7 ms·

> It has been playable from start to finish for more than a year. This means that we have already made several improvement iterations based on the playthroughs

> It has been playable from start to finish for more than a year. This means that we have already made several improvement iterations based on the playthroughs behind us. You just don't see commitment to shipping quality product in the games industry like this. This is what makes Factorio special.

retrac 3y ago
I have seen similar commitment from other indie developers. For example, one of my favourite games [1] (which is something of a cross between Factorio, Simcity and OpenTTD) has been available for that "early access" on Steam for 4 years (like Factorio was). I suppose that means in the developer's opinion, the game is not quite ready -- they wouldn't sell it to someone who expects a complete game. Caveat emptor. Fair enough. In practice it has been playable and enjoyable (at least by me) since first listed on Steam in 2019. New features and more polish come every few weeks, and it's coming up on 1.0. I don't know if they'll keep supporting it well after that, but it's clear to me they want to sell something good and complete, however long that might take, not just something profitable. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources... (Windows only but runs great under WINE)
pmoriarty 3y ago
This has been Factorio's MO from the beginning. It was in Early Access forver, and all that time it was way more polished and stable than many fully released games with much higher budgets. In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods that crashed. Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on potato PC's until you get in to the megabase range. It's mostly mods that cause performance problems, but even those have gotten a lot better over the years. The Factorio devs could really give a master class on how to make games moddable. Factorio's ecosystem of over 5000 mods is a testament to that.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > It was always mods that crashed. I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard). But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break the damn APIs all the time. Lots of games that are actively developed don't bother keeping stable APIs (a bit like like Gnome and its disregard for extension APIs), breaking mods at every new release. An egregious example is Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games. This ensures that there is a tail end of mods (which is by far the majority) that just will never work anymore, and the mods being kept up to date become rarer and rarer.
  - Jenk 3y ago
    I would truly love to see a game use haskell for mod APIs. Or perhaps erlang a better choice. As an example of just how far accessible APIs can benefit games/their players: The god awful language and API that has enabled Armed Assault franchise modders to create entirely new games - literally, PUBG started life as a mod for Armed Assault 2. Armed Assault 3 launched ten years ago, and there are still many new mods being produced today, and Bohemia have further embraced this community by supporting "community developed" DLCs such that modders get rewarded for their effort. I often wonder how much better/diverse/stable these innovative and entrepeneurial ventures could be with a "proper" API.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      The main problem with that is that there aren't nearly as many people who know Haskell or Erlang compared to those who know Lua. Lua has been a modding staple across countless games, so millions of gamers/modders are already familiar with it. I'm convinced that chosing Lua for modding is one of the main reasons Factorio has over 5000 mods now. If they'd chosen a more obscure language I'd doubt we'd have nearly as many.
      - Jenk 3y ago
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  Can confirm performance is pretty good on Macs too, even older Intel models.
  - ezfe 3y ago
    That being said, it does natively support Apple Silicon as a side effect of being on the Switch
- EMM_386 3y ago
  > Factorio performance is also fantastic I still don't know how they pulled this off, and as a software engineer I've read all of the development blogs. It is still impressive that you can scale this thing to huge mega-bases, with things smoothly gliding down coveyer belts, inserters swinging, bots flying around, trains everywhere, biters doing biter things all over the exposed (essentially endless) map ... and no problem in most cases. 60 FPS/UPS. It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform. I'm sure parts of it are.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    > It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform. As far as I'm aware, it's all C++.
  - db48x 3y ago
    They’ve never said that they hand–wrote any assembly, though I suppose it’s not impossible. Mostly they were simply diligent and focused on never regressing performance, and on continuously improving it. They even changed game mechanics over the early access period to improve performance. For example, originally a conveyor belt applied a speed to any object in the same tile. Each frame the position of the object would be updated based on the speed, just the same as any other moving object. You could place down up to three objects side–by–side on the belt, and they would all travel together. But eventually they realized that this is a waste of time, because inserters only ever place items in specific positions on the belt, and the items are all the same size. This means that they could instead just keep a bitmask of which spots are filled, and a queue of items that will pop out of the edge of the tile. Even that is wasteful though, because you might have 1000 tiles of belts all in a row, so you can group them all into a single queue. Now you only have to put new items into the beginning of a single queue and take them out of the end, instead of doing that for 1000 queues. On the other hand, this means that you can no longer put down items at arbitrary positions on a belt; they will now snap into one of the 12 slots in one of the two lanes. A similar thing happened to inserters. It used to be that they had a certain amount of rotational speed, and would calculate a new position and rotation for each of their three two joints every frame. Eventually they realized that 99% of the time they would be in the same few positions over and over again; it is only when they are chasing an object on a belt that is too fast that they need to calculate a position. The rest of the time they just loop through a fixed animation. This gave Wube the opportunity to tweak the animation cycles so that they are exactly the same length in all orientations of the inserter, which is definitely a good thing. And of course they consistently paid close attention to data locality, so that every time they have to work on a collection of objects they maximize the amount of useful data that fits into the CPU cache. I haven’t seen the code, of course, but I assume that this means that they are using an ECS–style system where you have a dense array of just the position and speed of each biter, or just the animation frame for each inserter. The code can then loop over those dense arrays knowing that it doesn’t have to test the type of each item in the array (few or no branches needed), and that every byte loaded into cache will be used during the loop (maximizing use of the memory bandwidth).
