[HN Gopher] Factorio 1.1 stable
___________________________________________________________________
Factorio 1.1 stable
Author : OrderlyTiamat
Score : 423 points
Date : 2021-01-29 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (factorio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (factorio.com)
| sdfjkl wrote:
| Factorio is such a high quality game. Not just the gameplay, but
| the entire development process where every alpha release is
| actually really stable and playable, certainly more stable and
| playable than most big-budget games are on release day.
| fastball wrote:
| Kinda dumb though. Isn't the point of an "alpha" to release
| something _before_ it is stable? Otherwise it 's just called a
| release. You can have a rapid release schedule and still
| release stable software.
| simonbw wrote:
| While having people find bugs might be one reason for an
| alpha release, it's not the only reason, or even necessarily
| the _main_ reason. You might also want to see if people like
| a new feature, if the feature is well balanced, if it
| interacts with other systems well, etc. This is all useful
| information to gather before releasing a polished version to
| the general public.
|
| If your alpha release is full of bugs, the type of feedback
| you'll be getting from users of the alpha is "this thing
| doesn't work" rather than "this thing is too easy/hard".
| gcoguiec wrote:
| Their codebase is also covered by unit tests [0] and
| integration tests [1].
|
| [0]: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-60
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/LXnyTZBmfXM
| mrlala wrote:
| If there's one game that should have an infinite number of
| tests, it's this one.
| rozab wrote:
| What always strikes me when I read Factorio blog posts is how
| they really approach game development like engineering
| (moreso than most software engineers). I'm very pessimistic
| about software, and it does give me a lot of hope.
| linkdd wrote:
| I don't think both kind of games are on the same complexity
| level.
|
| The gameplay is simple (aka: it requires few kind of user
| interactions), and the physic engine (source of most bugs in
| big budget open-world games) is far far far simpler as well.
| m463 wrote:
| I think AAA games gain complexity from grafting many
| technologies together. Yes a 3D engine and GPU stuff adds
| complexity that factorio sidesteps. And also, to many folks
| here they _see_ the complexity of factorio because they are
| exposed to it, while AAA games hide the game mechanics from
| the user.
|
| However Factorio seems to have done everything from scratch.
| the game engine, the UI, etc.
|
| And don't forget the (non-technical) complexity of developing
| out in the open with their blog and alpha testers.
| Vvector wrote:
| But complexity =/= fun. Factorio shows that "simple gameplay"
| can lead to massive fun.
|
| IMO, the AAA titles would be better if less time was spent on
| a bleeding edge physics system, and more time spent on other
| aspects.
| Qwertious wrote:
| "Simple" is a great source of endless discussion, because
| it has so many meanings that nobody can agree on what's
| simple.
| nip180 wrote:
| Physics engines and graphics engines take a lot of
| resources. Games that invest enough resources to develop
| their own highly detailed physics/graphics engines are
| almost by definition AAA. So what you're suggesting is that
| AAA games should spend less time/money on the thing that
| makes them a AAA game.
|
| It's okay that AAA games exist, because there is still room
| in the market for games like Factorio, which has
| experienced a long and successful life.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| There's a place for both I think. We've seen a lot of lo-fi
| successes as of late, but inevitably some of the reliably
| biggest selling games are the annual big budget updated
| graphics FPS and sports titles. I don't know if FIFA 2K22
| would have as much draw if they sold it as a sprite-based
| title.
| munificent wrote:
| _> IMO, the AAA titles would be better if less time was
| spent on a bleeding edge physics system, and more time
| spent on other aspects._
|
| They would be better games but wouldn't sell as well. Video
| game sales are driven _heavily_ by screenshots, trailers,
| and "Let's Play" videos. Graphics and physics look good in
| those media, actual personal fun experiences less so.
|
| There's probably some higher level business principle here
| that products end up designed to optimize for the property
| that most heavily constrains sales instead of the
| properties that maximize customer satisfaction.
|
| See also: Hollywood movies, book covers, synthesizer
| presets, house flippers, car interior widgets, etc.
| xfer wrote:
| You vastly underestimate efficient implementation of
| simulating and rendering so many entities at the same time. A
| lot of big name games crawl if there are 50 units doing their
| thing.
| newswasboring wrote:
| It is also being worked upon by only 17 people as opposed to
| the 500+ dev teams for AAA games.
| slightwinder wrote:
| AAA Games usually have a different realm of complexity and
| quality than factorio. Factorio is one-trick-game, in the
| sense that there is one thing it's doing really really
| good, while AAA games are doing many different things at
| the same time and sell you the whole package.
|
| For example, graphic of factorio is very basic. Level-
| design is not really existing, nor is there any story,
| music, highly optimized cutscenes, a quest-system or a
| constantly balanced battle-system. Multiplayer is rather
| basic, not some high level infrastructure with dozens of
| servers for 100k+ players. There is also no big marketing
| where you deliver some stuff outside the game. And Factorio
| is running only on PC, not consoles or mobiles.
|
| Basically, Factorio is 95% high level code which makes it
| successful because people enjoy the gameplay coming from
| this code; while AAA games are successful because of the
| 95% of things which are not code. People enjoy the
| gameplay, but even more do they like what is on top and
| around the engine. The story, the interaction, the
| atmosphere...
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| This comparison is somewhat misleading though.
|
| AAA games like Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) only have
| 50-60 developers.
|
| But then they'll have another 50-60 designers. 15 audio
| people. 40 animators. 90 artists.
|
| Most of that large team size is caused by the realistic
| graphics, which Factorio (and most other indie games)
| simply don't have.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Well the factorio team is also only 4 developers, 1 tech
| lead, 1 art lead and 1 3D modeler for some reason. You
| still think its misleading comparison?[1]
|
| [1]https://factorio.com/game/about
| Macha wrote:
| The factorio graphics are designed in 3d and pre-rendered
| to 2d for use in the game
| momothereal wrote:
| Here's more info on their GFX pipeline, where Blender is
| used to create the 3D models then pre-rendered for the
| game: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-146 (2016)
| jl6 wrote:
| I believe code quality to be closely related to the quality
| of communication between developers, and it's a lot easier
| to achieve high quality communication in a smaller team.
| fastball wrote:
| Right but that's not OC's point.
|
| How long do you think it would take a 4-person dev team
| to build something the scope of Cyberpunk 2077?
| linkdd wrote:
| I'm not sure to understand your point.
|
| More devs does not mean less bugs, it does not mean faster
| development, in fact, it does not mean anything.
|
| An AAA game may need 500+ games, because that's what the
| technological constraint requires in terms of brain matter.
|
| If big studio could launch an AAA game with only 10 devs,
| they would do it.
| mpalmer wrote:
| > If big studio could launch an AAA game with only 10
| devs, they would do it.
|
| They could, if they gave themselves 8 years. Factorio has
| been in development since 2012.
