Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of mechanics

[Mike5000]

The change to the first post did break the link to the FFF blog post. There is a ¨ at the end of the link.

Fixed, thanks

Actually it's still wrong because it now links to #267 instead of #266.

[posila]

LOL, thanks, fixed

[Rythe]

Why downgrade the only thing that makes Factorio what it is - the great moddable engine?

To give you that answer you're looking for:

Wube has a very specific idea of how Factorio should be played. They've even got an achievement telling you that. If you play the game the way they think you should play the game, that is, enjoy the game the same way they enjoy the game, then it's all fine. Otherwise, you're not their target audience and they don't really care.

The slippery slope you're looking at is one where, for people outside of Wube's target niche, your experience might get trimmed out for trivial gains to the target niche.

It's their choice, if unfortunate for those who fall outside their niche. On the other hand, gives more opportunity for another game to pick up in those areas they've no interest in.

[Mike5000]

Wube has a very specific idea of how Factorio should be played.

Judging by their promo videos and their explanation of that giant trade show poster, Wube's idea of how Factorio should be played is organic spaghetti.

I have no objection to that per se and I agree it looks a lot more interesting than a main bus.

The problem is that the game is neither designed nor balanced to that end.

[AlienZoo23]

This is a goodbye from me to FFF's, after several years of reading and enjoying. This FFF and the one early this year about bots vs belts have so soured me that the best thing is to just stop reading and stick with playing a version I can enjoy.

Thank you Wube for allowing us to download earlier versions and install them standalone. I can stick with 0.15, happy with its map generation and used to its limitations.

And a very big thank you too to Bob, Angel, and the RSO authors who between them far more than doubled the lifetime of the game. And also thanks to a host of other mod authors who actually improved the playability of the game (Autofill, Even distribution, Auto research, FNEI, Nanobots, Long reach, Creative mode, and others).

And a final thank you to Aavak and Shenryyr whose 0.12(?) Tutorial series encouraged me to buy the game and did so much better than the crappy in-game tutorial.

Modders, YouTubers and players commenting via the forums did an immense amount to improve Factorio. A shame that Wube now seem determined to forget that.

[lovewyrm]

You had weaponized autism at your hands, guys. You don't drop that kind of high tech armament.

Saving on the wrong end, but perhaps you're just sick of the game and want a last hurrah from the supercasuals.
I'm just a regular casual and the more simple you make the game the less I have to look forward to mastering.

All you had to do was make a dedicated, ingame, non modded, base game, fixed slow speed, not usable in vehicles blueprint building mode for the early game and you would have been golden.
Having to build that smelting column every time is more annoying than wondering about a pickaxe or some furnace ratios.

Give it a toggleable state with an UI indicator.
Slash movement speed to a quarter, make it not work in vehicles and turn the cursor into a different icon and while in that mode, holding the mouse button and dragging it over ghosts would fill them with inventory items.

The no vehicle clause and slashed speed is to make it an early game thing only and would not be cheesed with the car.
Furthermore, it would not deprive beginners from tinkering with designs themselves because the game doesn't start with blueprints, the player still has to make them, or import them.

Early game hubbub for casual players that play more than once > a pickaxe and furnace ratios.
That damn smelting column and co melts my motivation to stick to the game more than thinking about ratios or putting a gun into a wooden box.
Nothing is as awful as having to click needlessly, and buildings and belts are clicked more than manual mining patches. Even trees pale in comparison.

Saving at the wrong end. I'm not saying the changes are not a technical improvement of quality of life, but, they're misplaced.
You're also breaking Bobs mods, and Bobs stuff has been a secondary heart of the game. Streamers like Nilaus and co are and were amazing adverts for your game, and you are about to smooth out that kind of autism.
Don't combat internet autism. It's the best thing you can embrace.

Vi(m) text editor discussions on the internet? Oh, that's a text editor for autists, lol.
Yeah, but it's also the best text editor on the planet at the moment.

Ah, well.

