Reading that thread, a lot of the participants strike me as having little to no experience in the subject. I'm no game developer myself, but as a programmer, I have no doubt whatsoever that a switch to 3D rendering would resolve all the memory and fidelity problems. The only issue is the difficulty...

Factorio will not move to 3D. That would be too much of an overhaul. We did consider rendering some entities as 3D models (trains for examples) to save the video memory but even that would cause a lot of headaches, because they wouldn't look consistent with the rest of graphics. I think if you had ...

Drury wrote:The stops should be facing the outer ends and the trains need two engines facing opposite directions.

Holy crap! Two engines! That would be why! Man, would be great if the game actually taught us that.

Anywho. Thanks mate.

Factorio could be fairly easily and efficiently rendered in 3D. There is a lot of object repetition in the game, which means you can apply model batching on the GPU. It would work fairly well. However there are always trade-offs. The key one would be that you wouldn't be able to get anywhere near th...

I'm currently playing through the campaign and am stuck on the level where trains are first introduced. The tracks are meant to support a single train going back and forth between two dead-end stops. Once I fix the track and ensure both ends have a automated stop I put the train on and sometimes it'...

Indeed many systems these days can support much higher resolution textures. The devs would do well to ensure their game is at least future proof in this regard.

I personally find the default zoom level too small and I like to zoom in a little but unfortunately it looks like Factorio isn't currently employing any Level of Detail (LoD) to higher texture resolutions when zooming in. It causes the game to get a bit blurry and unsatisfying. I think if the game i...