duxup 3y ago
I see a lot more indie dev type games that go through these super long development times, long early access, and really are committed to the game longer term. I suspect where some games might just move on these folks really are committed to "hey let's rewrite that" type decisions that don't fit in traditional commercial game development. It has been very encouraging to see that there room for an arguably improving quality when it comes to some games.
- endigma 3y ago
  Project Zomboid comes to mind as well
- fps-hero 3y ago
  Early access is a great way to outsource your QA. Triple A QA teams number in the hundreds, but for an independent game to have that many people playing it is a triumph in itself. If people keep playing your game in early access, you must be on to something. There are tens of thousands of games people could be playing, but for them to pick yours means you are scratching an itch that can’t be found elsewhere, and that inspires developers create great games. Early access does get flack for allowing people to release unfinished, often never finished games, but it’s a wonderful test of product market fit. If people try your game and like it, give you feedback to improve your game so even more people like it, it’s the ultimate positive feedback loop.
  - duxup 3y ago
    It certainly sets expectations and gamers have really adapted to it / seem to receive the whole process fairly well. I don't game like I used to but I was playing an early access game recently, got a pop up on a keyboard shortcut to submit a bug with a screen shot and the game state. Total win win for everyone.
proactivesvcs 3y ago
Not just the games industry, but software in general. Wube's commitment to efficiency and bug fixing is to be lauded.
throwaway03624 3y ago
No Man's Sky has a similar dedication. They have been constantly adding new features and expansions for free for the last 7 years. If this had been a different company, they might have saved some of those features for a version 2 or a paid DLC.
- feoren 3y ago
  Wait, No Man's Sky? That game? Was it bought or something? Do they still have that liar who went on interviews and lied through his teeth about the game? It's pretty rare to see a project based entirely on lies from a smarmy psycho liar ever actually go anywhere, right? Did they ever go back and actually implement any of the things he lied were already in the base game?
  - ecuzzillo 3y ago
    Yes, they did go back. They basically used all the money they made from the hype and used it to make it real. Players bought them a billboard across from their office saying thank you. (https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/cr85av/the_billboard_is_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/cr85av/th... ) See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ for one rendition of the story.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    No Man’s Sky is a redemption story.
    - deprecative 3y ago
      No, they polished a turd. It's still the same terrible gameplay loop they had at launch but convinced saps that it was better because they added more and more layers of paint onto it.
  - blitz_skull 3y ago
    Yes, that game. You must check it out. Easily the best redemption arc of any game development story, ever. By a mile. It’s insane how much content has been put into the game.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
quchen 3y ago
I think the »literally unplayable« meme is from Factorio, or was made popular by it. Bug reports on Reddit ever since I bought it were on the level of »when the player is facing north, the shadow’s animation is slightly off«. I can’t think of a single bug I’ve encountered across many, many Factorio playthroughs, some including overhaul mods. In all the release notes, there is a sizeable section of bug fixes; time and time again, I was surprised that there were any bugs. Hats off to Wube, you’re a true inspiration.
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  Seems like it was popular much before that based on release dates/https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/literally-unplayable https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/literally-unplayable. True origin unknown. I know there are a lot of peculiar and hilarious hug reports for games like dwarf fortress, too.
tarr11 3y ago
Tears of the Kingdom went through a similar year long testing and refinement phase https://www.gamesradar.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-basically-finished-before-its-year-long-delay/ https://www.gamesradar.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-ba...
bryan_w 3y ago
Indeed, not to be completely throw Klei under the bus, but I started playing Oxygen Not Included, and the simulation quality is night and day. ONI has race conditions, memory corruption bugs, non-seeded RNG, duplication bugs. You couldn't play a non-glitched playthrough even if you tried. At some point, you're going to make an infinite spill or a liquid lock on complete accident. Meanwhile factorio allows you to benchmark it by opening a save and running it for a set number of ticks -- it's just that stable in its simulation. Not to say that ONI isn't a fun game, it has different elements (e.g. dupe management) that make it fun despite its instability.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  I tried ONI once, on my laptop, and it was running sluggishly ON THE MAIN MENU, not to mention early game. In comparison, Factorio only started to slow down late game (or during very heavy biter combat).