[featherwinglove]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-266
[*]Pickaxe - tool slot and mining-tool prototype removed from engine (there is dummy mining-tool for purpose of migration of old saves)

This freaked me out, but I couldn't quite articulate why until now. First, an introduction to how I play Factorio: The two main installations that I play are modded 0.12.35 and 0.14.21, and the reason for using these old versions has to do with mods not being updated and me taking several days to balance these modded installations to where I want them, and usually this includes diving into the code (including the original Pollution Damage mod, mine not to be confused with dankirban's; mine only does damage to the character.) Believe it or not, both of those installations include No Hand Mining. I just remembered this part of the FFF:

In the ancient times, you first had to create a wooden pick, to create a stone pick, to mine basic resources, to make iron, so you can make an iron pick. Yes... this was clearly Minecraft affecting our ideas. We identified soon, that this prequel of manual mining has nothing to do with the core of the game, and is an unnecessary distraction. The fact that it was the first thing the player had to do in the game was gravely affecting what new players thought the game is about. So we kept only the iron/steel pick to streamline things. (emphasis added by featherwinglove)

Well, what is the game about? That's not the right question. Think about "clearly Minecraft affecting our ideas." What is Minecraft about? Again, wrong question. The right question is this: Can and should what the game is about be moddable? The answer in Minecraft is obviously in the affirmative, and it is the very mods which changed what Minecraft is about which inspired Factorio in the first place.

Let's go back over the "wrong" questions (scare quotes because the massive matrix of answers created by the right question answer these questions in a variety of ways.) Vanilla Minecraft is about- ...well, it's hard enough to articulate that there are literal books in my physical library, but it boils down to voxel creativity, either for the sake of voxel creativity in creative mode, or solving game problems in survival mode. Then one might ask: what is survival mode is about? Ultimately dragons and magic, and I'm not all that interested in that. But what is Skyblock about? Starting with next to nothing and taking advantage of the vanilla Minecraft mechanics which violate the first law of thermodynamics in order build a floating empire ex nihilo.

'Nuff about Minecraft. Let's go back to the wrong question about Factorio and answer it in the vanilla sense: Factorio is about building factories to solve game problems and achieve game objectives. Outpost 2, yeah the 1997 Dynamix/Sierra On-Line game not directed by Bruce Balfour, has the exact same objective. I'm sorry, not exactly, until you install the SpaceX mod. Literally just updated ftw! Does anyone see where I'm going with this?

Okay, perhaps not 'nuff about Minecraft: There is a particular favorite modpack I like to play in Minecraft, which kinda makes the game almost exactly about the same thing as my favorite Factorio modpacks: Age of Engineering. These games are about the development of technology and capabilities in game, and I like big complex builds, which is why I haven't booted up an RPG in years ("build" is a term there, used in this exact sense, just search for "Diablo builds" and you get huge piles, including by the guy who asked the infamous "Is any of this coming to PC?" question at Blizzcon - he calls himself Lord Fluffy. He's got half his subscribers from that, and just over a year ago, the first half of his subscribers from a "GR90+ Blight Spear speed build" ...whatever that is.) And less because magic and dragons are boring; I like my games to have more of a connection to reality- ...which is why I'm slightly annoyed that Bob's Electronics doesn't have vacuum tubes. This includes axes, which is a huge thing in my Muddy Mountains installation. I've actually considered making a stone age start mod which would include a 3x3 drill mining a 1x1 area, have one of Klonan's wind turbines, re-shaded because it's made of wood, sticking out of the top of it. That would be tricky in considering that later in the game when mining machines can cover larger areas, these old 1x1 patches would go dirty first in Dirty Ores. Early in the game (even later in the game when first upgrading axes to pain-in-the-butt materials like titanium), axes to clear mud consume a significant amount of material. I like that mechanic.

One might ask why this is freaking me out if there are already reasons I'm stuck in older versions of Factorio to enjoy certain mechanics. The reason is that removing the axe from the engine will eliminate the ability to mod it back in! I'm okay with it if it's dropped from the base game and needs to be modded back in, but to remove it entirely closes off very significant options about what modded Factorio can be about.

Edit: You might find this hard to believe considering just how perfectly on-topic my post is, but I had not yet read the rest of the posts on page 23 where this appears when I wrote the above. I am astonished as to how accurately I blindly joined this conversation! I'd like to add that Bob's is the most important part of the modpacks I discussed. Do not break Bob's!!!! Finally...

Saving on the wrong end, but perhaps you're just sick of the game and want a last hurrah from the supercasuals. I'm just a regular casual and the more simple you make the game the less I have to look forward to mastering.

I find myself hoping that you get quoted on the Jimquisition and am seriously considering sending this to him. I believe similar things have been said about World of Warcraft, especially around the time they sued a third-party vanilla server, which was around because WoW's progression had been dumbed down so much there was a core of vanilla players who were no longer happy with, I guess, not having to grind. I like the grind. ...well, I can't really say that because grinding is a mindset, not a gameplay feature. Monetization, especially on mobile, has become infamous for allowing people to "skip the grind" by buying microtransactions which speed up progress. Pundits like Jim Sterling never mention the failures of games which are easy enough that buying microtransactions feel like cheating, or gamers like me where even if a game is like Dungeon Keeper 2014, buying microtransactions still feel like cheating (or would if I hadn't learned of the game's existence from a bunch of video game pundits complaining about its microtransactions and so I never tried it. By the way, if anyone here has played Dungeon Keeper, forget Dungeon Keeper.) Actually, he does, or at least I thought he did (not-safe-for-church warning), maybe it's Extra Credits, but at this point I wouldn't trust him for the time of day, so I won't bother looking.

