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Alt-F4 #65 – Factorio visualizer in Unreal Engine 5
- brucethemoose2 3y agoTo be clear, its a Factorio visualizer, not a client or anything. But its still super cool.
- dang 3y agoOk, we've put that in the title above. Thanks!
- samstave 3y agoWhat will be very interesting, as stated in the article, is to see what the factorio creatives in the community figure out what to hack together based on this... I expect some sort of UE5 factorio-esque battle system... Imagine a game where you run a factory, and you haveto maintain it - while a bunch of PvP FPS shooter are running through your factory battleing it out and keep dmaging your supply lines and you have to fix them - you can choose to join the factory maintenance team, or be a PvP player laying waste to your enemies and fucking up the factory supply lines for the other teams at the same time.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoI mean, you can already do this right now in MP (if not in 3D) : https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=560735#p560735 https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=560735#p560735
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThats interesting, but I don't think the social dynamics of such a game would work. The situation is unstable, where either the builders can't keep up and quickly lose their factory (and probably quit) or the PvPers get surpressed and/or just ignore the factory. This is kinda what happened in modded PvP Minecraft servers. But there are already some team based "production line PvP" games like Mindustry and Foxhole.
- a_nop 3y agoMindustry is like a PvP Factorio-lite
- psihius 3y agoThere's a better concept, it's called "Biter Battles" - just search Youtube for VOD's - there were whole bracketed tournaments with it.
- DDSDev 3y agoAs a game dev, factorio has always been a title that I would absolutely love to see the original source code for. Also, for anyone who’s first question was “how is this legal”: “When asked about the legality of this whole endeavour, they showed great understanding and allowed the project to be released, provided it won’t be used for commercial purposes.”
- TOGoS 3y agoThe Factorio team is pretty chill about stuff, generally, which is why they make the game so moddable in the first place. The only time I remember them having to take any legal action was to deal with someone reselling stolen keys or something. It's understood that anything cool the community does is good for Factorio. > i would absolutely love to see the original source code for As someone who's seen the source code, I'd say it's relatively good code, but nothing particularly amazing. C++ with multiple inheritance, game objects doing method calls to each other in multiple phases, and a good dose of "maybe not the best way to do this but it works and we're not changing it now" code. What keeps it all running as well as it does is a comprehensive set of automated tests, and Rseding getting on your case any time you make a PR with less-than-optimal code. The interesting bits are the algorithms, which are covered by the Friday Facts.
- bilekas 3y ago> What keeps it all running as well as it does is a comprehensive set of automated tests "Let's game it out enters the chat" Really though super cool to hear a perspective from someone with inside knowledge!
- paxys 3y agoMy graphics card cried just reading this post.
- bombcar 3y agoReminds me of the 3D visualization that you could get for Dwarf Fortress. Some “painted” and others tried real-time updates.
- un_montagnard 3y ago> When you don’t know how to code, you just put these nodes together, and if it doesn’t work you just keep adding more and more and become increasingly confused. Suspiciously similar to this factory game I’ve been playing recently. Cracked me up
- BlueTemplar 3y agoThat's nothing - LabView even has a similar colour scheme ! https://physics.highpoint.edu/~bbarlow/courses/phy2100/documents/Labview_mistakes.pdf https://physics.highpoint.edu/~bbarlow/courses/phy2100/docum... (Orange. And Gray Tiles show up in the 'GUI' view.)
- andrewstuart2 3y agoI loved that bit too. Especially because when you do know how to code, you still do the same exact thing but some things are probably less verbose. Still lots of spaghetti involved occasionally.
- flir 3y agoYou never eliminate a bottleneck, you just move it somewhere else. This is something I knew, but Factorio taught me viscerally.
- lastangryman 3y agoFull disclosure didn't even read the article. But if you wanted to know what programming as a game would look like, play Factorio. Refactoring, decoupling, debugging, it's all there. I played it intensely for 3 weeks then had to force myself to put it down. It's a one of a kind game.
