Live data from Hacker News

Factorio: Space Age

factorio.com

351–360 of 363 posts

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GregTech: New Horizons is also worth a look, if only for the detailed quests and absolutely insane progression required.

I did get through LV with a railcar wood farm and coke oven array before I called it in. I had a very diverse food gen and all sorts of farms. It was neat, but I have to say GCP with teleporting and chunk loading really scratches the itch without all the waiting around or microcrafting.

A lot of those "quested Minecraft modpacks" end up being amazingly fun if the quests match your play style.

If not, not so much. If you avoid going the "expected path" it can become a huge slog.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#352
post #291

Well it's a good thing they want to make it more approachable, because mods are terrifying, they're either not well designed or too complex to be fun. I've played about 1600 hours of vanilla factorio, and no mods really interests me. Also it's quite a shame multiplayer is not that much played. If there were some way to trade resources between player with some auction house, or to buy land, or maybe conquer alien terr…

I have to ask, sincerely -- how many hours does one put into a game that does have a good "end game"? As a game developer myself, when someone asks me what it's like to make games during a casual conversation, one of my favorite "go-to"s is to talk about reviews -- that it's so gratifying to see people who have paid Everyone's entitled to their opinion of a game (or anything else, for that matter), obviously. I do fe…

Well it turned into 1600 hours because I just tried to maximize the spaceship launch count to 1000 and beyond. I would still put a 10/10 score on factorio, but it still means it could be a better game, that's my only criticism, I want it to be even better. When a game is excellent it's obviously going to attract more criticism because it raises the bar on itself.

> I do feel that the collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though (for many totally valid reasons).

Yes, it's a saturated market and it's hard to find a game I can like. It's quantity and quality, there are a lot of indie games, too many of them, maybe, but that's how capitalism works. I would rather not play games I find not good enough, than the opposite. I have a hard time getting some satisfaction from a game, I don't know why.

I spend a lot of time trying to find new games to play, and sometimes I'm just immensely frustrated that I don't play anything, or just play some stupid game like untangle. I'd rather play some very cheap indie game like loop hero or micro town than playing call of duty online even if it's free and a AAA game.

I prefer playing a game that has a lot of replayability, than finish several other games that I can play once. There are a lot of "good enough" games, but there are VERY FEW excellent games that are so good you can play and replay them again and again.

Time spent replaying an excellent game is much better than playing other new good games. That's winner take all in the industry, at least that's how I view it. "A Delayed Game Is Eventually Good, But a Bad Game Is Bad Forever".

Sometimes I feel like I'm very very difficult to please, but I like it that way. I grew up with video game magazine that gave very hard review score.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what of the audiences that own no consoles but game on their phones? Non-mobile game sales are already a footnote by comparison. It should be little surprise that there are people who have not heard of factorio but have heard of mindustry simply due to what people are exposed to. https://www.statista.com/forecasts/455655/digital-game-reven...

Huh, wow. Though the issue with this statistic is that it is counting in dollars rather than units, and you know how disproportionately mobile games seem to rely on microtransactions, and isn't that income heavily weighted by whales ?

There is nothing that immunizes console and PC games from the rise of microtransactions. I would expect the relative effect to be similar. There are just many more phones than consoles.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, wow. Though the issue with this statistic is that it is counting in dollars rather than units, and you know how disproportionately mobile games seem to rely on microtransactions, and isn't that income heavily weighted by whales ?

There is nothing that immunizes console and PC games from the rise of microtransactions. I would expect the relative effect to be similar. There are just many more phones than consoles.

Maybe, maybe not, but it's just a fact that currently PC & console games are still much more upfront payment compared to mobile games.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect videogames to be the first to successfully solve the problem of statically checking code for correctness ;-) I'm astonished how stable so many mods are, given the environment they run in and the lack of almost any payment for the work. The Minecraft Java world at least starts with static types and memory safety. It'd be interesting to see if that results in a mod ecosystem that's more stable.

The Minecraft Java world starts with decompiling bytecode, replacing methods, and recompiling it. I struggle to think what could be further from either static types or memory safety - although at least that happens in the mod loader, and the mod code needn't be aware of how the sausage is made.

I don't think any of those steps significantly disrupt type checking or memory safety. It's hacky as all hell but it's still constrained by the JVM and bytecode validity.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio Each section has an author, and only the Space Exploration section is written by the mod author. Most of the post is written by kovarex, who is the founder of Factorio, afaik.

Is the Factorio source code available anywhere? I would be really curious to see how a game like Factorio was developed (e.g., what parts are 'the engine' and what parts are scripted? how does such a complex game have so few bugs?)

As said, Factorio's core is compiled binary, with a lot of customizable Lua on top.

Fun story:

Somebody independently recreated the core engine themselves to prove a point about multi-threading. Imagine recreating an entire game engine in 50,000 lines of C++ to prove a point, yeah, it happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/jizq1b/comment/ga... What a legend!

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#358
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stay away if you value your time. It's not a joke when they call it cracktorio. Especially on the Deck...

Tangent but if you 'value' your time but don't use the time to entertain yourself I'm not sure you're using it right.

Well, yes, but it can get out of hand.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source is not publicly available, no. It‘s still being actively developed and sold after all. There isn‘t really much of a barrier between engine and 'scripting', it‘s all custom and integrated. The reason there are so few bugs is that there is a ton of effort spent on squashing them! The approach is basically to fix any reported issue if in any way reasonable.

> The source is not publicly available, no. It‘s still being actively developed and sold after all. Those two are definitely not incompatible. Take Karia[0] for example, which is fully Free Software[1]. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261430/Kandria/ [1] https://github.com/Shirakumo/kandria/blob/master/LICENSE

Factorio is arguably way, way more popular than Kandria, however.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The source is not publicly available, no. It‘s still being actively developed and sold after all. Those two are definitely not incompatible. Take Karia[0] for example, which is fully Free Software[1]. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261430/Kandria/ [1] https://github.com/Shirakumo/kandria/blob/master/LICENSE

Factorio is arguably way, way more popular than Kandria, however.

It is now, are you suggesting it wouldn't have been as popular if it had been open sourced (more) ?
Post reply on HN