|
| AAA games ship on a deadline; naturally the work is
| divided as much as possible among many teams. More devs
| can in fact mean faster development if you're OK
| compromising on quality.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Yes they don't do it with 10 devs because the complexity
| is high. You don't think you need a larger team to handle
| complexity? Or you think the 500+ team normalized to
| complexity actually tell that AAA are understaffed.
| linkdd wrote:
| I do think you need more dev to handle more complexity.
|
| But more dev to have less bugs, or to develop faster is
| like saying that with 9 pregnant women, you can deliver a
| baby in 1 month.
| newswasboring wrote:
| So you are saying in a large complex project there are no
| impact on bugs by number of devs? I'm not saying there is
| a linear relationship but it's naive to say that having a
| large team does not help you handle bugs.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I imagine at one of these 500+ companies the majority of
| those are in the art department.
|
| I'm thinking about say DICE. DICE has made essentially
| the same game (battlefield/battlefront) about 10 times.
| The 3d engine does get upgraded game to game, but clearly
| the majority of the delta between games is simply the
| art.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| > The gameplay is simple
|
| No. Very no. It isn't a graphical game, but that means
| nothing to complexity. The number of objects and behaviors
| that the game engine must track, and track perfectly every
| clock tick, blows away most graphics engines. There is no
| room for the trickery that graphics/physics engines use to
| determine which objects need to be tracked. Factorio must
| track everything always, whether it is on screen or not. Each
| of those objects is also interactable. The character builds
| and maintains bespoke systems layered atop each other ad
| infinitum. The network of possible behaviors may be more akin
| to a giant excel document than a minecraft world, but that
| doesn't make it any less complex.
|
| See also Prison Architect. Cartoonish 2d graphics,
| reminiscent of SouthPark imho, but nevertheless a very
| complex game. Even after a thousand hours with it, Prison
| Architect's AI still surprises me every time I play.
| linkdd wrote:
| And yet, the gameplay is just:
|
| - move your character - mine stuff - craft buildings -
| place buildings
|
| And a small bit of combat for the aliens.
|
| I insist, the gameplay IS simple, the content allows for
| very complex designs.
|
| Similar to programming languages, Assembly IS simple.
| setr wrote:
| The UI is fairly simple, the engine is fairly complex,
| with a lot of interactions between different parts.
|
| I don't think most games struggle because their UI is
| complex, or because user behavior is complex (there's
| really only so many things a player can do, especially
| general ones -- most variety of interactions are
| "scenes", entirely captured within themselves). At least,
| most AAA bugginess isn't usually found in their UI. And
| graphics aren't the complexity generally -- they're just
| visual artifacts of the engine itself failing.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> The UI is fairly simple
|
| It isn't. There is significant depth to menus and
| displays. The way that players can interact with
| information is very complex, more complex than something
| as simple as FPS or flight simulator. If we wanted to get
| very simplistic, Factrio has a much wider variety of
| button presses than most every FPS.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I recommend you read the update notes. In particular the
| multi-threading solution to belt management is an
| interesting programming problem that many games just get
| wrong.
|
| As to your assertion about the game play of Factorio, it
| is not mine, craft, and place like in a normal RTS. In
| order to succeed at the game you must _design_ which is a
| far cry from base building in StarCraft II, for example.
| Blueprints are indicative of this design requirement.
|
| There are games where you design ships and save templates
| for them. But playing Factorio all the way through is a
| much more complicated experience than movement and
| crafting. Unless your assertion is that complexity of
| gameplay is measured by input mechanics, which I think is
| demonstrably incorrect.
| fastball wrote:
| Linkdd's point is about the complexity required from the
| developer, not the complexity required from the user.
| They are two different things.
|
| That is of course not to say that the developer is
| _worse_ for it, far from it: a developer that can create
| a complex game based on simple rules is a better
| developer imo. But that doesn 't mean the rules (and
| therefore programming them) aren't simple.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| That would be game mechanics (the software) instead of
| gameplay (how a user plays the game).
|
| Still, the scale of the mechanics leads to more
| complexity than your average crafting game. If your
| interpretation of what linkdd wrote is correct, his point
| is directly controverted when considering that threading
| discussion in the article. If you know the history of
| Factorio, then you also know there are many underlying,
| interlinked systems like that in the simulation that are
| complex. The software must handle _all_ the ways in which
| those subsystems could possible interact.
|
| The comparison to Dwarf Fortress is apt. Another
| similarly complex game that comes to mind is Distant
| Worlds: Universe, a 4X game that, with all the managers
| turned on, plays itself.
| maxZZzzz wrote:
| The network model is lockstep. Which means everything
| that changes gamestate needs to be deterministic.
|
| Keeping that alone bug free is quite the achievement.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> move your character - mine stuff - craft buildings -
| place buildings
|
| Have you played the game? That is, maybe, the first hour
| of a game that lasts many many dozens even hundreds of
| hours. Mining only happens in the first five or ten
| _minutes_. There are a host of other interactions, from
| tweaking object settings, optimizing pathing layouts,
| planning, direction of bots, to deployment of the
| factorio equivalent of Redstone circuitry.
|
| And mods. As with KSP or minecraft, a greater number of
| possible interactions comes from the modding community
| rather than the stock game.
| headcanon wrote:
| linkdd is saying that complexity comes from emergent
| behavior based on simple foundational building blocks,
| like a programming language
| tehbeard wrote:
| That's a very charitable reading of what they wrote.
|
| craft/place buildings implies a very discrete action and
| does not encapsulate the sum of the parts, the
| interaction between all these systems.
| fastball wrote:
| A parent comment mentioned Redstone, of Minecraft fame.
| Redstone, as a thing that the developer created, is not
| on its own very complex. But the things that user can
| _make_ with Redstone are insanely complex. That is not
| true for most gameplay in games, but it is true for
| Redstone in MC and Factorio in general. That 's not to
| belittle those things, they're both great. But if you
| compare the dev time required to make Redstone in MC vs
| the dev time to make other stuff, other stuff frequently
| wins. Hell, I bet just making skeletons took more time
| than making Redstone. But obviously that doesn't mean
| Skeletons allow for more interesting gaming than
| Redstone.
|
| "Simple gameplay" does not mean that the experience of
| playing the game is simple. Chess has very simple
| gameplay (basically just: learning how 6 different piece
| types move, pieces capture each other, and protect the
| King) but the emergent complexity from those simple rules
| is truly impressive.
|
| Compare this to say Monopoly, which has a lot more rules
| than chess, but is mind-numbingly _not_ complex in terms
| of strategy and the overall play experience.
|
| That is what linkdd is trying to say.
| indeedmug wrote:
| Even if what linkdd say on face value, every single piece
| of software is "emergent" from programming and from his
| logic is very simple. Clearly this is not true.
|
| Simple building blocks don't mean simple programs.
