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Friday Facts #165 - Death by a thousand cuts
Right now when you want to customize a particular mod you have to: [olist]Know what folder the mods are stored on your computer Unzip the mod Figure out what line of which file has the thing you want to change Save and optionally re-zip the mod Hope what you changed is compatible with the way the rest of the mod works[/olist]
The game also forces everyone playing on the same multiplayer session to have identical mod files so any changes you've made make it impossible for you to join others unless they also have made those changes. This also makes it difficult for mod developers to troubleshoot bug reports because they don't know what you might have changed.
This is obviously not so great and I want to address the main problem: there's no good way for mod developers to give users any portable way to configure their mods.
To fix this we're going to add the ability for mods to define settings that will be presented like our in-game options menu now under a new section "options -> mods". This will let mods give some basic information about what kind of setting they have and we can present it to the player in a (hopefully) nice GUI with verification and feedback about why what they've entered isn't valid (if it's not valid) as well as the ability to change them runtime should the particular setting allow it.
We can then sync these settings on joining multiplayer sessions (or not should you not want your settings to carry between games) and everything will just work.
My (Rseding91) favorite tasks are still optimizations. I can sit for hours (sometimes all day) working on improving some section of the code and not get bored. 0.12 saw a major improvement in performance and during 0.13 development there were a few edge case slowdowns that got fixed but nothing much was done during 0.14 development. For 0.15 I've started looking again at performance and not at the obvious slow areas. Mostly because there aren't any obvious huge slow areas (or we already know that 25,000 belts tend to be slow) but all of the surrounding code that gets run each tick. Honza (another Factorio developer) said it best to me the other day: "I think our performance issues are death by a thousand cuts." meaning there's no one thing that's particularly slow but everything is just a little bit slow. I took a few larger save files and started looking at them and every time I would re-run the profiler some small piece of code would show up taking 1-2% of the time. I'd spend 20~ minutes re-writing it and then it takes < 0.1% of the time (not accurately measurable by the profiler). I did that for 3 days and when I finished with the saves I had the end result was almost a 2x speedup over 0.14. Our test suite was invaluable during all of this to make sure I didn't break anything in the name of performance. The great part about these "micro optimizations" is that they are almost never specific to one thing but are shared pieces of code so improvements to them gives general gains across the entire game. The save files I was testing with that would run around 30 UPS in 0.14 are now running between 55 and 60 UPS in 0.15. There are still many more areas like this that can be addressed so I'm always interested in unique save files that stress different parts of the game.
Albert has spent some time this past week making a test render to see how the new train models will hold up in higher resolution settings, and has put together this UHD render of a simple train scene.
While the final render may look very pretty, it only has a minimal amount of post-processing applied, instead relying on the setup of the scene and the specifics of the render to really show off the latest models. As always, let us know what you think on our forums
[ 2016-11-18 19:41:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
Mod settings
Right now when you want to customize a particular mod you have to: [olist]
Optimizations
My (Rseding91) favorite tasks are still optimizations. I can sit for hours (sometimes all day) working on improving some section of the code and not get bored. 0.12 saw a major improvement in performance and during 0.13 development there were a few edge case slowdowns that got fixed but nothing much was done during 0.14 development. For 0.15 I've started looking again at performance and not at the obvious slow areas. Mostly because there aren't any obvious huge slow areas (or we already know that 25,000 belts tend to be slow) but all of the surrounding code that gets run each tick. Honza (another Factorio developer) said it best to me the other day: "I think our performance issues are death by a thousand cuts." meaning there's no one thing that's particularly slow but everything is just a little bit slow. I took a few larger save files and started looking at them and every time I would re-run the profiler some small piece of code would show up taking 1-2% of the time. I'd spend 20~ minutes re-writing it and then it takes < 0.1% of the time (not accurately measurable by the profiler). I did that for 3 days and when I finished with the saves I had the end result was almost a 2x speedup over 0.14. Our test suite was invaluable during all of this to make sure I didn't break anything in the name of performance. The great part about these "micro optimizations" is that they are almost never specific to one thing but are shared pieces of code so improvements to them gives general gains across the entire game. The save files I was testing with that would run around 30 UPS in 0.14 are now running between 55 and 60 UPS in 0.15. There are still many more areas like this that can be addressed so I'm always interested in unique save files that stress different parts of the game.
