Factorio that you can touch (factorio.com)
284 points by ibobev 8 hours ago
NelsonMinar 6 hours ago
Wube is such a unique game studio. They do a lot of very solid technical work and look like they have fun doing it. I particularly appreciated their recent post about porting Factorio to ARM64. They had a business reason to do it but it's clear the team was mostly just curious about whether ARM64 was a viable gaming platform now. And then shared the results with us. They seem like fun hacker guys.
twiclo 6 hours ago
I've never played a game where it was more obvious that the developers really played and enjoyed their game. It's just brimming with QoL features.
nerusskyhigh 5 hours ago
The modern doom saga gives me the same vibes. The team really poured their hearth in it!
duskwuff 2 hours ago
IIRC, a number of the team members started as players.
pphysch 3 hours ago
Factorio is in that top-tier. I just tried Core Keeper and had the same feeling, gushing with QoL and thoughtful design. Refreshing to play sandbox-y games where mods don't feel mandatory.
JMiao 4 hours ago
It helps they don’t have a publisher to confuse them with quantitative and qualitative pattern matching. Just make the game you play and judge it honestly. Of course, the second part is a rare ability.
AceJohnny2 4 hours ago
This is what being very successful (but still focused) gets you.
vconnor 7 minutes ago
Success is downstream to passion, not the other way around.
sandworm101 2 hours ago
Yes but they have fallen into a success trap. I have seen the same trend with Mincraft, KSP and Subnautica. An indi developer starts with a great concept and a true open world game. The player can progress through the tech tree how they choose but doing so requires exploration. All is good. Then the developer starts to tighten the reigns. The tech tree become more rigid. Exploration must happen in a more specific order. And then the graphics department takes over, adding more and more objects until a previously huge and open world is a tightly cluttered mess.
Think of how subnautica moved. The second game was very literally denser to the point that they slowed down movement to preserve any sense of space. And each step inthe tech tree required specific tools from a specific place. No more free explorations. No more alternatives. The player lost control over the story. Subnautica 3 is now so dense and linear I gave up after a week. It is more a decorated fishtank than open world.
I still play factorio (1000x) but I do not play the new planets. That whole rocket process is so locked down that there is little for me to enjoy. I get bored whenever there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.
scubbo 2 hours ago
This is a weird perspective. The middle planets can be approached in any order. And mods allow near-infinite variety - especially those that build on the platform of custom planets.
> there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.
Sounds to me like you are caught up in trying to chase optimization and bemoaning the fact that there's only one optimal strategy. Do a no trains run! Or a no bots run. Or a 1000x science modifier run, or Lazy Bastard, or Death World, or... there are plenty of constraints, both programmed-in or self-imposed, that can push you out of the "standard" optimal strategy.
sandworm101 an hour ago
sneurlax 2 hours ago
Do you play Space Age just on Nauvis or are you playing without Space Age entirely?
mococa 4 hours ago
I love Factorio, but I can't play it - it's way too addictive. If I start on a Friday, I won't stop until Monday
spaceclay 2 hours ago
I still believe Factorio fundamentally rewired the way I think about software and engineering more broadly... prepared me better for my first software internship than any class I'd taken
The whole game really drills in what it means to "think like a computer scientist". Abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, etc
komodo99 2 hours ago
With actual (virtual) drills!
mococa 2 hours ago
Agree - I see Kafka on it!
jl6 4 hours ago
Which Monday?
chapinb 2 hours ago
I felt this
fkozlowski 3 hours ago
It's a great way to rebuild a sense of agency for me. I find the weekend binge a good way to feel like I can effect changes in the world.
lucb1e 2 hours ago
Not sure if this seems too random but I think that's what I like about OpenStreetMap editing: it's only a few clicks to improve the map and thousands or more people will come across it. You're changing the world in one of the literal senses of the phrase, and can do it from an armchair (doing quality assurance or using aerial imagery) or use it as motivation to seek out places near you that you've not visited yet. Maybe that's something you'd enjoy as well
_doctor_love 4 hours ago
A bit like the old Bill Hicks joke: "I was a weekend drinker - I would start on Saturday, and then by Friday I..."
adamsb6 4 hours ago
you can stop?
BatFastard 2 hours ago
You think Factorio its self is bad? Try the Space Exploration mod! It expands the game with a ton of fun new problems.
mitxela 6 hours ago
Remember that Factorio does not release its 3D models. Everything in the game is a 2D render of a 3D model, which is why the game uses so much VRAM.
gizmo686 6 hours ago
As far as the game in concerned, the sprites are all just 2D assets. The fact that those assets came from a 3d model during development has no effect on performance. They also do manual post-processing on most of the 2D renders.
mitxela 5 hours ago
Literally what I just said
xboxnolifes 4 hours ago
Sohcahtoa82 5 hours ago
?
The game doesn't consume that much VRAM. It plays on 4 GB GPUs just fine. The GPU only needs to keep resident what's currently on the screen. Even including every animation frame, that's 1 GB tops.
Hell, the minimum requirements are a GeForce 750 Ti, or Radeon r7 360. Those are 2 GB GPUs.
daedrdev 3 hours ago
In fact, sometimes when your game lags too much you can speed it up by zooming in! (Only in some cases)
lucb1e 3 hours ago
> The game doesn't consume that much VRAM. It plays on 4 GB GPUs just fine.
Not everyone bought a GPU to run LLMs on. That is quite a bit of VRAM, especially for non-desktops
officeplant 3 hours ago
jamesgeck0 2 hours ago
fabian2k an hour ago
BatFastard 2 hours ago
Sohcahtoa82 3 hours ago
vlyan 5 hours ago
it does?