| Heavily interacting components leads to complexity and
| significant bugs. That's just software engineering 101.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I don't think the person you responded too meant to say
| that the game lacks complexity as a player, or even that
| its simple to program, just that it is difficult for the
| player to force a failed state because the player has a
| smaller range of actions than in a more typical AAA game.
| Obviously the coding behind the game is _brilliant_ , but
| in terms of player facing bugs its just much easier to
| test.
| fragmede wrote:
| Limitations on the physical actions the player can take
| is relatively limited - players can't even jump, very
| much limits bugs that come from player movement and the
| physics engine. But the gameplay has some _very_ complex
| mechanics. Mechanics where lesser programmers would have
| ended up with a far buggers and less fun version. Imo it
| 's easy to imagine weird bugs that manifest as flakiness
| slipping into the code that back railroad signals and
| repeaters, and intersecting tracks.
| SignalNotSecure wrote:
| It is obvious that you never used the logistic systems and
| built anything interesting using circuit networks
| Retric wrote:
| Complexity isn't simply the number of lines of code. Where
| individual shaders are adding linear complexity subtle
| interactions between different parts of a simulation can
| easily end reaching full factorial complexity.
|
| As such AAA games favor independent systems which add as
| close to linear complexity as they can achieve. 3D models are
| a great example where extreme detail is largely irrelevant to
| every other part of the game.
|
| That said, depending on what you're measuring AAA games end
| up having wildly different levels of complexity.
| serhatozgel wrote:
| I believe you are mistaken, Factorio is an incredibly complex
| game.
| linkdd wrote:
| Do you really think a 2D physic engine is comparable to a
| 3D physic engine in terms of complexity?
|
| Yes Factorio is complex. No it's not more complex than a
| Witcher/Skyrim/Cyberpunk/whatever big budget game you can
| think of.
|
| When i say complex, I talk about code, architecture,
| gameplay mechanics. Not play time...
| munificent wrote:
| Yes, I think Factorio's engine is more complex and
| difficult to implement well than a typical AAA game with
| rich graphics and "realistic" physics.
|
| In Factorio, you have a very large number of active
| objects with very dense, complex, time-critical and
| deterministic interactions. In most other games, you have
| relatively few active entities. The game gives you the
| _illusion_ of a rich living world, but a lot of the
| graphical bits floating around can 't actually be
| interacted with. The physics system is a complex bit of
| math but is fairly isolated from the rest of the engine
| and has relatively few entities to process. If it gets
| things "wrong" in minor ways, the player is unlikely to
| tell.
|
| Also, many AAA game physics and graphics engines work the
| same enough that engines can even be reused. There's a
| relatively small amount of bespoke system design. It's
| just following the same well-tread paths. Factorio's
| gameplay has enough novelty that the engine has to solve
| challenging somewhat unique problems.
|
| _Source: Senior software engineer at EA for eight years
| and wrote a best-selling book on software architecture
| for games._
| maccard wrote:
| > Yes, I think Factorio's engine is more complex and
| difficult to implement well than a typical AAA game with
| rich graphics and "realistic" physics.
|
| I think this is maybe true, but it's not a fair
| comparison. The real comparison is how much effort would
| go into making factorio with all of its polish in a 3d
| world rather than a 2d world.
|
| Factorio's technical impressiveness (?) Comes from how
| well it's designed and implemented. The limitations that
| it imposes are part of the reason it runs so well, and
| also what make it such a great game.
|
| > The physics system is a complex bit of math but is
| fairly isolated from the rest of the engine and has
| relatively few entities to process. If it gets things
| "wrong" in minor ways, the player is unlikely to tell.
|
| The difference between doing the above for physics and
| graphics is orders of magnitude in how expensive they
| are, and how complicated they are to implement. You're
| right that most people don't notice when they go slightly
| wrong, but they often go catastrophicly wrong. (Much more
| often in 3d than in 2d). Factorio skirts around this by
| not running a general purpose physics sim for the game
| logic, and constraining the problem space (which to me is
| even more impressive than getting a 3d physics engine
| right)
| LaGrange wrote:
| > Yes Factorio is complex. No it's not more complex than
| a Witcher/Skyrim/Cyberpunk/whatever big budget game you
| can think of.
|
| Than Skyrim, easily. Crowd mechanics in Witcher/Cyberpunk
| give me a pause, but still probably more complex than
| those.
|
| Popular "simulation" games like Factorio, Rimworld, Dwarf
| Fortress and Kerbal Space Program are deceptively heavy.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Most games at that scale begin to simplify individual
| objects into statistical averages. Factorio can't do
| that, so every single object is tracked meticulously on
| one thread. Even down to the position of the arms on each
| loader, since where they are in their cycle affects the
| game overall.
| js8 wrote:
| I have to agree with the OP, Factorio code is actually
| pretty complex. Lots of it comes from polish and creating
| the seamless player experience. It might not be as
| technically complex as 3D engine, but no AAA developer
| would care about optimizing the fluid or belt system to
| behave in a scalable way. It's really well thought out.
|
| (Also, there is a saying that it takes a genius to do
| something in a simple way. So even if the resulting code
| might be simple, arriving to that point can be actually
| pretty complex endeavor.)
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I think it's probably as technically complex as a 3d game
| engine. Just differently complex.
| maccard wrote:
| I really really don't think so. In my experience, 3d
| games are orders of magnitude more complicated than 2d
| games.
| username90 wrote:
| Most 3d action games have extremely few gameplay
| programmers, they just pick an off the shelf engine and
| then most of the technical work is optimizing the
| graphics pipeline.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| The only thing physical about Factorio are vehicles and
| particle effects. That's not where the difficulty comes
| from. It's more about optimisation: their entity system
| minimises memory use (and caches misses), many things are
| special cased for speed...
|
| Think about the sheer scale of a 10 rocket per minute
| megabase. The amount of inserters, robots, belts,
| factories, the pollution involved, the number of biters
| attacking the base constantly... The number of entities
| on such a base is _enormous_ , yet they still manage to
| compute it all in real time at 60 ticks per seconds. That
| feat of engineering is just as impressive as a 3D physics
| engine -- perhaps even a 3D _rendering_ engine.
|
| _(Of course, a AAA game is more than just a physics
| /rendering engine.)_
| scotty79 wrote:
| Play Factorio in multiplayer on a megabase map. And
| imagine how much insight you need to keep so many such
| complex game mechanics to be kept in sync and performant
| for even hundreds of players on same map.
|
| Compare this to average bug ridden AAA game that has half
| of game mechanics falling apart in visible ways in single
| player spawning and despawning stuff randomly in failed
| hopes of keeping an illusion that the systems are sort of
| working!
|
| A lot of triple A studios are havening trouble of
| implementing inventory game mechanics without introducing
| few item duplication glitches. Guys who are building
| Factorio are on another level they really made
| implementing game mechanics their core priority. For
| triple As their core priority is how to budget for making
| tons of assets and cramming them into the game.