Rendering test
Albert has spent some time this past week making a test render to see how the new train models will hold up in higher resolution settings, and has put together this UHD render of a simple train scene.
While the final render may look very pretty, it only has a minimal amount of post-processing applied, instead relying on the setup of the scene and the specifics of the render to really show off the latest models. As always, let us know what you think on our forums
[ 2016-11-18 19:41:03 CET ] [ Original post ]
Factorio
Wube Software LTD.
Developer
Wube Software LTD.
Publisher
2020-08-14
Release
Game News Posts:
506
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
Overwhelmingly Positive
(164072 reviews)
The Game includes VR Support
Public Linux Depots:
- Factorio Linux64 [306.86 M]
- Factorio Linux32 [300.1 M]
Available DLCs:
- Factorio: Space Age
Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories. You will be mining resources, researching technologies, building infrastructure, automating production and fighting enemies. In the beginning you will find yourself chopping trees, mining ores and crafting mechanical arms and transport belts by hand, but in short time you can become an industrial powerhouse, with huge solar fields, oil refining and cracking, manufacture and deployment of construction and logistic robots, all for your resource needs. However this heavy exploitation of the planet's resources does not sit nicely with the locals, so you will have to be prepared to defend yourself and your machine empire.
Join forces with other players in cooperative Multiplayer, create huge factories, collaborate and delegate tasks between you and your friends. Add mods to increase your enjoyment, from small tweak and helper mods to complete game overhauls, Factorio's ground-up Modding support has allowed content creators from around the world to design interesting and innovative features. While the core gameplay is in the form of the freeplay scenario, there are a range of interesting challenges in the form of the Scenario pack, available as free DLC. If you don't find any maps or scenarios you enjoy, you can create your own with the in-game Map Editor, place down entities, enemies, and terrain in any way you like, and even add your own custom script to make for interesting gameplay.
Discount Disclaimer: We don't have any plans to take part in a sale or to reduce the price for the foreseeable future.
Join forces with other players in cooperative Multiplayer, create huge factories, collaborate and delegate tasks between you and your friends. Add mods to increase your enjoyment, from small tweak and helper mods to complete game overhauls, Factorio's ground-up Modding support has allowed content creators from around the world to design interesting and innovative features. While the core gameplay is in the form of the freeplay scenario, there are a range of interesting challenges in the form of the Scenario pack, available as free DLC. If you don't find any maps or scenarios you enjoy, you can create your own with the in-game Map Editor, place down entities, enemies, and terrain in any way you like, and even add your own custom script to make for interesting gameplay.
Discount Disclaimer: We don't have any plans to take part in a sale or to reduce the price for the foreseeable future.
What people say about Factorio
- No other game in the history of gaming handles the logistics side of management simulator so perfectly. - Reddit
- I see conveyor belts when I close my eyes. I may have been binging Factorio lately. - Notch, Mojang
- Factorio is a super duper awesome game where we use conveyor belts to shoot aliens. - Zisteau, Youtube
MINIMAL SETUP
- OS: Linux (tarball installation)
- Processor: Dual core 3Ghz+Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 3.3 core. DirectX 10.1 capable GPU with 512 MB VRAM - GeForce GTX 260. Radeon HD 4850 or Intel HD Graphics 5500
- Storage: 3 GB available space
- OS: Linux (tarball installation)
- Processor: Quad core 3GHz+Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 4.3 core. DirectX 11 capable GPU with 2 GB VRAM - GeForce GTX 750 Ti. Radeon R7 360
- Storage: 3 GB available space
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