Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#51

Post by remexre » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #40

RangerScience wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two kinds of programmers, Those who look at Factorio and go: "That's my day job! Why would I do it for fun?" and those who look at Factorio and go: "That's my day job! You mean I can do it for fun?!"

Having a PM to help me stay focused would not be a bad thing when I play Factorio. However, that would probably come bundled with having a PM constantly ask me to half-ass (I mean MVP) three different new projects in the factory in the time it would normally take me to full-ass one project.

Three halves > 1 full, sounds like a win to me! /s

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#52

Post by unspecified » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

alexwebb2 wrote: post #2

Quick links to the five "must read" posts that William highlighted: > FFF #243 - New GUI tileset: Showing off their GUI design document. A MUST READ, if only for a good example of a comprehensive design style that fits the game theme perfectly. ( https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-243 ) > FFF #176 - Belts optimization for 0.15 : Incredible analysis of transport belts and optimizing their performance. A MUST READ. ( h…

> FFF #176 - Belts optimization

The last bit of this post mentions UDP packets not making it through ISPs if their checksum is 0x0000 or 0xFFFF...what is THAT all about? This would have been in February of 2017.

> If you remember from the previous FFF, our map downloader was having some extremely rare problems with some mysterious packets that would always get filtered over the Internet. We already had a fix for it, but I was curious what was going on. Thanks to the investigative power of the Factorio community, we found out that all those mysterious packets, before NAT, had a checksum of 0xFFFF. Admalledd from the forum sent some hand-crafted packets through his Internet connection and surprise, all packets would go through, except those with a checksum of 0xFFFF or 0x0000. At this point I would just assume this ISP(and some other few ISPs around the world) have some faulty hardware or software that do not handle these special cases of UDP checksums.

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#53

Post by ghostbrainalpha » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

daolf wrote: post #3

I've been a huge fan of Factorio since 2014. A huge fan of the game, the team, and the entrepreneurial adventure. Their willingness to share insights, every weeks, for 7 years is quite rare in the industry. It was also awesome to read the thought process behind each design decision alongside some nerdy story about C++ optimization. Factorio team, if you're ready this, thank you!

Any tips on where I could go to read more about the entrepreneurial adventure?

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#54

Post by J5892 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 6:52 PM UTC

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #41

stevenpetryk wrote: post #36

This reminds me of a cool article I read about how Kerbal Space Program 2 renders orbits. I love reading things like this: https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/dev-diaries/6509/

Those disclaimers at the beginning of the article are so out of touch

I... what?

How?

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#55

Post by zamadatix » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:08 PM UTC

unspecified wrote: post #52

alexwebb2 wrote: post #2

Quick links to the five "must read" posts that William highlighted: > FFF #243 - New GUI tileset: Showing off their GUI design document. A MUST READ, if only for a good example of a comprehensive design style that fits the game theme perfectly. ( https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-243 ) > FFF #176 - Belts optimization for 0.15 : Incredible analysis of transport belts and optimizing their performance. A MUST READ. ( h…

> FFF #176 - Belts optimization The last bit of this post mentions UDP packets not making it through ISPs if their checksum is 0x0000 or 0xFFFF...what is THAT all about? This would have been in February of 2017. > If you remember from the previous FFF, our map downloader was having some extremely rare problems with some mysterious packets that would always get filtered over the Internet. We already had a fix for it,…

If the checksum comes out as all 0's you're supposed to make it all 1's (0 in a UDP checksum means no checksum) so really it's related to that singular value and, if you've ever seen the quality of some of the dirt cheap hardware with ancient firmware some carriers use, it's really not that surprising for it to be bugged as described as they really don't care about dropping the occasional UDP packet when it's probably dropping more than that of general traffic due to how cheap and overrun it is anyways.

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#56

Post by zentiggr » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

kortex wrote: post #50

FredPret wrote: post #30

My biggest Factorio lesson was this: I no longer start a new factory from scratch if I want to do things differently. I use my existing - and now outdated - factory to launch a new one a few minutes run away.

Throw the first one away. Especially when starting a run, plan on throwing away the starter base. I learned this trick watching AntiElitz speedruns. He'll build a manual bootstrap "factory" (really just mines and smelting) to get plates, then build a very-polished-through-iteration bootstrap base which builds all the development essentials - circuits, arms, belts, ammo, etc. That's used to build the real base.

That sounds a lot like the old Gentoo stage 1 / 2 / 3 build system...

Makes me a little more interested, in general.

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#57

Post by bregma » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #22

nindalf wrote: post #6

For those wondering why this game about factory management keeps showing up on the front page of HN, it’s because the gameplay reminds its fans of software engineering in subtle ways. People who are good at one are likely to be good at the other. More about this here - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-enginee...

There are two kinds of programmers, Those who look at Factorio and go: "That's my day job! Why would I do it for fun?" and those who look at Factorio and go: "That's my day job! You mean I can do it for fun?!"

You missed those who say "I do this for fun, just like my day job!!!1!"

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#58

Post by bregma » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #25

TOGoS wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted, but never got around to, creating a mod that accepts some kind of data outside the game (lines of text, JSON objects, packets from the TUN driver, whatever), wraps them up as Factorio objects, and plops them onto a belt, and another that reads them and sends them back out. The idea being that this could be (A) a cool hack (belt speed factoring into ping time, lmao), but (B) a way to visualize data flow in c…

Hell, why not turn Factorio into a programming language? If you can translate a real-world problem to in-game problems, it'd be so much fun to solve them that you'd probably launch a new epoch in human history - the Factorio Age

And then Mazer Rackham reveals the truth about every Factorio game played since the official 1.0 release.

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#59

Post by TOGoS » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

drewmate wrote: post #19

TOGoS wrote: post #14

The Friday Facts were fantastic. I don't know of any other non-open-source project (but counterexamples are of course welcome) that encourages the developers to put that much technical information about what they're up to out on the website. I especially loved the ones about belt optimizations, multi-threading, and the networking model, since those are all interesting problems that any game developer is likely to thi…

Thanks for writing (the code and the blogs!) What are you up to these days?

These days I'm at a 'regular job' that is far less interesting, but pays a lot better, which I was especially glad about when the furnace needed replacing. So it goes, sometimes. I mostly blame the US healthcare^W extortion system.

Re: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

#60

Post by and0 » Wed, Jun 09, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

To anyone who loves Factorio as much as I do, I strongly recommend the new game Dyson Sphere Program. I never truly beat Factorio the way I did DSP, so I can't compare them completely, but DSP takes the concept to a 3D planetary scale and is in many ways much friendlier.

Also no combat/bugs, at least not yet. The dev team is Chinese and are releasing amazing quality-of-life updates at a rapid clip, too. Truly impressive piece of software.