| rkangel wrote:
| Specifically, think of one particular optimisation that
| most 3D games can make that Factorio can't: don't process
| stuff you can't see. Factorio is of course continually
| running the entire factory, regardless of which bit of it
| you are looking. I am amazed it is as reliably performant
| as it is.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > don't process stuff you can't see.
|
| There are absolutely optimizations that can be made to
| process items that aren't visible on the screen.
| Everything is deterministic, cyclical and can be
| represented as a graph. Given the initial number of
| resource at a node in the graph, and a time duration, you
| can calculate exactly where each resource will be at any
| time.
| leetcrew wrote:
| what kinds of optimizations are you thinking of? I don't
| think the engine can do stuff like defer simulating
| offscreen events to process them in a batch several ticks
| later. anything happening anywhere on the explored map
| could potentially affect things in the player's view.
| several systems (eg, trains, electricity) need to respond
| immediately to changes in the global state.
| gradys wrote:
| That optimization makes the 3D games more complex, not
| less. What Factorio does is impressive and surely comes
| with its own challenges, but it isn't necessarily more
| complex.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Haven't played much factorio but I imagine that
| simulating the factory is more akin to a game of life,
| wireworld or a graph signal processing. I.e.: in one tick
| you process all inputs of each entity, and put them to
| outputs, maybe having a queue on each. This will always
| scale linearly, and you can also parallelise this quite
| comfortably.
|
| In comparison collision detection and AI need to rely on
| a lot of trickery (and thus bugs) because naive
| approaches explode in complexity.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Yes, it's as simple as moving tick by tick. But there is
| a _lot_ of stuff. Like everything else, conceptually
| simple things become difficult at scale.
| falcolas wrote:
| Factorio has collision detection and AI as well. Biters.
| They have to do pathing, collision; all of the usual
| stuff AI enemies have to do.
|
| Plus, each item on a conveyor belt has collision as well
| - they can tell when they run up against each other and
| will stop. Inserters can't put items on a full belt, but
| if there's a space they will sneak the item in (moving
| items around it if necessary).
| maccard wrote:
| Have you written any collision deta code? The difference
| between collision detection between two boxes in 2d , and
| two convex hulls in 3d is many orders of magnitude.
|
| Compare [0] to [1]. Being 2D makes factorio many many
| times simpler than an equivalent 3d game.
|
| None of that has any bearing on the quality of the
| game,it's an excellent game, and a great technical
| product to boot.
|
| [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Games/Techniques/2D...
|
| [1] https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0003
| maxfurman wrote:
| Most 3D games don't _render_ objects that you can't see.
| They still must simulate their actions each tick so that
| they will be in the right place when you can see them.
| rkangel wrote:
| They might if they're just off camera. They don't if
| they're in the next town.
| BorisTheBrave wrote:
| I think it _is_ more complex in most dimensions, except
| for render pipeline and asset size. Physics engines are
| off the shelf, even in AAA games, they 're not really
| where the bulk of time is spent coding. Not to mention
| all the games you described have fixed maps and no
| multiplayer.
|
| Really, most of the budget of AAA is spent on art and
| level design. They have sophisticated tech, but often it
| is not on an unreachable level.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| You're talking about the user perpective, while GP is
| talking about the programmer perspective.
| est31 wrote:
| Yeah a point & shoot game where you can choose your own
| clothing with various 3D rendering goodies that works at
| good enough FPS is way more complex implementation wise
| than a factorio clone with its 2D graphics. For gameplay,
| it's the other way round.
|
| There is a good xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/1425/
| dkersten wrote:
| Yeah, Factorio's complexity isn't in the graphics, it's
| in the simulation.
| bombcar wrote:
| Factorio is a lot like Dwarf Fortress - the graphics are
| a very small part of the gameplay.
|
| Interacting with the simulation is the majority of the
| gameplay - and the majority of the simulation is spent on
| that.
|
| The thing that is interesting about Factorio is it is
| entirely deterministic (similar to old games that could
| "record demos" such as Doom or the original Starcraft) -
| this simplifies some things and complicates others.
| fastball wrote:
| Right, but the simulation isn't as complex as simulating
| rain in a 3D game or whatever.
|
| Nobody is arguing that Factorio doesn't have complexity.
| But do you really think a one-man team could create
| Cyberpunk 2077?
|
| A one-man team built Minecraft which includes Redstone,
| which allows for some amazing complexity. But that
| doesn't make it more complex (dev time wise) than an AAA
| FPS.
| josephg wrote:
| > Right, but the simulation isn't as complex as
| simulating rain in a 3D game or whatever
|
| I think a naive implementation of factorio would be
| reasonably straightforward. But that implementation would
| have no chance to scale to the size of bases factorio
| manages. The complexity of factorio's implementation
| comes from its simulation's optimizations, particularly
| in the face of its hard determinism requirement.
| (Something most physics engines and rain shaders never
| need to think about.)
|
| Making a good rain shader takes expertise but probably
| not a lot of time when you know what you're doing (months
| not years). Making a game like factorio probably doesn't
| take more specialised expertise than many devs here have,
| but even with all the requisite knowledge it would still
| take me years to implement something as feature rich,
| correct and performant as factorio's simulator.
| slightwinder wrote:
| The gameplay is complex, but that does not mean the
| software must be complex. Take for example the ancient game
| of Go. It's a bunch of very simple rules with some stones,
| yet it's a highly complex game that could not be beaten
| with traditional software-solutions.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| The factorio development blog is one of the best development
| blogs out there
| Phillips126 wrote:
| Unrelated to the article, but I found clicking the rocket at the
| bottom of the webpage an amusing (and fitting) way to handle the
| typical "scroll to top" feature. Kudos!
|
| Also - Awesome game!
| kzrdude wrote:
| Their multithreading story here was fascinating. Gratifying that
| they have such a visual explanation.
| willis936 wrote:
| They keep the discussion very high level. The topic is much
| deeper, but they appear to be constraining themselves to a
| single-timestep-state. If they loosened up the state to include
| two timesteps then a _lot_ more could be parallelized. Since
| the simulation and graphics are in lockstep, this would add one
| frame of latency. One frame of latency is hardly noticeable
| against the 7-10 frames minimum added in multiplayer but the
| payoff could be massive. It's hard work, without a doubt. An
| example I like to point to is the minecraft mod
| "tickthreading". It was never stable, but the concept is there
| and sound.
| Netcob wrote:
| I've always wondered, how exactly games do this. Do you have
| at least one "write" state and one "read" state, so that the
| simulation can write during its update and the renderer can
| read the previous state independently? I think copying the
| write state to the read state would probably take some time
| in a Factorio "gigafactory", while the renderer only has to
| access a tiny part of the state most of the time.