I don't have it installed now (lest I get tempted into a quick 2-hour session and end up being late for work 12 hours later), but IIRC it performed the same for me on iGPU and 4090, even on the big saves running below 60 FPS/UPS.
tasuki 3 hours ago
> Everything in the game is a 2D render of a 3D model, which is why the game uses so much VRAM.
Surely from first principles one'd expect 3D models to be heavier than the 2D renders, due to the extra axis?
namrog84 an hour ago
Purely from a vram perspective. A triangle is just 3 vertices and some edges. A few bytes of data.
A similar 2d image of a triangle would likely be thousands of bits of data.
The 2d probably uses a little less per pixel. Whereas the triangle has slightly more expensive compute per pixel cost. But modern gpu have dedicated hardware for that.
3d is probably more expensive compute but cheaper vram usage. At least to a point and a certain set of conditions. Barring things like textures and others.
dymk 7 minutes ago
katzenq 5 hours ago
Do they really load so many spirites into memory it's heavier than 3D?
Sohcahtoa82 5 hours ago
There are assumptions being made about texture resolution.
The high quality sprites are 64 pixels across per tile. With each tile being 1 meter, 1 pixel is 1.56 cm (About 0.63 inches) across. By today's standards, that's a very low texture resolution, though they can get away with it when your camera is so far away.
But if the game was 3D, you could expect players to put the camera closer to your objects. You'd need significantly higher texture resolutions. And you'd need a texture for each part of the object.
Meanwhile, consider a 3x3 object. That's 192x192 = 36,864 pixels. Assume it has a 60 fps, 2-second animation loop. That's 4,423,680 pixels. With 8 bytes per channel and 4 channels (RGBA), that's about 17.7 MB, which allows you to store 56 objects per GB.
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but we're making some huge assumptions. Not all objects are 3x3 tiles. Most don't have 120 frames of animation.
And as I mentioned in another comment, you don't need to store ALL the game's art in VRAM at once. Only what's on the screen. And you can certainly fit an entire screen's worth of animations in a 2 GB GPU.
soulbadguy 4 hours ago
mitxela 5 hours ago
Yes. Several GB. I had to enable half resolution to play modded Space Age.
sdenton4 4 hours ago
conorcleary 6 hours ago
Somehow the engineering behind this will help that fly and all his viewpoint windows
schobi 5 hours ago
Oh - but only touching them?
I was hoping for an iteration of a factorio belt that could actually move!
pennomi an hour ago
I thought you were going to taste them for a second.
Cieric 7 hours ago
I'm (hopefully) getting a G1X soon, so I think I'm going to put it to work printing this stuff out. I'm now excited for this as a use case and I kind of hope someone builds something to convert an existing factorio world into a 3d model, though it might be to big to actually print so maybe a way to take a section would be even better.
throwaway219450 6 hours ago
Blueprint would be easiest. Grep for printable entities, count how many you need and the grid extent.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Blueprint_string_format
(Also unrelated, I think by clearance they mean tolerance?)
sdenton4 4 hours ago
Omg, this is so my jam...
I'm looking forward to making a Factorio themed war game table. Star Wars Legion on the factory planet...
evv 4 hours ago
not me hoping for an official factorio board game
hobofan an hour ago
Not quite Factorio, but Satisfactory has a board game in the works: https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/1wj4gc6/i...
tasuki 2 hours ago
There was an attempt, with a very well known board game designer. They got along well, but didn't find a board game in it.
annoyingnoob 2 hours ago
I imagine it takes a football field and a small building full of pieces. Sounds like fun!
mcphage 3 hours ago
Until then, there's Factory Fun, and Factory Funner.
lucb1e 3 hours ago
not you? Is that an expression I should know, meaning the opposite presumably?
john_strinlai 3 hours ago
yes, "not me X" means "absolutely me X", in gen-z form.
i typically interpret it as having a hint of embarrassment to it (e.g. "not me eating instant ramen for dinner for the 3rd time"), but not always.
Sir_Twist 5 hours ago
Based on the title I thought this would be about adapting Factorio for touch controls, but this is way more interesting. The folks at Wube have such a unique sense of technical curiosity.
thendrill 6 hours ago
I love this <3 Wube should be the example the game industry follows
atemerev 5 hours ago
Real-world Factorio, aka composable manufacturing, aka "factories building drones building factories", aka universal constructor, is the next trillion dollar company.
darkmighty 5 hours ago
The entire planet taken as a whole is already a form of universal constructor ;)
atemerev 3 hours ago
But we can't program it yet.
Animats 2 hours ago
Now try to get a Factorio-Lego collaboration going.
choo-t 19 minutes ago
It's in the vote, support it : https://ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/e71b69f4-827f-47dc-be5e...
Not as sexy as the satisfactory one tho : https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/1vw7hb0/i...
breckenedge 6 hours ago
The factory must grow.
ill-ion 6 hours ago
This project looks simple until you realize how much engineering went into it.
The original assets were never meant to be physical, so they had to completely re-engineer isometric tricks and floating geometry for 3D printing. Releasing the files instead of an expensive collector's edition is a classic Factorio move, and I personally love it. Now the community can remix these and build some awesome stuff that the original devs could never imagine. Awesome stuff!
cogythea 3 hours ago
What a good AI-generated summary of the article!
lastscattering 6 hours ago
Fun thing about taking Factorio physical is that the game already has a real scale. A tile is a metre, that's what the km/h readouts for vehicles are based on. So a yellow belt moves at basically walking pace, and the engineer runs everywhere at about 30 km/h all day without getting tired. The mining drill that eats a whole ore patch is a 3x3m box.
zelias 3 hours ago
guessing the suit has an exoskeleton built into by default, and the exoskeleton equipment simply boosts the performance