[Oktokolo]

I'm okay with it if it's dropped from the base game and needs to be modded back in, but to remove it entirely closes off very significant options about what modded Factorio can be about.

Modding does not even allow UPS-friendly alteration of inserter-behaviour, making belts singlelane or add more rail curve radii. Modding never allowed Factorio to become Minecraft or OpenTTD or even SimCity. Factorio Modding is limited and will be limited as long as Factorio is closed-source (there are currently no indications for any plans to make it open source).

I like, that they are not only polishing the GUI and gameplay, but also polish their engine. They axed the axes in the gameplay and then decided to also axe them in the engine to get rid of the corresponding code. Code is a liability. It has to be maintained and interacts with other code. If code is not needed, it should get removed to reduce complexity.
They are brave enough to do that and that is a good sign. 0.17/0.18 will surely be improvements over 0.16.

P.S.: Almost all mods of the past could be updated to work with 0.16 or upcomming 0.17 / 0.18 somehow. If mod authors don't want to do that and license allows it, than everyone else could do it. Maybe you should give it a try.

[featherwinglove]

I'm okay with it if it's dropped from the base game and needs to be modded back in, but to remove it entirely closes off very significant options about what modded Factorio can be about.

Modding does not even allow UPS-friendly alteration of inserter-behaviour, making belts singlelane or add more rail curve radii. Modding never allowed Factorio to become Minecraft or OpenTTD or even SimCity. Factorio Modding is limited and will be limited as long as Factorio is closed-source (there are currently no indications for any plans to make it open source).

Wow, did you ever get confused! And incorrect in a few cases: Bob's Logistics overhauls inserter behaviour, and I've never seen it have any deleterious effect on game performance (the opposite, since 3 tile extended "wiggler" inserters spend a lot less time moving.) The other thing you're incorrect about is what changes impact what the game is about: while it would be nice to have single lane belts upgradable to 2 lanes or more, possibly by different-sized item entities, rail curve radius and such things have little impact on the game's purpose. You're clearly confused about the distinction between a game's title and a game's purpose, and this is very strange since I said that Factorio w/SpaceX is about exactly the same thing as Outpost 2! This says absolutely nothing about being able to mod Factorio into Outpost 2. Because you were still confused as to what I was talking about even with that comparison, I honestly have no idea how it could be explained to you.

[Zavian]

And incorrect in a few cases: Bob's Logistics overhauls inserter behaviour

As far as I am aware. Bob's logistics does not modify inserter behaviour. I modifies inserter pickup/dropoff locations and rotation/extension speeds etc. ie it modifies parameters that affect the vanilla inserter behaviour.

[Meggal_Bozale]

Having machines keep recipe limits was a beautiful feature! Don't take it away! It added a beautiful sense of progress into the game.

[featherwinglove]

I agree, and I've always seen Automation 2 as the enabler of Level 2 science. I forget exactly what Level 2 research I was looking into first, or for whatever reason was setting up Level 2 science automation in my very first game, before I had researched Automation 2, but I was like, derp, I can't select the inserter recipe. Fortunately, the ingredient count is not being pulled completely out of the API and can be modded back in, and I'm pretty sure someone is going to do that within 24 hours of the first experimental release of 0.17. It won't be me because I'm not that good at modding. Unfortunately, the axe removal is in the engine and is permanent unless Wube stops losing touch with their core audience and puts it back in. They are a very, very long way away from Blizzcon 2018 levels of retardation, but I'm pretty sure Blizzard's decline started with something like this. Were I as much a fan of Diablo as I am Factorio, I'd probably be able to find this thread's exact equivalent from, probably 2012 because it was probably the washed out mechanics of Diablo 3.

[Oktokolo]

Wow, did you ever get confused!

It might look so from inside a confused mind.

Bob's Logistics overhauls inserter behaviour, and I've never seen it have any deleterious effect on game performance (the opposite, since 3 tile extended "wiggler" inserters spend a lot less time moving.)

Altering the inserter behaviour would be something like changing how inserters decide when or what to grab (like in Inserter Fuel Leech, wich fakes it by teleporting them into the inserter's hand when it hovers over it or an entity containing them).