| Chabsff wrote:
| It's hard to tell for sure. Double-buffering game updates
| like that can involve a lot of memory copying. Considering
| that it would not surprise me in the least if Factorio was
| close to being bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, this could
| easily be counterproductive.
| willis936 wrote:
| Factorio is sensitive to memory latency, not memory
| throughout. This matches expectation of a single threaded
| application with many data dependencies. Ripe for
| multithreading where data independencies can be made.
| JesseMeyer wrote:
| The game Destiny went this route to increase GPU throughput
| by 50%. An extra frame of latency, the dev's said, was hardly
| discernible on a controller.
| wesleytodd wrote:
| I bought the game late last year and have almost 700 hours
| already. This is a great game and the 1.1 update is awesome.
| Logistics, move queue, and follow for Spidertrons are game
| changing.
| kgm wrote:
| I taught myself linear programming because of Factorio. It is
| easily the single game in which I have spent the most time,
| probably close to 4,000 hours. It is delightful to see that the
| team is continuing to improve it, even after the 1.0 release.
| nindalf wrote:
| > some media picked up on it and presented it as a "fairly bugged
| release".
|
| This is so unfortunate. I've never used any software, game or
| otherwise that has been as bug free as Factorio. I guess it must
| have been "journalists" who didn't want to put in any time
| playing the game.
|
| Congrats to them on reaching 0 bugs and 0 open issues - I can
| only dream of achieving that one day!
|
| For people wondering why they see Factorio updates on HN when no
| other game makes it, I wrote about what makes this game appeal so
| much to HN users - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-
| software-enginee...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > "journalists"
|
| In my experience, gaming journalists are often neither gamers
| nor journalists.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Like science journalists, political journalists, or really
| any journalists.
|
| Are their any industries with quality journalists that have
| legitimate industry knowledge?
| krastanov wrote:
| I am a scientist and I am pretty happy by most journalists
| I have interacted with and most science articles for non-
| scientists I have seen. Like all media, just stick to
| reputable outlets.
| filoleg wrote:
| They are gems in the rough, but they do exist.
|
| One that instantly comes to my mind is Matt Levine from
| Bloomberg, who writes on finance. People on HN seem to be
| holding him in high regard as well, whenever his name comes
| up.
|
| I wouldn't say it is due to the industry of his choice
| commonly having quality journalists that have legitimate
| knowledge of the industry, though. Finance journalism is
| very densely packed with typical trash journos, just like
| other industries.
|
| I have an armchair theory that higher barriers to entry in
| the industry (in terms of the pre-existing knowledge that
| target readers have) increases the likelihood of a quality
| journalist like Matt Levine appearing. Gaming journalism
| requires almost no prerequisite knowledge from readers
| aside from playing games, so the average quality of "game
| journalism" is abysmal, and people who read those articles
| are usually just all kinds of people. Same thing with "pop
| science", because everyone wants to jump on the next
| clickbait about some miracle drug or other futuristic
| sounding stuff. With finance journalism, most average
| people on the street have zero interest in reading those
| articles, so the audience self-selects mostly towards those
| who already have the pre-requisite knowledge and
| understanding of the subject matter, so the demand in terms
| of quality of the journalism from the target audience is
| higher on average. Which would increase the probability of
| someone like Matt Levine popping up, since those people are
| much more valued and sought after.
|
| That's just my personal guess though, so I don't encourage
| anyone here to take the entire previous paragraph as a
| fact.
| fao_ wrote:
| > I guess it must have been "journalists" who didn't want to
| put in any time playing the game.
|
| I'm not really sure what you mean. I'm not even sure what the
| main article meant, because I could only find four mainstream
| reviews covering the 1.0 release. The first one by
| RockPaperShotgun[0] is essentially glowing and mentions how
| they've closed so many bugs. The second one by Game Enthusiast
| which seems pretty happy about it, the only reference to the
| word "bug" in the review is: Let's just say,
| Factorio has always been a diamond in the rough. Or
| more like just a lump of promising coal. And after 8.5
| years, 18,855 bug reports, 5,603 mods, and probably
| thousands of man hours, we can finally conclude that
| Factorio has become a spectacular diamond. Albeit, a
| diamond for gamers with a highly specific acquired
| taste. - GameEnthusiast review[1]
|
| The only other reviews I could find were both by PCgamer, and
| only one mentioned the number of bugs left, but was overall
| positive. Here is the reference to bugs, which is almost
| entirely factual, and seems mostly-positive about it aside from
| a single line: The rush to get it out a month
| early does mean that the 1.0 build is still a bit on
| the buggy side. According to Wube, there are around
| 150 reported bugs and 80 internal tasks that still
| need to be tackled, but they're apparently smaller
| issues rather than critical ones. You can see the
| known issues and current bug reports on the official
| forum. They'll hopefully be dealt with in the 1.1
| update, which will focus on fixes and "filling the most
| obvious gaps" rather than adding new stuff.
| Factorio was pretty much feature-complete already--though
| Wube was also planning a campaign and some UI improvements
| that have been cut [...] - PCgamer review [2]
|
| The fourth review is particularly glowing. When talking about
| bugs they say: Factorio has been in early
| access for four years, so most of its creases have
| been ironed out. There are some minor flaws. Visually
| it isn't the most exciting game, with an odd penchant
| for beige and brown. The top-down perspective can also
| obscure potential spanners in your works, like a
| missing piece of conveyor belt or an inserter facing
| the wrong way. - PCgamer review[3]
|
| they give a 91/100, and have this particularly glowing passage
| at the start: Let's skip the preamble, shall
| we? Factorio is brilliant. If you're remotely
| interested in games about management, construction,
| and above all production chains, then hop aboard the
| nearest conveyor belt and grab yourself a copy of
| Factorio this instant. Then pick up another copy for
| the most important person in your life, because they
| won't be seeing you for a while, and at least this way
| they'll understand why. - PCgamer review[3]
|
| I'm honestly not sure why one line in a mostly-positive-but-
| factual review that is mostly not subjective, results in in the
| need to disparage the entire journalistic profession? Could you
| explain why? I'm extremely curious, thanks.
|
| [0 (RPS review)]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-
| fantastic-factorio-has-...
|
| [1 (GameEnthusiast)]: https://game-
| enthusiast.com/2020/08/18/factorio-review/
|
| [2 (PCgamer)]: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/factorio-finally-
| leaves-early-acc...
|
| [3 (PCgamer)]: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/factorio-review/
| kwdc wrote:
| While pointing out that factorio has bugs is factually true,
| its effectively just clickbait in terms of the duration of how
| long they impact players if at all. I'd judge that newsfeed
| into oblivion. But these articles are few. The main game sites
| only have glowing reviews.
|
| Factorio's bugs are swatted at high speed with gusto and grace.
| How do I know this? I use the experimental version for
| gameplay. Any bugs soon vanish into the changelog history.
| snthd wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210129121156/https://factorio....
