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It's the game to teach people what technical debt and refactoring is. When you start building your factory, you think about how to get first steps just done (s
by flixic 6y ago
It's the game to teach people what technical debt and refactoring is.
When you start building your factory, you think about how to get first steps just done (ship it!). Over time complexity and scope of your factory increases, but old code, I mean old machines, are still there, getting in the way.
You can choose to ignore it and work around it using underground belts and similar solutions, or you can take on a proper refactoring, limiting your progress in the short term.
- cybrox 6y agoIt also impressively shows the other side of things, where you can keep your factory running on hotfixes until pretty much the end of the game. You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your production) and re-build it.
- oefrha 6y agoNuking your starter base is silly unless you're on death world and have some impenetrable defense set up that's hard to attain elsewhere without significant work. Usually to start a fresh megabase you just load up a car and drive a couple minutes to a new location. Then you can keep supplying the construction materials of the megabase with your starter base. (To those unfamiliar: yes, "the end of the game" -- launching a rocket -- is really the start of the game to seasoned players, so the initial base you launch the first rockets with is commonly called the starter base.)
- bregma 6y agoThe starter base is probably a UPS sink. Nuke that trash, it's not worth the flock of construction robots to disassemble it. The point of the late late game is to minimize UPS (updates per second). It becomes memory bandwindth bound at some point. It demonstrates what's possible with today's technology. In comparison, Microsoft Word can not keep up with my typing in a new, blank document.
- oefrha 6y agoA starter base on the order of up to say 100-200 spm usually doesn't have much of a ups impact at all in my experience but I guess it could be on wimpier hardware. Or if you rely too heavily on logistics robots, but I think people usually don't go mass logistics until later.
- Rapzid 6y agoI haven't played in a long while and never quite got a rocket launched(can't recall why). Any tips for getting to that point very fast without feeling like cheating the phase?
- nomoreusernames 6y agohaha i love that. it just shows us that gaffa/silver tape hotfixes are the real deal.
- NelsonMinar 6y agoOnce you get logistics bots you can monkey patch anything with a requester chest.
- blickentwapft 6y agoSounds like fun but only if you’re not a programmer, for whom it would just be work.
- Nursie 6y agoDepends - Some games like this are addictive and great fun for programmers too. I played "Spacechem" to death. It's effectively a two-thread, multiprocess, visual turing-alike machine with an organic chemistry theme. It's awesome.
- p_l 6y agoLots of programmers enjoy Factorio - personally I think it's because it's less annoying than work, so we do what we like minus management
- thaumasiotes 6y agoSeveral Zachtronics games are just "programming, but intentionally annoying". I don't really see the appeal compared to ordinary programming. My favorite programming game has actually been a flash game where your goal was to transform binary strings (represented as sequences of blue/red dots) into other binary strings. You were still writing in Befunge, but the rest of it came off as trying to be helpful to the extent possible, rather than giving you a goal and then disabling the tools you'd want to use to get there.
- dEnigma 6y agoAre you perhaps talking about Manufactoria? http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/ http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/ Probably my favourite flash game.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoYes, one of my favorites too. It's even less of a game, but I also had a lot of fun with http://incredible.pm http://incredible.pm .
- pjc50 6y agoOr alternatively take a Moore's law view: the original factory remains there forever, eclipsed by the much larger, more orderly and modular, one build next to it. Walk speed is a surprisingly big constraint on the early game, until you get various upgrades; you build a small factory because you don't want to walk round a larger one.
- scrollaway 6y agoWalk speed is a metaphor for the AWS budget.
- LoSboccacc 6y agoexactly, the original factory is likely the construction/logistic bot production center, it'd be slow but not necessarily inefficient, so it can stay while the bot build the modular factory elsewhere
- vsareto 6y agoYou can also use the internet to find solutions to all of it!
- melvinroest 6y agoOr input/output, or scalability and to a limited extent security (aliens attacking weak spots).
- dom96 6y agoThis is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory and it just feels too much like work. It's one of those games that I wish I could love, but whenever I attempt to start it now I just remember that feeling of "ugh, why don't I instead code something, at least I'll create something".
- KONAir 6y agoIt really feels like a time waster until you get the drones to do those chores. I had a huge sprawl just because teching up to drones again in a new map felt like too much work.
- oefrha 6y agoJust add a quality of life mod giving you earlier access to precursor bots, e.g. Construction Drones[1] or Nanobots[2]. [1] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones [2] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Nanobots https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Nanobots
- MivLives 6y agoThis mod is great, really speeds up the early game to get to the more interesting middle and late games.
