It's also fair to say that the engineer would be wearing some form of ear protection in their factory. The heavy clang clang sound of a thousand machines will add up quickly, and any engineer without earplugs will quickly find themselves in trouble. The first types of sounds to get suppressed from e...

Audible feedback is very important for situational awareness, How much situational awareness does sound really need to provide? There's nothing in the factory that can really hurt you or fail in some catastrophic way. There can be one thing or a thousand moving things, and it doesn't really change ...

I'm going to throw my vote down for keeping most sounds in the theme of being comfy background noise. Factorio is neither a dedicated action game nor a sensory melting experience. The greatest challenges come from the player sitting back and going "hmm", which doesn't mix very well with st...

I'm wondering if the belts could have unique sounds based on their contents. So for example if a belt is filled with ore it would have a sound of dirty rumbling gravel. Higher tech items might cleaner sounds like tapping metal or plastic. I'm not a sound designer so I dunno how cute or clever it wou...

Storage automatically looks for storage chests with an item filter or a matching item to combine. Buffer chests do the same except more explicit, and remain lower priority than blue chests.

I mean, by that definition Supreme Commander (2007) is also a multi-threaded RTS. The video renderer ran separately from the main sim, and there were a handful of other bits and pieces on the side. I used to comment that it was a 2.5 core game, but the big bottleneck was clearly the main sim. There'...

A gigantic ammo belt looping around the base can get pretty messy, but a mini belt to feed guns around an outpost works just fine. Just keep in mind that the pollution cost of ammo is VERY high, so simply fighting off biters will create enough pollution to spawn even more biters. It's generally bett...

It sounds like it may be fun as a collection of game scenarios. I think a similar game mode already exists, where each round requires a certain pile of resources to progress.

Threading clearly implies a well of bottomless CPU potential and infinite UPS gains, at least to the ordinary person. Unfortunately, it isn't free. There is a meta cost of supporting algorithms that is inherent to threading, and one of big advantages of modern CPUs is they are optimized to pay a low...

The problem seems pretty straight forward. If the train station maxes out and hard caps, then the pathing for any other trains will break. Broken pathing causes trains to stop. Stopped trains ruin everyone's day. When does a station decide that it's full? Is it when the trains choose the station as ...

The idea of mini scenarios sounds like a good option. A lot of problems with a traditional campaign disappear with that approach. For example, continuity between scenarios is no longer important. Each scenario is a standalone project, so having overlaps in objectives or similar puzzles is okay. A no...

A big save file is basically a pile of blueprints ripe for the picking. If none of your games actually used those BPs, were they even worth anything?

I think it'd be fine if the "continue" button changed to a "reconnect" button if multiplayer was the last game played. For bonus points, the button can have a popup showing exactly what it thinks "continue/reconnect" thinks it's supposed to do. So if it's trying to relo...

Oh hey, are we talking about campaigns? Each of the two proposed approaches have their dilemmas. A huge problem with the growing world concept is that you may pick a factory design that works well in the early constrained stages, but gets completely ruined by future map growth. For example you might...

The absolute HAIL of brass spraying out of the rifle is pure gold. Unf.

I gave 18 + 18 bits for X and Y. I agree, that can be not enough, that's just an example. 16 bytes may be still good achievement. State bits unpacking shouldn’t be a problem, register bit masking and shifting are superfast operations. There's always a way to trade off between CPU cycles and memory ...

But building larger reactors is more efficient, meaning you need less of them. That should be less laggy. You're talking about a difference of like 20 reactor cores in a gigantic base. The number of heat pipes and turbines don't really change, so you can probably count the difference in CPU cycles ...

Does this mean the game world can have random "particle" effects that pop up whenever?

Monitors don't get any brighter than the outdoor sun, so I dunno how so many eyes are getting injured. It may be time to invest in some TV curtains. :lol: I can see the need to maintain strong color contrast for clarity's sake. For example it's much harder to see the colors on the T1 belt icon compa...

I think, in general I agree with those who have wished for more contrast between a healthy looking nature and areas exploited and polluted by the player. A good way to do that is to make healthy nature brighter. That increases the level of contrast for when pollution drags it back down again. That ...