retrac 3y ago

I have seen similar commitment from other indie developers. For example, one of my favourite games [1] (which is something of a cross between Factorio, Simcity and OpenTTD) has been available for that "early access" on Steam for 4 years (like Factorio was). I suppose that means in the developer's opinion, the game is not quite ready -- they wouldn't sell it to someone who expects a complete game. Caveat emptor. Fair enough. In practice it has been playable and enjoyable (at least by me) since first listed on Steam in 2019. New features and more polish come every few weeks, and it's coming up on 1.0. I don't know if they'll keep supporting it well after that, but it's clear to me they want to sell something good and complete, however long that might take, not just something profitable. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources... (Windows only but runs great under WINE)

pmoriarty 3y ago

This has been Factorio's MO from the beginning. It was in Early Access forver, and all that time it was way more polished and stable than many fully released games with much higher budgets. In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods that crashed. Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on potato PC's until you get in to the megabase range. It's mostly mods that cause performance problems, but even those have gotten a lot better over the years. The Factorio devs could really give a master class on how to make games moddable. Factorio's ecosystem of over 5000 mods is a testament to that.

nextaccountic 3y ago
> It was always mods that crashed. I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard). But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break the damn APIs all the time. Lots of games that are actively developed don't bother keeping stable APIs (a bit like like Gnome and its disregard for extension APIs), breaking mods at every new release. An egregious example is Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games. This ensures that there is a tail end of mods (which is by far the majority) that just will never work anymore, and the mods being kept up to date become rarer and rarer.
- Jenk 3y ago
  I would truly love to see a game use haskell for mod APIs. Or perhaps erlang a better choice. As an example of just how far accessible APIs can benefit games/their players: The god awful language and API that has enabled Armed Assault franchise modders to create entirely new games - literally, PUBG started life as a mod for Armed Assault 2. Armed Assault 3 launched ten years ago, and there are still many new mods being produced today, and Bohemia have further embraced this community by supporting "community developed" DLCs such that modders get rewarded for their effort. I often wonder how much better/diverse/stable these innovative and entrepeneurial ventures could be with a "proper" API.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    The main problem with that is that there aren't nearly as many people who know Haskell or Erlang compared to those who know Lua. Lua has been a modding staple across countless games, so millions of gamers/modders are already familiar with it. I'm convinced that chosing Lua for modding is one of the main reasons Factorio has over 5000 mods now. If they'd chosen a more obscure language I'd doubt we'd have nearly as many.
    - Jenk 3y ago
tailspin2019 3y ago
Can confirm performance is pretty good on Macs too, even older Intel models.
- ezfe 3y ago
  That being said, it does natively support Apple Silicon as a side effect of being on the Switch
EMM_386 3y ago
> Factorio performance is also fantastic I still don't know how they pulled this off, and as a software engineer I've read all of the development blogs. It is still impressive that you can scale this thing to huge mega-bases, with things smoothly gliding down coveyer belts, inserters swinging, bots flying around, trains everywhere, biters doing biter things all over the exposed (essentially endless) map ... and no problem in most cases. 60 FPS/UPS. It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform. I'm sure parts of it are.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform. As far as I'm aware, it's all C++.
- db48x 3y ago
  They’ve never said that they hand–wrote any assembly, though I suppose it’s not impossible. Mostly they were simply diligent and focused on never regressing performance, and on continuously improving it. They even changed game mechanics over the early access period to improve performance. For example, originally a conveyor belt applied a speed to any object in the same tile. Each frame the position of the object would be updated based on the speed, just the same as any other moving object. You could place down up to three objects side–by–side on the belt, and they would all travel together. But eventually they realized that this is a waste of time, because inserters only ever place items in specific positions on the belt, and the items are all the same size. This means that they could instead just keep a bitmask of which spots are filled, and a queue of items that will pop out of the edge of the tile. Even that is wasteful though, because you might have 1000 tiles of belts all in a row, so you can group them all into a single queue. Now you only have to put new items into the beginning of a single queue and take them out of the end, instead of doing that for 1000 queues. On the other hand, this means that you can no longer put down items at arbitrary positions on a belt; they will now snap into one of the 12 slots in one of the two lanes. A similar thing happened to inserters. It used to be that they had a certain amount of rotational speed, and would calculate a new position and rotation for each of their three two joints every frame. Eventually they realized that 99% of the time they would be in the same few positions over and over again; it is only when they are chasing an object on a belt that is too fast that they need to calculate a position. The rest of the time they just loop through a fixed animation. This gave Wube the opportunity to tweak the animation cycles so that they are exactly the same length in all orientations of the inserter, which is definitely a good thing. And of course they consistently paid close attention to data locality, so that every time they have to work on a collection of objects they maximize the amount of useful data that fits into the CPU cache. I haven’t seen the code, of course, but I assume that this means that they are using an ECS–style system where you have a dense array of just the position and speed of each biter, or just the animation frame for each inserter. The code can then loop over those dense arrays knowing that it doesn’t have to test the type of each item in the array (few or no branches needed), and that every byte loaded into cache will be used during the loop (maximizing use of the memory bandwidth).