| willis936 wrote:
| I don't think we have to worry about the HN hug of death. Wube
| posts their updates to their own subreddit that has 230k
| subscribers. Afaik their website has never been smothered by
| traffic.
| basilgohar wrote:
| There were problems early on when they were posting GIFs
| instead of videos. It was nice because they noted the
| bandwidth savings by converting over to WebM instead.
| snthd wrote:
| The website doesn't load for me on firefox on Android - some
| vague security issue (I'm guessing it could be related to
| OSCP Stapling?). factorio.com appears to be on cloudflare, so
| you are of course right that it's not a hug problem.
| avereveard wrote:
| this is great, the new train logic allows for completely modular
| factory building, can't wait to start all over again.
| irtefa wrote:
| This is super exciting! Going to be a fun weekend.
| dubcanada wrote:
| One thing some people don't know is there is a ton of really cool
| mods - https://mods.factorio.com/
|
| You can see some of the most popular at -
| https://mods.factorio.com/downloaded and
| https://mods.factorio.com/trending
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Any good texture packs people can recommend? I can't stand the
| outdated graphics of the vanilla version. (Yeah, I'm one of
| _those_ people.)
| squiffy wrote:
| Here are some recommended mods from a previous Factorio
| discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22933767
| Mostly convenience/quality-of-life improvements.
|
| I "completed" the game using a lot of these and thoroughly
| enjoyed it but it was incredibly addictive.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Some favorite mods (I've played a LOT of factorio over the
| years)
|
| Bobs Mods is a good "new game plus" after beating the base
| game.
|
| Space Exploration adds an amazing amount of depth, but it's
| somewhat intimidating.
|
| FNEI is a very useful recipe browser.
|
| Recursive blueprints are incredibly cool, but also hard to
| reason about. Fun to try though!
|
| Factorissimo add recursive space (buildings that contain more
| space inside than their footprint).
| coryfklein wrote:
| Looks like the top of the "downloaded" list is basically all of
| Bob's mods? What's the story there - is it basically "Factorio
| but with an alternate game progression"?
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| Yeah, that and "angels" mods are two very popular mod groups
| that make the game much harder and more complex.
| sdfjkl wrote:
| Amongst the total conversions, I've quite enjoyed Krastorio 2.
|
| If you're into really detailed and complex factories,
| Industrial Revolution might be for you.
| [deleted]
| 404-universe wrote:
| As long as we're doing mod recommendations, I can also
| recommend the Space Exploration total conversion, which
| expands the game far past your first rocket launch. If you're
| looking for a really complex factory and are so inclined,
| it's compatible with Krastorio 2 (but it also works
| standalone).
| hanikesn wrote:
| Had a blast with Krastorio 2. Thanks for your Industrial
| Revolution recommendation!
| koolakalaban wrote:
| Recently discovered a less complex, open source alternative
| called Mindustry. Highly recommend it.
| dubcanada wrote:
| That looks very similar (in gameplay) to
| https://www.puppygames.net/revenge-of-the-titans/ which is
| another great game.
| Jaygles wrote:
| Another game I like to recommend that is in the same vein is
| Big Pharma. I particularly like the aesthetics.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Megaquarium is by the same team as Big Pharma
|
| It's a aquarium business management simulator (think
| RollerCoaster Tycoon but indoors and with aquatic life.)
| Really enjoyed it as a relaxing casual game.
|
| Looking forward to trying out Big Pharma.
| louwrentius wrote:
| Mindustry is absolutely fantastic, especially the recent 6.0
| update. As addictive as factorio and I think that the whole
| combat aspect is much more fun.
|
| Combat in factorio is an aside, almost a nuisance, but factorio
| could be better if it would copy some things from mindustry on
| that front.
| bavell wrote:
| A very similar game called Dyson Sphere Program came out in the
| last week, I've been having a great time with it! Basically
| Factorio with planets and solar systems you can fly to. Early
| access but tons of content.
| notamy wrote:
| I just heard about this game earlier today! It's looked super
| cool from what I've seen, I might have to get it soon...
| Vespasian wrote:
| Great game. For me, it scratches all the right factorio
| itches and adds some Sci-Fi and Space(TM).
| gnud wrote:
| Dyson Sphere Program looks interesting.
|
| There's also Satisfactory, which is a 3d first-person-
| perspective factory builder.
| cwkoss wrote:
| DSP is quite good. I think it's worth the ~$20 currently.
| Definitely a few QOL rough edges and some balance issues
| still, but certainly playable and haven't seen any critical
| bugs or crashes.
|
| I think building systems in DSP feels a lot more like
| Satisfactory, but it's much easier to get a good view of
| whats going on. Loved Satisfactory but found FPS
| perspective frustrating frequently.
| bregma wrote:
| Many of the more popular mods _add_ complexity to Factorio. I
| guess there might be an audience that swings the other way, but
| I don 't imagine the lack of the dopamine surge from solving
| the next problem is going to have Mindustry players putting in
| the same insane hours.
| willis936 wrote:
| This is one of those cases where it is best to not judge it
| before you try it. Mindustry has a bespoke assembly language
| that lets you control the behavior of drones and buildings.
| The complexity cap is far above factorio.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Not putting in insane hours is a feature for many.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| While I completed it, I personally did not enjoy my time with
| Factorio. In my review I specifically used the term
| "complexity fetishist" to describe the kind of player who
| might enjoy the game _too much_.
|
| Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with the game. It
| actually felt kind of weird to not recommend it since it was
| a pretty darned good execution of what it set out to be, I
| just couldn't ever actually suggest to someone that they play
| it. Either they wouldn't like dealing with the needlessly
| ever increasing in complexity goldbergian monstrosity, or
| worse they actually would.
|
| I think the game's popularity among developers highlights a
| core problem with our industry. Look at Factorio, then look
| at all of the over engineering, the layers upon layers of
| abstraction, the obsessive need to keep making software
| larger and more complicated only to eventually tear it down
| and rebuild the exact same thing with the new-hotness
| widgets...
| willis936 wrote:
| Factorio was inspired by minecraft tech mods. My favorite
| minecraft mod is gregtech. It adds the most complexity of
| any mod I know of, but it's balanced in a rewarding way.
| Higher tier setups need more factory to produce, but also
| produce squared gains (each power tier goes up by a factor
| of 4). The endgame is fusion for both power and alchemy.
| It's great stuff, but eventually one has seen it all.
|
| If you really want to see an offender of complexity for
| complexity's sake: check out gregtech new horizons. They
| maintain a minecraft modpack based around needing gregtech
| recipes for all other mods. On paper that's great. Hell,
| even I made a pack like that for personal play. They go
| pretty far with it though, to the point that the
| maintainers seem to have an expectation of grinding
| endlessly and never reaching the highest tiers. An outsider
| might dismiss it as chasing a dragon.
