FFF (Factorio Friday Facts)
- https://www.goodoldtetris.com/ - http://farter.cn/tetr.js/
First one is "NES-style" with fast lock in, no ghost and so forth. Second one is for fast play, with ghost and no fast lock-in. I have no clue about current tetris, but i think that's the modern style, no???
Edit: I believe tetris friends was the website where i started playing more tetris some years ago and the version from farter came closest to it, after it got shut down
Thank you for sharing!
The real innovation was just teased at the end. Balancers (systems of belts and splitters than evenly distribute the contents of n belts to m belts) are tricky to get right and compact and so far as I know are only human-designed. A mechanism to automatically design them would be very interesting.
Then you can go figure out how many iron ore mining drills you need to keep a purple science factory running.
DoshDoshington is my favorite youtuber for this type of things, really intresting and the engineer mind that he has is fascinating
My favourite recent challenge was "New Game +", you start with all tech (perhaps except damage upgrades) unlocked, but biters also start at 1.0 evolution. You technically don't need any science to launch a rocket, but you still have to figure out how to build a mall (and enough defences) before triggering a single attack.
Factorio is an excellent tower defense game!
A weekend of watching movies/shorts feels way worse than a weekend growing the factory. It's definitely a step up, but the best would be to get out of the house more often besides going to the office.
One day at a time (recovering from a lot of past emotional pain).
It really is, isn't it. You're incentivized to protect every last thing, not because of some arbitrary points system, but because they're all part of a big, interconnected system that needs to work in order to survive.
In my book, Factorio is up there at the top of best games of all time.
The flowcharts are generally made with Foreman2 [https://github.com/DanielKote/Foreman2], yet another external tool
Both the calculator websites, https://factoriolab.github.io and https://kirkmcdonald.github.io also have both Sankey and Box-line flow diagrams
In-game calculator mods are Rate Calculator (that just shows the production ratios of selection), Helmod and Factory planner, don't have flow diagrams afaik
---
But with the new 2.0 DLC Quality and Recycling mechanics which makes every graph connection quintuple and bidirectional, the difficulty to calculate what's the best way to craft something of high quality is going to skyrocket
https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/12/dashboards?orgId=1&refresh...
Civilization: add more civics and techs and special resources, more civs, more units... It doesn't bring anything to the game. It just makes the excel more annoying to deal with. I paid for Phoenix Point (from the creator of XCOM). Nice game but when they asked for feedback it was just about wishing either more units or more maps or more factions, which would you prefer? None! How about making the core mechanic more fluid so there's less "oh I didn't mean that"? Or the crashing and having to start over after many updates.
What would really make Factorio better? I don't know. Maybe a simplified interface? There's so many ctrl-click things and having to place and stock turrets in a hurry that it just makes me not want to start the game etc.
There are also a lot of Quality of Life changes in the new version.
I would say, still, that SE was the missing expansion so I've already had the expansion and I'm not that tempted by the new updates (Except for elevated rails!)
The SE author also showed impeccable taste in game design, improving on the base game, their beacon change being a good example, running over pipes another one.
Satisfactory has a range of useful tools like this to plan your factory (if you don't want to do it manually), and they can quickly explode in complexity.
At first it's mind-bogglingly daunting but breaking it down into smaller parts then addressing them down the DAG makes it more digestible. When you finally complete an end goal it's very satisfying.
Guess I’ll have to wait and see for myself when I have organized my life around another Factorio dive.
I think Satisfctory has some interesting game design choices that promote that. Since mines give a fixed round number of primary resources and factories also process round number of items like 15, 12, 30, 60, 90 and so on I'm immediately incentivsed to think how many factories of each type do I need along the chain so so that all inputs are processed. No other game prompted me to do this much simple math in my head. Thinking about whole network of dependecies with their throuput is the natural next step and since it's getting unwieldy for a brain then writing a tool for this is the next one since you already understand what the tool needs to do very well because you were doing it yourself up to that point.
In games like Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program the information about throughput of factories is somewhat obscured so it's not easy to do these calculations in your brain so I don't do that and just go with visual feedback about whether factory is starved or overwhelmed.
Until this week, I had a fancy tree visualization similar to the article's content (except that the location of the nodes was hardcoded). I spent quite some time to implement it and get it right, and it was difficult to maintain and update when adding new content.
Also, one feedback that I got from early testers is that this is confusing, and they didn't know how to read it.
I think that the main problem is that in such a graph, it is difficult to know if a branch means "A is an ingredient to make B" or "A is a machine that you can use to make B".
I spent time this week replacing it with a dumb list showing individual recipes in the form of an equation like "A = B + C", and I find it not only easier to understand, but also way cheaper to maintain.
You can see the previous version in one of the screenshots (fifth thumbnail): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2597060/Astral_Divide/
And the first draft of the new version: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@sebc/113327870376150885
digraph { a -> b -> c -> a }
Here's minimal syntax for drawing directed graphs with image nodes, in the style the Wolfram example uses: digraph {
node [label="", style="none", shape="plaintext",
fixedsize="true", imagescale="false",
width=1.0, height=1.0]
copper_plate [image="Copper_plate.png"]
copper_cable [image="Copper_cable.png"]
copper_plate -> copper_cable [label=" 50 trillion"]
}
Have you actually read what new content is coming, or are you just saying things?
There is a ton of new mechanics. Theres a ton of improved mechanics. And then there's a ton of new content. Everything you critises as missing is actually in the DLC
I don't really have the will to do the math in my head either, specially since things may change frequently as you upgrade/add/remove things and a throughput at one place causes a cascading change throughout the production chain.