I may be wrong, but based on the FFF it appears that you have three different processes that update a single variable, but that variable is shared between each. (...) I also suspect that this isn't the correct path for parallelization any way, you'll likely find that each step itself could be paral...

creating/reaping threads costs time too. I do hope you're not doing that every tick?

Notwithstanding the interesting discussion about whether your analysis is right, I have a suggestion for achieving parallel thread update isolation at whatever granularity you need without moving data as entities move. Given N threads that will be updating in parallel some object type T, create N s...

Regarding skipping stations: How about a set of conditions on whether to visit a station, in addition to the wait conditions? Normally this would be an empty list, meaning the station is visited. Adding a rule like 'Fuel less than X MJ' or 'Cargo of Iron less than 8000' could make a station be skipp...

Hello, I have an idea about the iteration over the electric network items. Because most of the time you have enough power the second loop can be skipped. So all machines have a default that they take 100% power in the first iteration you calculate the total power need. If you have enough you stop t...

Regarding the problem that no-one reads the tips and tricks, one possible solution is to add a tip to the loading screen at the start of the game. (Obviously I'm meaning a different tip each time the game loads). +1, putting tips on a loading screen is standard game design now. Our loading screen i...

That solves the landfill cheat, but that's just as easily solved by deducting multiple landfill if the tile correction logic needs to add additional land tiles.

You still need tile correction logic during normal world generation.

It seems to me that a relatively easy way to resolve would be to use something like a 4-way flood fill algorithm starting at the player start location and use it to count land tiles surrounding the player above sea level. Maybe allow the player to set the value. For example a value of 40,000 would ...

And underground belt upgrades aren't bidirectional either.

@Max, you don't want to do that. The cost of the unaligned access of your double member (especially if it happens to cross a cache line boundary) is more expensive than the extra bandwidth used from padding.

Regarding optimisations, have you considered using database techniques to optimise out that huge annoyance that is Autosave? A large production database cannot afford to lock up for several minutes every few minutes to write everything to disk; if you use an approach like the redo log stuff in Orac...

I do agree with you that mrvn's table of waypoints idea sounds a lot like a n^2 problem. That's just space. Computationally, it's travelling salesman, which is NP. I'd hazard it's probably cheaper computationally and more effective to route within the coverage area instead of between explicit robop...

If that pointer is being accessed often, then it is probably in cache. That means the extra indirection itself is relatively cheap, especially if doing things that way results in code that generates more cache hits and lower overall cache misses. But it's still one extra memory region, taking up va...

Have the developers ever defined what they mean by "large bases" and "mega bases"? It would be useful to know (in terms of number of entities/factories/bots/belts) when reading about how these optimizations are tested and measured. Excellent point. Some people might think a rock...

I don't know your code of course, and I'm hampered because my experience is C not C++. Depending on the list and the type of removals, I'd wonder if you really need to delete them or can just mark them inactive. If a new entity gets placed on the map (or one gets removed), then yes the list needs t...

You guys are using... linked lists?... Why, oh why do you use linked lists? It is supposed to be common knowledge that in almost all situations even a straight vector is better. At the very least something like C++'s deque would be better. Tell me how you'd get: O(1) time to turn an entity on/off a...

Very many entities will be aware ahead of time when they will next need to do work. An assembler doesn't need to do a thing for X ticks until its craft is done. An inserter is doing nothing for Y ticks until its swing is complete. Etc. Even an inserter hovering over a belt can predict to some degre...

A linked list of multiply-inheriting classes? I'd have expected an array of structs. I'm surprised to. I'd have expected C++ to handle virtual function calls and inheritance at compile-time, but apparently things are setup so that some of the required class structure isn't known until run-time? Thi...

A linked list of multiply-inheriting classes? I'd have expected an array of structs.

Let's imagine the following scenario: Bots are removing/placing rails which changes the rail network causing rerouting. On your beefy 8-core machine the recalculation happens immediately, a train repaths and goes his merry way. A bot places another rail piece. On your friend's lowly 2-core machine,...