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The journey to Nintendo Switch

factorio.com

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Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#101

Post by selectodude »

wtallis wrote: post #78
krallja wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devs have talked about performance bottlenecks a lot - the real benefit of Factorio on the M1 would be the RAM interconnect, as most of the performance issues are related to RAM latency. Upgrading your PC from (e.g.) DDR3 to DDR4 gives you a whole lot more FPS per $ than upgrading your graphics card or CPU.

Does Factorio benefit more from RAM latency or bandwidth? Apple's processors have unprecedented GPU-like memory bandwidth available to the CPU, but I don't recall hearing about the latency being anything special. (For latency, AMD's 3D-stacked cache might be the best solution out there.)

Seems like ram latency is huge for factorio. I know the UPS skyrocketed on the 5800X3D with its 96mb of L3.

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/f2nab9/ram_speed_...

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#102

Post by amalcon »

hbn wrote: post #74
afterburner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that's always been Nintendo's thing, hasn't it? Cheaper, less powerful consoles, but focus on iconic gameplay

I'd say that only really started in the 7th console generation (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360) Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition, but after that the other companies were trying to outperform each other in graphical fidelity while Nintendo released basically another Gamecube but with motion controls. And it was a hit!

Certainly the N64 (immediately prior to Gamecube) was supposed to be super high tech. They actually stressed the partnership with SGI in the marketing, and literally named the console after the word size of its CPU. In retrospect the former was pretty weird, since the public would not have known that name or anything.

Folks can quibble about the Gamecube if they like, but step back one generation and they were definitely trying to push the technology.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#103

Post by shadowgovt »

pdntspa wrote: post #100
shadowgovt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... as long as you ignore the places where CDPR didn't actually finish debugging the game and errors abound, from innocent things like a pathing error in a pre-rendered character animation causing them to steamroll through movable objects in a scene to arguable game-breakers like a mission neither being succeed-able or failable because some key internal flag is in the wrong state, with the only solution being to roll…

I've beaten the game and NEVER had any issues like that, other than right after launch. You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time. The game is really quite good now and has been for some time. > actually finish debugging the game and errors abound Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this. I ca…

> You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time

I'd be happy to as soon as it's possible for me to complete or discard the "Get a gun" tutorial quest that is stuck in my quest roster. Stuck quests are a category of bug that stick badly in my craw; personal preference.

> Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this

Absolutely true, but there's degrees, and CP2077 was the buggiest game I played in 2021. When it works? It's... Okay, it's fine; I didn't find it as captivating as I hoped.

When it doesn't work, the results range from annoying to comical. I did have a good laugh the time that NPC got her handbag fused to her hand at a right angle, just gesticulating wildly in a conversation waving the thing around like an oven mitt. I did not have a good laugh when I got stuck in the floor crawling through an air vent to get into a locked room with a 'runner jacked into his chair, levitated off horizontally into the void so I couldn't move, and found that restoring from save took me all the way back to before I'd accepted the quest.

I'm old now; that shit eats into my finite time to enjoy games at all, and I have minimal patience for that category of error.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#104

Post by pdntspa »

shadowgovt wrote: post #103
pdntspa wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've beaten the game and NEVER had any issues like that, other than right after launch. You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time. The game is really quite good now and has been for some time. > actually finish debugging the game and errors abound Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this. I ca…

> You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time I'd be happy to as soon as it's possible for me to complete or discard the "Get a gun" tutorial quest that is stuck in my quest roster. Stuck quests are a category of bug that stick badly in my craw; personal preference. > Literally EVERY software developer is g…

You can't be very far in the game if you are stuck on that quest. Why not just start over?

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#105

Post by vikingerik »

hbn wrote: post #74
afterburner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that's always been Nintendo's thing, hasn't it? Cheaper, less powerful consoles, but focus on iconic gameplay

I'd say that only really started in the 7th console generation (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360) Gamecube and prior was roughly comparable to the competition, but after that the other companies were trying to outperform each other in graphical fidelity while Nintendo released basically another Gamecube but with motion controls. And it was a hit!

It was fairly true for the NES and SNES generations as well. Each used a CPU five years old by then and a RAM size that was common in computers eight years prior. Really, for only the N64 console generation did Nintendo ever try to outdo its competitors on hardware specs.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#106

Post by spijdar »

Andrex wrote: post #45
klodolph wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some games, like ACNH, have a long load time.

