Factorio -- A game about building factories

[windgen]

The new trailer for Factorio is here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDZM0diiYc

You can try the demo, visit the forums, or buy the game (currently in alpha) at http://factorio.com  (Disclaimer:  I bought the game several months ago and I think it's worth every penny)

In Factorio, you've crash landed on a planet with hostile aliens, and you have to build enough industry to create a rocket system that can punch through the enemy's orbital defenses and allow a rescue fleet to extract you.  It starts out with Minecrafty survival stuff where you need to chop down trees and mine stone, coal and ore by hand, then smelt ore in furnaces so you can craft items.  Then you gradually get the ability to automate the process more and more.  E.g. you can build conveyor belts so you don't have to shuttle resources into and out of the furnaces.  And you get electric power later so you don't have to keep every individual mine stocked with coal for power, you can just build electric drills instead and connect them to a central power plant.

Also, your buildings cause pollution, which has inconvenient effects on the local aliens, like causing them to attack your base, or causing them to evolve into stronger units.  This is very similar to a recurring theme in Arcen games:  The computer player has very different rules than the human player, and will get stronger in response to the player's progress.

[Mick]

Looks interesting. I will check it out.

[mrhanman]

Wow, this has gotten a lot more impressive since the last time I looked at it.  I might have to get it soon.

[Mick]

This is really cool. Very impressive for an alpha.

[Aklyon]

Ah, factorio. The game where you always end up with a messy factory unless you rebuild everything later. Or just workaround the messiness with floating logistics robots.

[orzelek]

Thanks for this - game looks cool

[x4000]

It looks like the sort of thing I would love to build, or play, honestly.  A citybuilder where you aren't building cities?  Awesome.  I also love how well they've managed the perspective on the graphics despite it being 2D.  The movements of the train in particular.

[eRe4s3r]

I got hooked on Factorio for a while, until I realized it's failings and shortcomings. If Arcengames does a game like this, please for all that is holy make it stylized 3D. This game looks OK but uses over a gig of video ram. Mods can easily push this over 2GB.

This is exactly the kind of game nobody should ever use png sprites for animated buildings for. EVER.

Anyway, that said, this game is not so much about building factories as it is about building huge overland structures that sort of kinda interact with each other, barely. It would be more awesome if we could specify a lot more, if everything had a modular structure, right click on ARM OPTIONS -> Where to put item output, Where to take INPUT from, set rate (limited by joint and motor technology) etc... also I think the focus on this HUGE grid size is hurting the game. Things are off-scale so to speak. Everything is either way too large or way too small

I want a game like this, just more detailed, in stylized (meaning, not necessarily textured, just well animated and easily moddable) 3D. And then of course also a overview kind of thing where my huge factory has outputs and inputs that interacts with other factories, leading up to a large scale economical sim with trade and resource mining etc....

But it needs to be 3D. Why? Because the shape of an object across it's various production stages is pretty vital. And it needs to be sci-fi or 100% realistic (so basically, you won't be making robot arms out of X iron and X computer chips) ;P

I dunno if what I described would be fun or not, but I'd want to play it.. at least once ;P It could even be 2 games, 1 a hardcore sim, and 2 a puzzle game. "How to best design this production layout" applying all the current real world states of technologies used in manufacturing. But maybe abstracted to some extend..... ah yes ;P


By the way, in my dream hardcore eco sim, the above kinda merges in a "you landed on a new world and you have to colonize it, you have to choices, high-tech with low resources, or from scratch but with high resources, and there'd not be hostile animals. There'd be plant life that'd be slowly encroaching upon you. You need to build the various things that keep your colony running, water purifier, pumps, etc. and everything needs to somehow get from factory to building AND to the place where the "2nd Colony" is in need of your assistance (2 colonies, in order to allow for 2 different approaches to this). This plant life is ALIEN, and it's open to your imagination what that means. The game would have a VAST set of random properties that can appear on plants and planet.

