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The journey to Nintendo Switch

factorio.com

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Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#131

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

pdntspa wrote: post #59
naranha wrote: post #56

If the switch proves anything it's that you don't have to pay $1600 for a GPU to enjoy amazing games. Or the other way round, if you pay $1600 for a gpu it does not mean that you'll be able to play any good games.

Depends entirely on what you play. Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K with DLSS and raytracing is exquisite...

Cyberpunk 2077 main issues are the very unequal main story and the extremely boring and repetitive side quests (also the driving gameplay but that’s fixable). That’s not things graphics can save sadly.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#132

Post by mattl »

highwind wrote: post #116
hbn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I'd argue that first time Nintendo exhibited that mentality was with GameBoy.

I think their Game and Watch systems show it too.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#133

Post by yeputons »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #52
Arrath wrote: post #47

> "This is the first time we had to make sure the game is deterministic between ARM and x86. We should be fine, C++ is portable, right? Just don't use undefined behavior. Turns out we use quite a lot of undefined behavior..." Hah

Would it occur had they used UBsan on debug builds?

No doubt. For starters, UBsan does not check for any invalid memory access.

In my C++ course, I require that the code runs correctly under 5 different compilers (GCC, LLVM Clang, Apple Clang, MSVC, Intel C++ Compiler Classic) on 3 OS (Ubuntu, Windows, macOS) in Release, Debug+Valgrind, Debug+Sanitizers modes, and students still get UB quite often.

Extra reading: http://evan.nemerson.com/2021/05/04/portability-is-reliabili... and discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044419

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#134

Post by Macha »

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…

A modern 1.6ghz laptop cpu like the 1240U is probably fine for factorio.

A Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3ghz probably isn't.

They don't want to test and then list the minimum CPU for every generation of cpu for the last decade or more when listing system requirements. So they go a little higher in the stated requirements than is probably needed with newer gens so people don't get angry and disappointed that their older gen cpu doesn't run well despite having the listed clock speed.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#135

Post by misterprime »

gbasp wrote: post #114
naranha wrote: post #56

If the switch proves anything it's that you don't have to pay $1600 for a GPU to enjoy amazing games. Or the other way round, if you pay $1600 for a gpu it does not mean that you'll be able to play any good games.

I think the technical limitations of the Nintendo Switch makes for more interesting games in general. Most of the games on my Xbox and PC tend to be FPS/Action games with very boring, brown and green "realistic" environments whereas games on my Switch tend to be bright and colorful with lots of 2D and pixel graphics and games in the vein of simulators, adventures, roguelikes etc.

Tangent: It's amazing that the popularity of XP to "level up" and HP to bring to zero has become. This was a new concept to me way back when Final Fantasy 3 (3 in the US, I think 6 in Japan) came out. It felt very niche and reserved for a specific type of game. Now those ideas are everywhere.

What's a common new game trend since then? I can think of these: randomized microtransaction packs, online multiplayer PvP and co-op.

Are there any established trends that I'm missing out on, or new concepts emerging that old gamers may not have come across?

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#136

Post by astrange »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #52
Arrath wrote: post #47

> "This is the first time we had to make sure the game is deterministic between ARM and x86. We should be fine, C++ is portable, right? Just don't use undefined behavior. Turns out we use quite a lot of undefined behavior..." Hah

Would it occur had they used UBsan on debug builds?

It won't find threading issues, or "implementation-defined behavior" (which isn't the same thing as undefined behavior).

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#137

Post by spamalot159 »

misterprime wrote: post #135
gbasp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the technical limitations of the Nintendo Switch makes for more interesting games in general. Most of the games on my Xbox and PC tend to be FPS/Action games with very boring, brown and green "realistic" environments whereas games on my Switch tend to be bright and colorful with lots of 2D and pixel graphics and games in the vein of simulators, adventures, roguelikes etc.

Tangent: It's amazing that the popularity of XP to "level up" and HP to bring to zero has become. This was a new concept to me way back when Final Fantasy 3 (3 in the US, I think 6 in Japan) came out. It felt very niche and reserved for a specific type of game. Now those ideas are everywhere. What's a common new game trend since then? I can think of these: randomized microtransaction packs, online multiplayer PvP and…

The Battle Royale genre (Fortnite, PUBG, ect.) is the biggest new genre I can think of. The 100 player last-man-standing game mode probably wouldn't have been possible without the advancements in networking speed and infrastructure in the last 15ish years.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#138

Post by m4rtink »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #119
bri3d wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of determinism testing is a fairly common approach in games that implement shared-state multiplayer, and I think that's why it was implemented for Factorio as well. Otherwise you get drift between clients that breaks the game.

One alternative is to run everything on the server, but that introduces another set of problems.

IIRC that's what Satisfactory does and it causes all sorts of synchronization issues and glitches - non-hosting players not seeing buildings or stuff on belts or even glitching into/colliding with things that were not there a split second ago, as they loaded from the server too slowly.

That won't really happen in Factorio due to the shared state & makes possible insanely complex layouts that all players can see an interact with exactly the same. The downside usually is that eventually - just after you got that 20 GW nuclear power plant with trucked water & and steam going - the slowest player starts to have issues as his hardware no longer can keep with the complexity of the simulation.

Then you either start shedding players or call it a day and start again with a different objective or mod.

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#139

Post by foolfoolz »

when i’ve played games like RCT1 that can handle thousands of guests in the park, 1000s of placed items, each square customized, hundreds of rides simultaneously with real physics, it makes me wonder why factorio needs such intense system requirements for a mostly 2d production game

Re: The journey to Nintendo Switch

#140

Post by elihu »

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…

Part of it might just be that they have lower expectations for Switch in terms of the CPU being able to keep up with a large megabase. They expect players to be able to launch a rocket without any noticeable lag, but one-rocket-per-minute bases might be a bit much.

Also, they mentioned in the previous blog post that they've done some optimization to keep the framerate from bogging down, so maybe even the x86 requirements are lower these days (or will be when those optimizations show up in the public version, which might not have happened yet).

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