- jokoon 3y agoFactorio is already quite CPU heavy so I don't want to imagine how it would behave in 3D. The factory size might be much smaller for this to be possible. I don't really see the point of this, really, except a misunderstanding about game design, UX and programming in general. This thing might be possible with huge sacrifices, though, but I'm not very interested in making something in 3D "just because". I love 3D games, but a lot of games just don't translate properly to 3D. Factorio is popular because its hardcore players make immense factories that usually reaches the limit of any CPU/GPU. That's a bit why I dislike most of the gaming industry, because there are way too many people who aims for high quality 3D graphics without ever understanding software or hardware, and it shows, and it's a big step back for the industry as a whole, but GPU vendors are always happy for those people to push for high end graphics, but not people who like good gameplay.
- detaro 3y ago... your comment doesn't particularly suggest that you have understood what this is about, while complaining that its authors don't understand things. For one thing, this is not the game and doesn't attempt to be.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI mean, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program run well. Also, hypothetically, I don't think a 3D client would impact the simulation since Factorio (AFAIK) runs as a client + server. The 2D simulation would be unchanged.
- duskwuff 3y ago> since Factorio (AFAIK) runs as a client + server It does not. Factorio runs as a single process encompassing both simulation and rendering; the "headless server" just omits the rendering bits.
- gouggoug 3y agoRead the article. This is just a fun pet project allowing you to visualize your base in 3D. Nothing less, nothing more.
- gigel82 3y agoIf you want to actually play a Factorio-like game in 3D, I recommend Satisfactory.
- spiderice 3y agoAlso play satisfactory if you want days of your life to disappear. Such a fun game. Just like Factorio.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoOr Dyson Sphere Program.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NelsonMinar 3y agoDSP is a really excellent game. Also it looks beautiful.
- iliketrains 3y agoOr Captain of Industry (disclaimer: I am one of the devs)
- brucethemoose2 3y agoYeah, this is on my wishlist already.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoBriefly mentioned in this and rendered: space exploration is an incredible factorio mod and the deepest game I've ever played. In Factorio you launch a rocket and win. Space exploration takes that and continues. You end up developing a base across multiple worlds in the solar system. After developing the solar system from the different unique resources on each planet you expand to interstellar space and then other solar systems. The game has a 'quarter of the way through' victory screen but there's another victory screen as you explore a mystery that spans the known universe and takes a reasonable amount of math knowledge figure out. It's 100s of hours of gameplay and really well done. They modified the game so that you can fly spaceships between planets with a star and solar system maps and it all works really well. Just make sure to turn the biters way down. The mod requires a level of patience and the intensity of combat runs counter to that (in fact the mod itself has a popup telling you to turn biters down on start).
- fermentation 3y agoI actually prefer to completely turn off biters. They’ll still be there on other planets, but the anxiety on the home world is gone
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoAgreed. The difficulty creep that was demanded by vocal experienced players has made Factorio much harder for newcomers to get into. Factorio is a brilliant Zen garden and an absolutely terrible real time strategy game. Since the beta there's been more and more biter types and a gradual ramp up in how frantic you have to be to keep up. It's tremendously off-putting and completely opposite to what makes Factorio what it is. Hopefully the developers realize this at some point and knock it off. Make a 'frantic mode' toggle for the experienced players but don't make it the default. I can handle needed a turret or two at key points but I can't handle needing to race the tech tree to keep up. I don't get why they made the defaults so hostile to new players. I'm not even that new to Factorio but it's still waaaay too frantic with default settings.
- 3y ago
- redox99 3y agoWhy is the video 25fps? To make it more "cinematic"? It isn't even 24fps cinematic. In either case, they both look awful in your typical 60hz container because 60 isn't divisible by 24 or 25. Just make it 30 or 60fps. It looks awful like this.
- Operyl 3y agoIt doesn't look that bad, honestly.