You're clearly confused about the distinction between a game's title and a game's purpose, and this is very strange since I said that Factorio w/SpaceX is about exactly the same thing as Outpost 2!

You obviously did not get, that i purposefully picked examples for modding that would not change the games direction significantly. They would fit into Factorio - but can't be modded in because of engine optimizations (single-lane belts, inserter behaviour) or engine limitations (rail curve radii). That are things that make the limits of modding pretty obvious. I got the impression that you did not grasp the existance of that limits - so i gave you easy-to-understand examples.

Because you were still confused as to what I was talking about even with that comparison, I honestly have no idea how it could be explained to you.

At some time in the future you will surely find someone who can understand your beautifull mind. Just keep trying - on someone else...

[featherwinglove]

Wow, did you ever get confused!

It might look so from inside a confused mind.

That's not a good way to start a rebuttal. I explained how you got confused by pointing out exactly which things you got confused. If you did not get them confused by accident, you deliberately conflated them, i.e. you lied. This is just a simple insult.

Bob's Logistics overhauls inserter behaviour, and I've never seen it have any deleterious effect on game performance (the opposite, since 3 tile extended "wiggler" inserters spend a lot less time moving.)

Altering the inserter behaviour would be something like changing how inserters decide when or what to grab (like in Inserter Fuel Leech, wich fakes it by teleporting them into the inserter's hand when it hovers over it or an entity containing them).

We're talking about a computer game! You could say that about pretty much any trick used to model a game or any other type of simulation in a computer. In other words, we're always faking it.

You're clearly confused about the distinction between a game's title and a game's purpose, and this is very strange since I said that Factorio w/SpaceX is about exactly the same thing as Outpost 2!

You obviously did not get, that i purposefully picked examples for modding that would not change the games direction significantly. They would fit into Factorio - but can't be modded in because of engine optimizations (single-lane belts, inserter behaviour) or engine limitations (rail curve radii). That are things that make the limits of modding pretty obvious. I got the impression that you did not grasp the existance of that limits - so i gave you easy-to-understand examples.

That's not how you put it, you said

Modding never allowed Factorio to become Minecraft or OpenTTD or even SimCity. (emphasis added)

This language conveys the literal changing of Factorio into a specific voxel game or a city simulation. (OpenTTD is much simpler than Factorio, and I'm fairly sure Factorio could be modded into something very close to OpenTTD if someone wanted to do that. And it would look a heck of a lot better!) Changing the game to be similar in mechanics and purpose isn't the same as changing the game literally into another, which is what you said. Problem exists between brain and keyboard?

At some time in the future you will surely find someone who can understand your beautifull mind. Just keep trying - on someone else...

Your spelling could be improved too. I would posit that the person who jumps in with conflations, insults, and patronizing instead of contributing the discussion is the one who should leave the conversation. You're not the only one in this thread, bud.

[Koub]

[Koub] I'm still here, watching everything. Attacking your opponent to lower his credibility will not make you more right, but will make my scissors angry .

[eradicator]

Bob's Logistics overhauls inserter behaviour, and I've never seen it have any deleterious effect on game performance (the opposite, since 3 tile extended "wiggler" inserters spend a lot less time moving.)

Altering the inserter behaviour would be something like changing how inserters decide when or what to grab (like in Inserter Fuel Leech, wich fakes it by teleporting them into the inserter's hand when it hovers over it or an entity containing them).

We're talking about a computer game! You could say that about pretty much any trick used to model a game or any other type of simulation in a computer. In other words, we're always faking it.

I don't care to take sides in your argument. But i can tell you from an experienced modders perspective how modding works in factorio. There's basically two engines in the game. One is the base engine. Using the base engine to write a mod is fairly easy and without performance cost, as the engine does everything for you but also fairly limited, as you can only change things that the devs explicitly allowed to be changed. Bobs mods (almost) exclusively use this mechanic.
The second part is the lua engine, aka "scripting". It has some helpful hooks you can use (aka "the api") but basically you're on your own. You can mod anything you want, but you have to write all the code yourself, and as this is basically a second engine running within the first, performance cost is high for even basic things. This high coding-work, high performance-cost is the reason why most modders don't bother much with scripting. (Also because the factorio community is highly "UPS sensitive" to sometimes zealotic levels.)

So when someone says "fake it" in a factorio-modding contest they mean it's a (high-ups-cost) scripted feature that doesn't rely on the base engine. Brushing that away with "all computer simulations are fake" isn't helpful because you're misinterpreting the word outside of the context it was used in.

[featherwinglove]

[Koub] I'm still here, watching everything. Attacking your opponent to lower his credibility will not make you more right, but will make my scissors angry .

