC faction and a bunch of features. And it runs better on PSVR (foveated rendering) and switch (AMD FidelityX). It's an incredible achievement, and I keep dreading the inevitable post where Hello Games decides to move on... I hope it never happens.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#263

Post by ooterness »

epiccoleman wrote: post #170
babypuncher wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might also recommend Satisfactory. It is essentially Factorio in first person. I think it actually has a better tutorial for people who are just getting into this kind of game.

I've been really interested in Satisfactory, but the last time I looked, they didn't have blueprints - and I really can't imagine playing one of these kinds of games without some way of repeating designs. It looks awesome though, and I'd love to get a server running with a few friends.

Satisfactory added a blueprint system in Update 7, circa November 2022.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#264

Post by EMM_386 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #36
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.

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…

> Factorio performance is also fantastic

I still don't know how they pulled this off, and as a software engineer I've read all of the development blogs.

It is still impressive that you can scale this thing to huge mega-bases, with things smoothly gliding down coveyer belts, inserters swinging, bots flying around, trains everywhere, biters doing biter things all over the exposed (essentially endless) map ... and no problem in most cases.

60 FPS/UPS.

It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform.

I'm sure parts of it are.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#265

Post by zhynn »

feoren wrote: post #175
throwaway03624 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, No Man's Sky? That game? Was it bought or something? Do they still have that liar who went on interviews and lied through his teeth about the game? It's pretty rare to see a project based entirely on lies from a smarmy psycho liar ever actually go anywhere, right? Did they ever go back and actually implement any of the things he lied were already in the base game?

That "smarmy psycho liar" was an introverted developer-turned-ceo who was in over his head. He is now beloved by the community. Sean Murray is a legend. They have been over-delivering on NMS for the better part of a decade now without charging for anything but the base game.

And yes, they implemented all of it. Everything that was promised and much much more. Just check out the trailer for Echoes that dropped yesterday (the new update for the game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqpVCwwuyh8

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#266

Post by knome »

pmoriarty wrote: post #132
mcv wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains are my favourite part of the game, and I always make myself a massive bowl of train spaghetti. I love watching my trains automatically find their way across my messy maze of train tracks. My simple rules: * Trains can only stop on the section after a regular signal. If you don't want a train to be able to stop in a certain place (like on an intersection), don't use a regular signal in front of it. * Make sure…

For refueling I've recently been using the cybersyn mod, which let's you easily create a refueling stations that your trains will automatically go to when they're low on fuel (with exactly how "low" they need to be being configurable in the mod settings). I just plop down a refueling station, and a requester station next to it that refuels the refueler and I'm done. Don't have to worry about it again.

My most complex train system had every train carry a single item type, and a large central trainyard. trains won't leave without an active destination. so all of the destinations for dropping off a type had the same name, and similarly the pick ups and would be disabled by circuits if their dropoffs were more than a quarter or so full. so if something needed green electronics, it would activate its DropOffGreenElectronics, the train would leave the yard, or sometimes 2-3 as at the time I didn't have any way of limiting it and one train wasn't enough to service all of the delivery points with my single car trains. the thundering herd problem[1] was real. the first train would get there, rest would go home. everything refueled at the home terminal, which had a stop for the coal train on it. each train had (dropoff(X) -> pickup(X) -> rest(X)) for their instructions. it worked pretty well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#267

Post by Baeocystin »

Factorio remains the only game where I had to purposefully set it aside, because it was starting to negatively affect the rest of my life due to late nights and blown sleep schedules.

I say that with praise and admiration, but also as a genuine warning to anyone who hasn't yet tried it that might be reading this. For a certain kind of mind, it is digital crack in the purest form that I've experienced.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#268

Post by snthd »

kevincox wrote: post #171
unglaublich wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the Steam deck? How? With external KB and mouse?

They made some UI tweaks to make it work well on the Steam Deck. https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-370 I haven't tried it but I've heard that it is completely playable, although I'm sure not as convenient as using a mouse and keyboard.

Controller support landed in June, a long time after that blog post.

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=586148#p586148

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#269

Post by drbawb »

pmoriarty wrote: post #82
vbezhenar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intended or not, I've found playing with mods way, way more fun (and much less annoying) than playing vanilla Factorio (which I still love, but not nearly as much as modded Factorio). After my first vanilla playthrough I loved the game, but found a bunch of things annoying or which I thought could be improved on. Soon after I found there were mods to satisfy every one of my wants and cure every one of the annoyances.…

I did a vanilla playthrough w/ no console commands to get my fair share of achievements.[1] That base is from beta, and doesn't really function correctly anymore.[2] At this point I feel pretty done with the base game, though I suspect I'll do another "from scratch" playthrough w/ the expac to celebrate its launch. I have something like ~1100 hours in the game, and it still brings me great joy. Vanilla certainly owes me _nothing._ However it's really the joy of finding mods and playing their scenarios (or creating my own scenarios) that keeps me coming back to the game. Ironically I'm currently working through Space Exploration with friends; I sure hope we finish before the expansion!

These days though I find the "burner" gameplay provides me very little enjoyment. I detest the "punching trees" phase of the game mostly because I've spent so many hours with my engineer at Max Power Level. (Maybe it'd be different if I had gotten bit by the speedrunning bug, and learned how to optimize that bit of the game.) Even my "most vanilla" playthroughs these days usually have at least:

- "far reach"

- a factory planner

- some kind of warehousing/loaders

- an /editor'd in crate of supplies to build power, some labs, and stamp down "the mall"

- some kitted out modular armor and a personal roboport (to do the more finnicky builds; though I've watched some speedruns and my base building micro has gotten a lot better.)

- LTN(!) - I love trains, and this mod's take on trains just gels with me.

[1]: The only ones I have left are to do a "lazy bastard" playthrough which requires enough consideration that I wanted to do it by itself in a challenge run, and the rest are all the top tier production based time sinks, which I'd rather do in a map tailor generated to be a megabase.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#270

Post by duskwuff »

EMM_386 wrote: post #264
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…

> Factorio performance is also fantastic I still don't know how they pulled this off, and as a software engineer I've read all of the development blogs. It is still impressive that you can scale this thing to huge mega-bases, with things smoothly gliding down coveyer belts, inserters swinging, bots flying around, trains everywhere, biters doing biter things all over the exposed (essentially endless) map ... and no pr…

> It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform.

As far as I'm aware, it's all C++.

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