Which is a little disappointing, since one of the things I loved most about the GameCube game was the instant load times. I also enjoyed taking the disc out of the slot after the game was loaded.

Animal Crossing is an interesting game to me because of how little the series code has changed over time. The GameCube releases seems to have almost literally been the Nintendo 64 release recompiled against a different SDK for the GC platform (weighing in at only 27MB total for the GC release! An entire 1.4GB DVD for 27MB!), while the Wii and 3DS games, and seemingly the Switch one, are variants of the DS rewrite (seemingly the last time the codebase was scrapped and restarted).

I'd be really curious to know how similar the Switch code is. On the surface, the game seems to have been extended quite a bit, but I feel like a lot of it is just uncovering functionality that already existed in the codebase, e.g. the ability to place arbitrary items on the outside grid, I'm fairly sure the "engine" already supported this, and it was the way outside objects were implemented, there was just no interface for adding/removing them.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#107

Post by shadowgovt »

pdntspa wrote: post #104
shadowgovt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time I'd be happy to as soon as it's possible for me to complete or discard the "Get a gun" tutorial quest that is stuck in my quest roster. Stuck quests are a category of bug that stick badly in my craw; personal preference. > Literally EVERY software developer is g…

You can't be very far in the game if you are stuck on that quest. Why not just start over?

There are two answers to that question.

The first is "You misunderstood me. I'm hours into the game; that quest got stuck in the first hour or so, I didn't realize it was stuck, and rolling back to before I acquired it would basically reset all my progress. So it's just stuck there, like a splinter, reminding me how broken the game's mechanics are. Getting to live out twelve-year-old-me's fantasy of fighting Adam Smasher hasn't offset the irritation because that's my flavor of OCD."

But had the situation been as you expected, my response would have been "Because I respect my time more than these developers do and there's a literal sea of other games I could be playing that don't make me replay around script bugs."

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#108

Post by Johanx64 »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #86

Factorio's official requirement for x86 is a dual core 3.0Ghz processor & yet it's able to run on Switch which has a very weak 1Ghz quad core cortex-A57 ARM CPU. How is this possible? I would imagine CPU requirements to be more or less same across any resolution / operating system. This is what makes Nintendo Switch interesting to me. It's CPU is even less powerful than an Raspberry Pi 4. Even midrange android smartp…

Switch can't run Doom "just fine", it downscales down to 360p frequently and chogs between 20-30fps. It's barely playable. Mind you, Doom is one of the better optimized games of this gen. And running it sub~60fps on with all settings turned down to ultra low is a sin.

Factorio is pretty well optimized too, however the factory size Switch can handle are on the - can launch the rocket - scale. This is but a small fraction of the factory size people end up building

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#109

Post by MayeulC »

pdntspa wrote: post #100
shadowgovt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... as long as you ignore the places where CDPR didn't actually finish debugging the game and errors abound, from innocent things like a pathing error in a pre-rendered character animation causing them to steamroll through movable objects in a scene to arguable game-breakers like a mission neither being succeed-able or failable because some key internal flag is in the wrong state, with the only solution being to roll…

I've beaten the game and NEVER had any issues like that, other than right after launch. You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time. The game is really quite good now and has been for some time. > actually finish debugging the game and errors abound Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this. I ca…

Consider SQLite as a conterpoint before using superlatives. There are others.

Edit: well, of course, a game bug, even if game-breaking, isn't safety critical. Yo have to plan what to spend time on.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#110

Post by hoten »

Moncefmd wrote: post #92
jvanderbot wrote: post #57

> Removing all uses of undefined behaviour is probably a fool's errand, as it would require significant changes throughout the code that would take time and come with a performance impact, all for no immediate practical benefit. So I just hunted down the undefined behaviour cases that actually broke determinism. This was easy enough, as we have plenty of tools we use to test determinism. By comparing the game state C…

Whats CRC?

It's likely a hash of the game state. They save input and playback recordings of the game, expecting to always receive the same hash for the game state every frame.

Just this week I started on a similar system for a game engine I work on (Zelda Classic). Main reason was for testing purposes, but another benefit is that it is SO cool to see the game replayed for you. Like those self playing pianos.

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