| tialaramex wrote:
| It's tough to get the curve right.
|
| I actually haven't _completed_ all that many of the packs
| I play, e.g. I finished Age of Engineering (even
| meticulously upgrading all my storage to infinity though
| I knew I 'd probably never use it) but I didn't
| technically finish Agrarian Skies (I had a few of those
| stretch goal quests left) or Project Ozone 2 (got bored
| during the last of my singularities) or even Compact
| Claustrophobia (I've run it twice, I escape, and then I
| tend to lose interest before getting to the Moon)
|
| I recently finished Star Factory and I realised that on
| the one hand it was nice to be able to look at it and say
| yup, I have ticked every box, almost anything you could
| want my setup now produces in unlimited quantities -- but
| on the other hand of course because it's so small it also
| felt cramped. I had to use very obviously bad solutions
| because the better options just weren't available in the
| pack.
|
| One problem I had in Factorio was that it seemed like it
| was just doing one thing over and over, with different
| dress up - whereas I like how Minecraft packs teach me
| both new things I need to do, and entirely new ways to
| solve problems. Writing a Predicate that automatically
| processes my Astral Sorcery crystals goes from an idea
| that I'm obviously not the first to have, to something I
| can do almost by reflex... and then a pack says too bad,
| no Integrated Dynamics so figure out a different way.
|
| The other problem I had is that I like to ignore our
| universe's rules, I like infinitely renewable everything,
| sure that's unrealistic but it's a video game. My
| Minecraft wins are generally powered by something
| ludicrous, like a single inexplicably efficient solar
| panel beaming energy from a world of eternal daylight, or
| a closed box which is somehow producing and burning
| unlimited amounts of Ethylene made from nothing. Factorio
| clearly doesn't want such shenanigans.
| willis936 wrote:
| Constant learning does keep modded minecraft fresh.
| That's why I eventually stopped playing: I had
| sufficiently seen it all.
|
| One thing that really allured me towards the end was the
| idea of voxel layouts. I found it fun to optimize pipe
| layouts between heat exchangers and boilers to maximize
| throughout and minimize resource cost.
|
| Factorio has similar feelings with 2D layout
| optimization, but it feels comparatively simplistic.
| There is also never a crunch for resources in factorio.
| "Oh I need more iron" is very different than "I just
| spent an hour hunting down a chrome vein and I better
| carefully pick what I'll make next". This is a rather
| hardcore game mechanic and I can see it being very niche.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| The universe is a Goldbergian monstrosity running on a
| Godlbergian mostrosity. Computer programmers didn't invent
| this pathology, and they might help us understand it.
|
| Factorio is a celebration of things as they are.
|
| "Five: From the wheels-upon-wheels-upon-wheels evolution of
| computer programming dig out, systematize and display every
| feature that illuminates the level-upon-level-upon-level
| structure of physics." ~ JA Wheeler in "Information,
| Physics, Quantum: the Search for Links"
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| My point is that the problem with complexity fetishism is
| that one adds complexity where none is necessary simply
| because one _enjoys_ the complexity. That 's fine for a
| game, but our industry is very often doing it at work
| with products that are ostensibly meant to make people's
| lives better.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Added complexity isnt always bad. It's just that
| abstraction is indeed a very, very hard thing to be done.
| Powerful features will be complex.
|
| Take browser as example, it's a form of abstraction (imo,
| it's an abstraction done right). It abstract the http
| communication in form of html and represent as gui.
| Browsers are indeed, very, very complex.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| "then look at all of the over engineering, the layers
| upon layers of abstraction, the obsessive need to keep
| making software larger and more complicated only to
| eventually tear it down and rebuild the exact same thing
| with the new-hotness widgets"
|
| That could be a sane evolutionary process. I'm not saying
| it is, of course there are problems with the tech
| industry, but this process of exploring a space of
| possibilities with the tools you have, then breaking them
| down and building up a better suited set of tools from
| the ground up doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.
|
| Maybe what I mean is, what makes you think the game is
| unnecessarily complex? Playing it, I was always amazed
| with how you become capable of achieving more and more
| with less and less time and effort as the game goes on. I
| don't see that it is made artificially more complex, it
| seemed like there was a lot of effort put into making the
| emergent complexity manageable at larger and larger
| scales.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| - The vast majority of products you create are never
| actually employed to do anything and are instead thrown
| into a blender to make science-goo, arbitrary amounts of
| which are required to unlock new stuff that is also
| mostly destined for the blender.
|
| - Bots are introduced _way too late_ in the game, forcing
| the player to manage the rapidly increasing complexity of
| their infrastructure _manually_ for a large portion of
| it.
|
| - Power distribution is a tedious non-problem you're
| forced to keep solving, again _manually_ most of the time
| because bots come so late in the game.
|
| To name a few. The natural argument here is that those
| things are required to motivate the player to make their
| automation faster and more efficient to progress the
| game, but the point is that they _feel_ needlessly
| arbitrary. In a game like Subnautica, for instance, there
| are some big high-resource things you have to build with
| reasonably deep critical paths, but they are things you
| actually use instead of just melting them down to
| increase a number somewhere. They feel necessary,
| science-slurry doesn 't.
|
| Players also claim that yeah, that's all true, but the
| _real_ game doesn 't start until after you've researched
| everything and launched your first rocket anyway. Meaning
| all of that is essentially a 40 hour _tutorial_.
| username90 wrote:
| Every game is about adding artificial barriers the player
| has to deal with. Games without artificial barriers are
| called movies.
| rustyminnow wrote:
| I think a lot of the appeal comes from reducing complexity,
| not adding it.
|
| My first playthrough was a rube-goldberg spaghetti mess.
| Scaling out specific resources near the end became a very
| painful process.
|
| I'm in my second playthrough, and the goal is to build a
| factory WITHOUT all the complexity. How can I cleanly scale
| out resource production without things becoming a hot mess?
| How can I build flexible re-usable subsystems that don't
| restrict systems downstream?
|
| Solving simple problems with complex solutions is one thing
| (over-engineering) but solving a complex problem with an
| elegant solution is much harder. And factorio is full of
| complex problems.
| imiric wrote:
| That's an interesting take, I think I agree.
|
| My biggest problem with Factorio is that after a few hours
| it starts feeling like programming, which is why it
| attracts a lot of programmers, but it lacks any tooling or
| QoL features that remove some of the frustrations of
| programming.
|
| I can't add tests to ensure that refactoring my belt system
| doesn't break some process on the other side of the map.
|
| I can't place a breakpoint to trigger a debugger and step
| through a tricky piece of logic.
|
| I can't raise exceptions on unexpected behavior and handle
| it in a sane way.
|
| Some of these are contrived examples and I can't imagine
| what the UI would look like, and they might be achievable
| via debug mode or some mods, but I haven't explored much
| outside of the base game.