So far I have no clue how to make this a fun game. But in my mind the setting would sound neat at least. Primary idea in all of this, is of course that "Not 2 games would be the same" in a general sense. It would not be a "Banished" where you build always the same colony, but in this you would need to build buildings taking into account the world you landed in. Meaning you design them like lego, with smaller modules. And your factories would need to manufacture those modules. (It'd have to be somehow turn/realtime based ala Total War)

Mhh, Factorio reminded me of this idea again. Either way, good game, but bad engine.

[Draco18s]

This is exactly the kind of game nobody should ever use png sprites for animated buildings for. EVER.

Gah, really?
I mean come on, APNG is a thing!

[eRe4s3r]

This is exactly the kind of game nobody should ever use png sprites for animated buildings for. EVER.

Gah, really?
I mean come on, APNG is a thing!

Oh it's a thing alright, for small things (hehe) but the bigger you get, it exponentially increases your VRAM usage..... and buildings have 4 directions... and when you animate them.. you suddenly have 4 directions with 4 different animation sets.... so you are stuck already with limiting your visuals and details.

And for example, that fancy diesel engine with wagon? You know how much VRAM is used for that? 84MB + 40MB for the Wagon.. so you are at 124MB VRAM usage, for 2 objects on the screen. (And yes, it's a huge sprite catalog for all possible directional situations the train can be in in a sprite-tile across 8 png files)

This kind of approach severely limits the kind of detail the developers can put in a game. Which means Factorio will never advance beyond Dyson Mod + Native ;/ If native puts more content in mods can put less content in.... there is a hard-limit to the amount of possible modifications for Factorio, and it's already been reached before the game is even fully done ;P

[Draco18s]

There are so many better ways to do that kind of crap >..x

[Aklyon]

This is exactly the kind of game nobody should ever use png sprites for animated buildings for. EVER.

Gah, really?
I mean come on, APNG is a thing!

There was even a kickstarter some time ago to make it more of a thing.

[eRe4s3r]

No.. just.. NO .. that's never gonna be a thing for games ;p

You will never see animated PNG's in a game engine because game engines do not understand PNG's.. they only know uncompressed or DXT compression. Even if a engine supports loading PNG, the real rendering happens uncompressed (in absolute worst case) or DXT compressed (in best case)

A game like Factorio should have been mixed 2D and 3D and 64bit, it would have allowed for infinite extension possibilities. Since you could just unload every asset not in vicinity from VRAM and thus have an infinite procedural world that doesn't blow up GPU's ;P Also the bonus of 3D objects is that setting the texture resolution down does not destroy as many details as setting a sprites resolution down Sprites upscaled = pixelated. Texture maps upscaled = blurry (but the 3D model gives it still definition). A pretty big difference when you are looking at something at various zoom levels ;p

A sprite game has the problem that the only "good" zoom distances are specific multiples of the resolution of the sprites. Meaning, maximum zoom is a sprites 1:1 resolution. Only zooming out beyond that works without destroying visuals.

That's why Pillars of Eternity does 3D characters and 3D spell effects. Sprites are superb for tile-sets. Sprites are terrible when you want to animate a lot of things on screen that are sharp at high resolutions

Exception. Sidescrollers and TOP DOWN games. But Factorio has a faux 2.5D view. Very odd choice imo. (From a technical standpoint)

[Aklyon]

I wasn't expecting it to actually work in a game.

It was just relevant to the APNGs.

[eRe4s3r]

I wasn't expecting it to actually work in a game.

It was just relevant to the APNGs.

Ah hehe just wanted to make sure nobody got misunderstandings ,)

 I really wish a game like Factorio would exist, except in 3D like KSP. I want to build my factories piece by piece, etc.... heck, KFP (Kerbal Factory Program) would be awesome.... and it'd be 100% moddable. Everyone can script with a simple language and logical production steps would result in actual objects. Simulating welding and screws and everything ;P