- reaperman 3y agoMost people over the age of 30 or so can’t see the difference. We didn’t grow up with high frame rates and our brains didn’t train on them. It’s entirely possible they have no idea this is a thing. I’ve seen some videos where different people try out gaming trials on different Hz’s and it seems like older gamers don’t get nearly as much performance improvement from high frame rates that younger players do. They’re also much less likely to be able to tell which is which in a blind trial.
- Sardtok 3y ago60Hz video looks super weird to me. Looks like it's running in like 2x FF, but everything syncs up with 1x audio. Watching The Hobbit when it came out was a horrible experience. It's not a problem with games, though. Even if 60 fps was quite rare to achieve for 3D games 20+ years ago. I was usually happy if I could get stable 20-30 fps.
- BluePen7 3y agoThe hobbit was 48FPS, so that was probably pretty weird.
- redox99 3y agoI never mentioned high frame rates. I mentioned uneven frame times, because you can't properly show 24 or 25fps on a 60hz display. The vast majority of videos on YouTube are 30fps so they don't have this problem.
- Aardwolf 3y agoWow how did they build so many 3D models in just 5 months, that's amazing talent, perhaps 3D modeling tools are also just really good now?
- chefandy 3y ago> The remodelling process was a lot of fun, but next time we should really ask for the original Factorio models to preserve what’s left of our sanity. Some tools are a lot better-- Substance 3D for texturing, for example, especially if you can get their auto UVing to make something acceptable-- but fundamentally most straight-up 3D modelling tools are roughly what they were a while ago. The screenshot of their model seems to have tight topology, too, so I'll bet it was pretty labor intensive.
- skykooler 3y agoI modeled a few of the Factorio machines back when I was 3d-printing them to use as desk ornaments - they took me around six hours each, so I could definitely imagine getting through all of them in a few months. Of course, my task was certainly easier since models destined for 3d printing don't need proper UV mapping or texturing.
- butz 3y agoI would like to see someone building visualizer of same quality for good old SimCity 2000.
- dividuum 3y agoProbably a whoosh moment, but in case people don’t know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoOr Streets of SimCity
- Arrath 3y agoThe collection of random voice clips for yelling at traffic jams to clear them live on in my head to this day.
- netsharc 3y agoSimCopter made the cities 3d, but obviously not Unreal Engine 5 quality...
- bloqs 3y agoOr play Satisfactory in the new Unreal 5 Experimental branch !!
- EMM_386 3y agoI installed Factorio 4 times, and uninstalled it three times. The slow pace at the start, and the somewhat lifeless 2D isometric graphics simply didn't do it for me. But the blog posts were fascinating, and people kept raving about it, so on that 4th install I decided to soldier on and actually get somewhere. I now rate it as one of the greatest games ever made. It is insanely technically impressive, able to run megabases with trains and belts and robots and inserters and all the rest of it at 60 FPS. It doesn't crash. It's incredibly fun and very addictive. Amazing mods, amazing community. I can't wait for the expansion. I'll just assume from the start it will be as polished as Factorio is.
- shostack 3y agoIf you want Factorio with amazing graphics, check out Satisfactory.
- bberrry 3y agoSeconding this recommendation. Definitely one of my favorite games the last decade
- mcv 3y agoGet a very powerful GPU, though. I haven't played it, but from what I've seen, things can get crazy in Satisfactory.
- psihius 3y agoThey mentioned megabases. It's not something Satisfactory realistically can do :D
- evandale 3y agoI apologize in advance for introducing the risk of ruining your life.. but I highly recommend checking out Captain of Industry. It has a faster start, real world processes, terraforming and I believe is better than Factorio in every way. I consider Factorio a genre defining game and while Satisfactory and DSP comes close to surpassing it their 3d nature makes the game's puzzles easier to solve. Captain of Industry makes the puzzles just as difficult as Factorio despite having more dimensions. CoI has a lot more resources you need to manage as well.
- trhr 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't take HN threads into flamewar like this. We have to ban accounts that do. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been doing it repeatedly, so it should be easy to avoid in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- trhr 3y agoI'm not sure how people didn't get the dripping sarcasm. The renders look dystopian.