|
| So as the factory grows (and it _must_ grow!) the game
| doesn 't have any mechanisms to help you deal with the
| complexity. After a while it becomes a chore to manage, and
| I usually end up thinking that I'd rather enjoy programming
| instead. Which after spending a work day doing at my day
| job, I rarely have the motivation to do in my spare time,
| and when I do, I'd rather invest it on side projects than
| on Factorio.
|
| Still, it's one of the greatest games ever made, and the
| thrill of watching it all work when it does work is
| exhilirating, much like programming. :)
| bregma wrote:
| Leading up to this the developers were pushing out twice-daily
| updates to the game. These guys give unheard-of levels of support
| to their base. They should be the object of study in academic
| courses.
| meibo wrote:
| They also know what they have - an extremely loyal fanbase and
| a great product that can stand on its own. See: they never put
| it on sale on Steam.
| arkitaip wrote:
| This seems to be the standard for indie dev studios [0]. They
| have to work harder and smarter than the big guys because their
| resources are in such short supply and they can't survive
| having a game that flops.
|
| [0] Just look at Edmund McMillen (The Binding of Isaac, Super
| Meat Boy), Eric Barone (Stardew valley), Cardboard Computer
| (Kentucky Route Zero), Scott Cawthon (Five Nights at Freddy),
| Extremely OK Games (TowerFall, Celeste) or The Fullbright
| Company (Gone Home) to mention a few.
| bombcar wrote:
| Indie dev studios also have the ADVANTAGE that they can do
| this - if Bob wants to post a blog he just needs to run it
| past Jim and Barbara - no need to run it through Legal, etc.
| nip180 wrote:
| Also "management" and "devops" needs to trust every dev to
| push out a high quality update. Twice daily deploys don't
| happen if QA goes through a 48 hour test process for every
| release.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Not a dev: " Twice daily deploys don't happen if QA goes
| through a 48 hour test process".
|
| Why does that matter, surely it's pipelined. If you feed
| in RC packages to a 48h QA twice daily then after 2 days
| lag you're getting tested code twice daily.
|
| I'm not suggesting that's realistic for large software
| houses, just that the logic seems wrong?
| simonbw wrote:
| I think the QA process isn't usually as pipelineable as
| you're suggesting. On a website it's often easy to QA
| changes that happen on page A at the same time you QA
| changes on page B. But in a game, especially one like
| factorio, it's probably a lot harder to find features
| that can be tested and deployed simultaneously with other
| features.
|
| It would be easy to test changes to the design of Level 3
| at the same time as changes to the design of Level 5, but
| it would be hard to test changes to the way inserters
| work at the same time as testing changes to the way
| conveyor belts work.
| meibo wrote:
| Mind that the amount of QA you ought to have heavily
| depends on what game you're making - e.g. with a story
| heavy game, you 100% want give or take 3 weeks on every
| update for localization checks, or for a MMO you probably
| want to run new clients/servers with your testers first
| for about a week to make sure nothing catastrophic
| happens, which is especially important in online
| games(lots of bad PR and real money invested by players -
| you really don't want to have to roll back "saves").
|
| All depends on budget and quantity of course, but this is
| what's usually planned for from my personal experience
| working in that sector.
| CobsterLock wrote:
| the devs at factorio have developed an amazing test suite
| automation system to automate regression tests. I wouldnt
| be surprised if this is what gives them most of their
| confidence to do twice daily releases. I thought it was
| newer, but they seem to have had it for the past 6 years.
| So i guess my point is they dont need to 100% trust every
| dev (while I'm sure they could with such a small team)
| they can instead trust in the tests.
|
| https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-62
| https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-186
| nip180 wrote:
| Who owns the tests? Developers.
| dstick wrote:
| Wait, this went from twice-daily "updates" to release too
| fast. One is a blog post / tweet, the other is software
| related ;-) Where did you get twice daily _release_ from?
| hobofan wrote:
| I wouldn't call it standard for indie dev studios. It's
| certainly what makes a good indie dev studio stand out, and
| your list which is comprised of studios that make games in
| the top ~5% percentile of quality shows that.
| claw_howitzer wrote:
| The section on multithreaded belts hits on my biggest complaint
| with this game: I don't like that the belts are multi-lane, I
| wish they were smaller and single-lane.
|
| I've tried to get into Factorio twice in the past but I always
| eventually run into some annoying issue where oops, I need
| resources to be on the other lane of a belt, or a grabber arm
| that should obviously be able to reach something isn't, or
| something of that ilk, and I now need to scrap and rebuild my
| entire design.
|
| At that point, I feel less like I'm building a factory and more
| like I'm working around the game engine, and it just immediately
| kills my interest in going further.
| psyc wrote:
| To each their own, but I find it an interesting dynamic. I'm
| having a hard time understanding the problem, but the game does
| have a learning curve. Suggestions: The majority of my belts
| carry one item. The remainder carry only one type in each lane.
| Those are neatly merged at the beginning, and consumed
| indiscriminately at the end. That is, the consumer wants both
| items so they can be transferred by one inserted. I never pack
| a belt to save on belts or space.
|
| I'd hate for this to be the nit that stops a person from going
| deeper into this amazing game.
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| You might check out https://shapez.io, which is a simplified
| (an open source) clone with single-lane belts.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >I wish they were smaller and single-lane.
|
| Smaller and single-lane as in individual half-width belts that
| can be placed independently? I think it would be more of a pain
| to play with, because now only would you now have separate
| left- and right- belt items, but also have more complex
| rotations to be able to convert one belt into another at a
| corner. Eg to convert a right-belt going east into a left-belt
| going south, you need to rotate just the tip of the right-belt,
| not the whole right-belt.
|
| ---
|
| >I need resources to be on the other lane of a belt
|
| A single splitter and a little space around it can swap a belt
| around if you need to. Or better yet, find the place where
| you're mixing the two items on the same belt and make the
| change there. A + +-- A/B B
| + A --+ +-+- B/A +-+ B
| --+
|
| (The + in the second diagram is a crossing of belt and
| underground belt.)
|
| For single-item belts where everything's on one side and you
| want everything to be on the other side, it's even simpler.
| -++ A/- -++- -/A -/A -++- A/-
| -++
|
| The + and + are a vertical belt feeding into the side of a
| horizontal belt. Because the horizontal belt has another
| horizontal belt to its left, the point where the vertical belt
| touches it does not make a corner.
| jackdh wrote:
| Does anyone have experience updating servers to 1.1?
|
| Is it as simple as loading into 1.1 loading the old 1.0 map in
| single player, saving it as 1.1 then uploading to the server?
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| If my experience with old versions is to go by, you just update
| the server binary and fire it up. No need to download + upload!
|
| Factorio is a very stable game, do a backup and give it ago!
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Beware that some mods haven't been updated to 1.1
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Warning: this game is seriously addictive. I don't game a lot,
| but I tried this and lost a weekend. Just say no
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