It looks like it's supposed to be an electricity supply, or possibly an electrical weapon. It doesn't look like something that speeds up production in nearby units. With the varied orientations, etc., it also looks like something that'll drive OCD people mad for no particularly good reason (I unders...

General rules for tutorials: Players like to know what to do: now, next and in the future. Players want to do that themselves. They don't want you having to spoonfeed them and limiting the speed at which they can do it (if I want to wait for things to scroll and read the whole tooltip, I will, but d...

We need a big bassy sound for the largest biters/spitters, something to invoke fear as you hear them coming towards you.

1 x Global List/Array/whatever of pointers to all entities, each with a type inside it. 1 x List/Array/whatever for each "type" of entity that needs to be handled separately, stored as a set of pointers to each of those entities. Even for a thousand particles, the memory overhead is pathetic - basic...

P.S. Re: pathfinding: It would probably be too heavy for something like Factorio, but in the past I've implemented A* with a twist - rather than just a graph of points weighted only by distance between them that they navigate through, I have it so that the points are weighted by future AI movements....

I gave up on making MacOS ports of various things I have. It seemed to be almost impossible without paying for a developer licence (for iPad/iPhone apps), lots of accounts and signing tools, and then *only* using XCode to compile (even when you use other tools, the only reliable way seemed to be to ...

Oh my, that is your server room.... Ordinary shelving. Window open for cooling. No UPS, or are those the 2 boxea at the bottom. Come on guys you should be doing better than this. Former Network Manager. I forgive you so long as you keep producing such an awesome game. But server room... Airco, UPS,...

In terms of debugging multiplayer, can't you just pull a frozen state out of the multiplayer server for offline replay for, say, the last dozen ticks? Then if you crash out, you could instruct the server to send you that state, and then replay it offline to your heart's content without interfering w...

NULL checks are critical and should be absolutely everywhere. And result in instant failure of the application, with full debugging trace. The first line of any new C function that I write is literally just a list of any pointer parameters with: assert(parameter != NULL); assert(parameter2 != NULL);...

Would have been simpler, and a better idea, to just let the ban commands have proper quoting applied, so you can ban "awkward user name". The restrictions on usernames just suggest laziness around the "we don't want to have to care about sanitising our string-handling, we'll just limit what the user...

Been here a while. Played thousands of hours. Not a fan of 17 at all so far. Bear in mind that I went into it knowing only "this is now possible", not playing through hours of tutorials and googling. First, it messed with the gui scaling so I was squinting at text and had to reset the gui scaling ba...

I always mark the cargo wagons of trains with filtered spaces. That way, it helps stop contamination of the lines, and if it should accidentally stop at some other station it won't fill up with junk. Is there a way to do that in one stroke? I did not find a way other than doing it cell by cell and ...

Huh. I never even thought to try it on a car or train. I've wanted it in chests since I learned it was in trains though. I always mark the cargo wagons of trains with filtered spaces. That way, it helps stop contamination of the lines, and if it should accidentally stop at some other station it won...

It's quite tricky to setup and I doubt I still have the save, but for one game where I had a load of leftover stuff I did this: - Managed to find a HUGE island, totally surrounded by water, with aliens on it. - I built all around the island without actually joining to it but safely out of range of a...

Emulating a PC on ARM would be atrocious, obviously. For emulation think "10 times at least". Wanna emulate a 4.77MHz Z80? You need 50MHz or thereabouts to do it any justice at all, not including other hardware. Running natively - the code wouldn't be too hard to port and compile (a lot of work, but...

Surely, the latter problem is just a question of changing how inventories are modified. i.e. you CANNOT modify the inventory without triggering that code. e.g. private data in a class, with only a limited public interface, so you can't tinker things out of inventories without using a stated function...

Please make "saving" reset the autosave timer too. It's so annoying to save, only to then have the game save again just a short while later. Or to load in again and a little while later it does an autosave. Especially if it's a save that you reload several times in a row while you try to resolve som...

16.6ms is eons in computer-speak, about 50 million cpu cycles at 3ghz.... Instead of dropping a fame that can't be drawn wouldn't it be more visually pleasing to have a subroutine hold on to whatever the current/last frame data was, and constantly feed that at 60 fps whether or not you can update t...

Survey doesn't work (only by people in a domain, etc.). I don't care which name you choose for anything, just pick one and stick to it! I call them drones, not bots, because that's what they are. I call the uranium ores "bright and dark". I only ever call the biters "aliens", not their types, and th...

Without pretending to know exactly how SDL and GPU's work... why do frames that can't be rendered in time get dropped? Shouldn't the game be writing (ideally, only the changed pixels) to some sort of frame buffer that is constantly updated as the screen is polled? My understanding of screen tearing...