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Factorio is great, I don’t see it as a waste! It’s given me a new respect for logistics and advanced planning. I think the whole idea is a massive exercise in p

Factorio is great, I don’t see it as a waste! It’s given me a new respect for logistics and advanced planning. I think the whole idea is a massive exercise in programming, producing functions, changing structures and then debugging the problem/expanding the bottle neck. But yeah it’s still a game.

Shorn 7y ago
This is why I avoid the more complex games where you build things (Factorio, Kerbal space program, etc.) Playing them scratches some of the same itches I get from writing software. So I avoid playing them and re-direct that energy into using an actual programming language to build a real thing. There are upsides and downsides. The challenges in a game are designed to be overcome, but the satisfaction of solving real problems is even better than solving puzzles in-game. Sometimes the parallels for me are uncanny. I'm faffing about with OpenSSL right now and it feels like nothing so much as a badly designed game sub-system. Can somebody please fix OpenSSL so I can get back to the core game please? :) I used to say that Unity3D is Minecraft for programmers.
fendy3002 7y ago
True. Factorio shows how complicated and power wasting logistics are. And it's already generous enough by not having items that can expire, it makes logistics exponentially harder
pjc50 7y ago
Somewhere on the back of an envelope I have written "bipolar train-sistor", as the start of an attempt to do computation in Factorio without using any of the features intended for the purpose like the circuit network. Never got round to actually building it. (An unloaded train is clearly a "hole" charge carrier..)
tetris11 7y ago
In a similar vein, DwarfFortress I usually play it with DfHack to handle all the labour assignments automatically, and then I play it usually up to the point that I'm tapped into a magma shoot and flooding the magma with water to obtain obsidian. Then I lose interest, and play the same biome on adventure mode where I attempt to find the ruin of the mine I created before and plunder it.

Shorn 7y ago

This is why I avoid the more complex games where you build things (Factorio, Kerbal space program, etc.) Playing them scratches some of the same itches I get from writing software. So I avoid playing them and re-direct that energy into using an actual programming language to build a real thing. There are upsides and downsides. The challenges in a game are designed to be overcome, but the satisfaction of solving real problems is even better than solving puzzles in-game. Sometimes the parallels for me are uncanny. I'm faffing about with OpenSSL right now and it feels like nothing so much as a badly designed game sub-system. Can somebody please fix OpenSSL so I can get back to the core game please? :) I used to say that Unity3D is Minecraft for programmers.

fendy3002 7y ago

True. Factorio shows how complicated and power wasting logistics are. And it's already generous enough by not having items that can expire, it makes logistics exponentially harder

pjc50 7y ago

Somewhere on the back of an envelope I have written "bipolar train-sistor", as the start of an attempt to do computation in Factorio without using any of the features intended for the purpose like the circuit network. Never got round to actually building it. (An unloaded train is clearly a "hole" charge carrier..)

tetris11 7y ago

In a similar vein, DwarfFortress I usually play it with DfHack to handle all the labour assignments automatically, and then I play it usually up to the point that I'm tapped into a magma shoot and flooding the magma with water to obtain obsidian. Then I lose interest, and play the same biome on adventure mode where I attempt to find the ruin of the mine I created before and plunder it.