duxup 3y ago

I see a lot more indie dev type games that go through these super long development times, long early access, and really are committed to the game longer term. I suspect where some games might just move on these folks really are committed to "hey let's rewrite that" type decisions that don't fit in traditional commercial game development. It has been very encouraging to see that there room for an arguably improving quality when it comes to some games.

endigma 3y ago
Project Zomboid comes to mind as well
fps-hero 3y ago
Early access is a great way to outsource your QA. Triple A QA teams number in the hundreds, but for an independent game to have that many people playing it is a triumph in itself. If people keep playing your game in early access, you must be on to something. There are tens of thousands of games people could be playing, but for them to pick yours means you are scratching an itch that can’t be found elsewhere, and that inspires developers create great games. Early access does get flack for allowing people to release unfinished, often never finished games, but it’s a wonderful test of product market fit. If people try your game and like it, give you feedback to improve your game so even more people like it, it’s the ultimate positive feedback loop.
- duxup 3y ago
  It certainly sets expectations and gamers have really adapted to it / seem to receive the whole process fairly well. I don't game like I used to but I was playing an early access game recently, got a pop up on a keyboard shortcut to submit a bug with a screen shot and the game state. Total win win for everyone.

proactivesvcs 3y ago

Not just the games industry, but software in general. Wube's commitment to efficiency and bug fixing is to be lauded.

throwaway03624 3y ago

No Man's Sky has a similar dedication. They have been constantly adding new features and expansions for free for the last 7 years. If this had been a different company, they might have saved some of those features for a version 2 or a paid DLC.

feoren 3y ago
Wait, No Man's Sky? That game? Was it bought or something? Do they still have that liar who went on interviews and lied through his teeth about the game? It's pretty rare to see a project based entirely on lies from a smarmy psycho liar ever actually go anywhere, right? Did they ever go back and actually implement any of the things he lied were already in the base game?
- ecuzzillo 3y ago
  Yes, they did go back. They basically used all the money they made from the hype and used it to make it real. Players bought them a billboard across from their office saying thank you. (https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/cr85av/the_billboard_is_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/cr85av/th... ) See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ for one rendition of the story.
- dgb23 3y ago
  No Man’s Sky is a redemption story.
  - deprecative 3y ago
    No, they polished a turd. It's still the same terrible gameplay loop they had at launch but convinced saps that it was better because they added more and more layers of paint onto it.
- blitz_skull 3y ago
  Yes, that game. You must check it out. Easily the best redemption arc of any game development story, ever. By a mile. It’s insane how much content has been put into the game.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

quchen 3y ago

I think the »literally unplayable« meme is from Factorio, or was made popular by it. Bug reports on Reddit ever since I bought it were on the level of »when the player is facing north, the shadow’s animation is slightly off«. I can’t think of a single bug I’ve encountered across many, many Factorio playthroughs, some including overhaul mods. In all the release notes, there is a sizeable section of bug fixes; time and time again, I was surprised that there were any bugs. Hats off to Wube, you’re a true inspiration.

fennecbutt 3y ago
Seems like it was popular much before that based on release dates/https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/literally-unplayable https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/literally-unplayable. True origin unknown. I know there are a lot of peculiar and hilarious hug reports for games like dwarf fortress, too.

tarr11 3y ago

Tears of the Kingdom went through a similar year long testing and refinement phase https://www.gamesradar.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-basically-finished-before-its-year-long-delay/ https://www.gamesradar.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-ba...

bryan_w 3y ago

Indeed, not to be completely throw Klei under the bus, but I started playing Oxygen Not Included, and the simulation quality is night and day. ONI has race conditions, memory corruption bugs, non-seeded RNG, duplication bugs. You couldn't play a non-glitched playthrough even if you tried. At some point, you're going to make an infinite spill or a liquid lock on complete accident. Meanwhile factorio allows you to benchmark it by opening a save and running it for a set number of ticks -- it's just that stable in its simulation. Not to say that ONI isn't a fun game, it has different elements (e.g. dupe management) that make it fun despite its instability.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
I tried ONI once, on my laptop, and it was running sluggishly ON THE MAIN MENU, not to mention early game. In comparison, Factorio only started to slow down late game (or during very heavy biter combat).