- kortex 6y agoWatching AntiElitz speedruns and going for No Spoon taught me how to sprint through the early game and get to bots and a large amount of production quickly.
- eterm 6y agoIndeed, and to explain for the audience, in speedruns the split to get construction bots up and runnuing is around 40 minutes. The WR time to launch a rocket and get 'space science', the final science is currently about 1hr46m.
- DonHopkins 6y agoProgrammer crack!!!
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThe people behind this game stream on Twitch, and you can see what their development process looks like.
- throwawayfac 6y agoDo you have a link to the channel? I'm having trouble finding it.
- 29athrowaway 6y agohttps://m.twitch.tv/rseding91/profile https://m.twitch.tv/rseding91/profile There are no past videos there but you can follow him.
- throwawayfac2 6y agoThank you!
- sandworm101 6y agoIt teaches that if you wait a while eventually some magic technology (drones, trains, faster belts etc) will allow you to bypass technical debt and/or simply eliminate it with a single demolish command. And it teaches that humans can do whatever they want to a world, level all the forests, kill all the locals, because eventually we are going to fly away. Not our problem anymore. Space people are above the petty concerns of terrestrials.
- halfFact 6y agoThat's quite a take. The upgrades gives you totally different options.
- bransonf 6y agoIt’s for this reason I personally dislike factorio as a game. Don’t get me wrong, the game itself is fantastic, but I don’t have the patience for it. Rather, I find myself trying to build a factory top down. I write a bunch of sticky notes with material requirements and calculate backwards “how many labs do I need?” “How many gears do I need to make the beakers?” “How much do I need to mine to match that hourly throughput of gears? It’s the perfect candidate of a game to write an algorithm for. Assuming a known seed, it’s trivial to design the most efficient system based on those parameters. And at that point it just becomes work. It’s really designed as a bottom up game, but I think about problems top down and for that reason factorio drives me nuts.
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoYou really need a combination of top-down vision combined with bottom-up implementation, mixed together with a healthy dose of pragmatism. It's enough to know that you'll need lots of gears and to know that you'll need high-capacity mining eventually. But there's no great harm from having a few extra or from having not quite enough to max out beaker production; just start the process, get some gears, get some beakers, and refine as needed. Without a little top-down vision, you'll end up severely overproducing some things and underinvesting in others, which is no good, but you'll never be able to build an optimal factory without first building a suboptimal one.
- kllrnohj 6y agoThere's still plenty of room for creativity even with an extreme top-down approach, like this series does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8QDQmOoys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8QDQmOoys > Over a few months I designed an entire Factorio base without testing any of it. The goal is to create a mid-sized base capable of building a megabase. A secondary goal is to not break down or rebuild anything ever. The challenge isn't that it's hard to figure out the ratios or math out the machines you need, it's in getting to having the production to make that base without falling asleep waiting on things. Continual bootstrapping towards that end goal is the gameplay.
- AgentME 6y agoI just make labs and factories in arbitrary amounts, and then adjust the amounts later as I go based on where I see the bottlenecks. I tried getting the ratios exactly right up-front when I first started playing, but it was almost never worth the effort because I would usually outpace the production of a specific input resource (especially when I later built new factories that used one of those inputs too).
- bcrosby95 6y agoAnd the speed runners are the ones doing waterfall design rather than agile.
- Aardappel 6y agoExcept it doesn't have very good refactoring tools. Sometimes you need to change just one small thing about some sub-graph of your factory, but circumstances require you to re-do most of it to implement that change. This is just busy-work, and not "fun", to me at least. I know later in the game more options open up, but that doesn't help me get there. I wish for a Factorio-style game where I can just drag (groups of) machines and conveyors around, and I just pay cost for however much just changed.
- snicky 6y agoFor me the game got so much easier when I started to construct drones. There was almost no need to build belts any more! Not sure what it says about me as a developer though...
- JakeTheAndroid 6y agoI have built an entire no belt factory. It works for the most part but damn it's slow. I do transition a lot of the technical debt from the green and red sciences so I can properly support the rest of the science development.
- sn9 6y agoProbably a huge fan of microservices and cloud computing.
- snicky 6y agoHaha, neither of those. I guess solving everything with drones = "reuse the same favorite tool for all kinds of jobs".
- m463 6y agoIt sort of struck me as "the learn new concept" vs "keep doing what I know". You can get really good at burner inserters or learn about electricity. Or keep get fancy with belts... or learn about trains. or get a personal roboport and learn cut/copy/paste