Amen brutha

We're talking about a computer game! You could say that about pretty much any trick used to model a game or any other type of simulation in a computer. In other words, we're always faking it.

I don't care to take sides in your argument. But i can tell you from an experienced modders perspective how modding works in factorio. There's basically two engines in the game. One is the base engine. Using the base engine to write a mod is fairly easy and without performance cost, as the engine does everything for you but also fairly limited, as you can only change things that the devs explicitly allowed to be changed. Bobs mods (almost) exclusively use this mechanic.

I think calling them separate "engines" is a big stretch. I'm not much of a modder (almost all of my modding work I've kept to myself, not just because I don't think they'd be very popular, but because circumstances keep me from publishing them. Bob's Mods has a no-derivatives clause, and Pollution Damage wouldn't upload to the mod server.) One thing I can tell is that Bob's Logistics changes inserters in a way that works in the native code, so while their behaviour is overhauled, the code is not. I haven't bothered to look into how he did it, but I really like it.

The second part is the lua engine, aka "scripting". It has some helpful hooks you can use (aka "the api") but basically you're on your own.

This is where I spent most of my time. It's an interpreter rather than an engine; I'm not one to throw around the word "engine" willy-nilly and disagree with NAR's practice (which may have changed) of calling approved locked-down firecrackers model rocket "engines"; they're rocket motors. Rocket engines have turbopumps. I, for one, am very thankful that Wube decided against an existing engine for Factorio, because any I can think of have serious flaws for this kind of game: Unity is horrendously inefficient at 2D, Unreal doesn't have it at all, and anything else that's both efficient and powerful is probably too expensive.

You can mod anything you want, but you have to write all the code yourself, and as this is basically a second engine running within the first, performance cost is high for even basic things.

That's because it's a Lua interpreter. Since its code doesn't run natively, it's not optimized x86 machine code. That said, I think there is a compile step during runtime load (which is why Factorio takes a long time to load for its sub-1GB size) which results it running much better than I'm used to seeing with interpreted code, e.g. Javascript (I'm not too sure what's happening at yorg.io - it gets a frightening amount done graphically and runs at least an order of magnitude better than anything I've seen in the Unity web player.)

This high coding-work, high performance-cost is the reason why most modders don't bother much with scripting. (Also because the factorio community is highly "UPS sensitive" to sometimes zealotic levels.)

So when someone says "fake it" in a factorio-modding contest they mean it's a (high-ups-cost) scripted feature that doesn't rely on the base engine. Brushing that away with "all computer simulations are fake" isn't helpful because you're misinterpreting the word outside of the context it was used in.

I see where you're coming from, but first, it's a relatively clean implementation (i.e. it doesn't "fake" much), and more importantly, the term was shoehorned into a broader context: I was discussing modding much more generally, including discussion about modding other games, especially in ways which change gameplay mechanics and objectives in a major way. My post was from a player's perspective, not a modder's perspective. In this sense, Bob's is an almost complete overhaul of the game, with new primary materials, new machines, and new axes, to stay on topic. My own mod, Pollution Damage, has only control.lua. Perhaps somewhere in modder's land (but I doubt it), mine would be considered more of an overhaul than Bob's because it probably runs more control script in real time (as near as I can tell, just about everything that Bob's control script does is at load time to select and update base and mod code.)

The interpreter engine leaves open the possibility that axes can be modded back into the game via the expensive control.lua route, especially if one can stash an object somewhere that has an inventory slot and then put a GUI element on screen somewhere, preferably somewhere in the lower right, but I've only seen upper left implementations to date, and control.lua modifies the player's mining rate based on what's in that object, wearing it out and breaking it as necessary. Basically re-implement everything that the base game currently does in expensive Lua script. If someone does that and it becomes one of the most popular mods, it'll become extremely obvious that removing it from the base game was a mistake and hopefully they bring it back.

My opinion, however, is that the best way to implement 0.17 w.r.t. axes, is to make the wear rate on the axe variable, and default it to zero in the base mod. Then one need make one and only one iron axe, one and only one steel axe, and when they are first available, they are expensive enough (especially in Marathon), that crafting them is a significant resource step. Tweak the First Steps mission to instruct the player to SHIFT-click the axe into the tool slot and forget about it.

A mod that I would love to see is mining machines with drill heads that wear out. If the axes wear out, it makes little sense for an automated mining machine to keep its drill head forever, and perhaps they were thinking this when considering the axing of the axe. It wouldn't be for everyone, but I'm an SJT-DirtyOres kind of player. I'm not sure how to implement this, but it looks like, even in the current version, something along the lines of tool inventory objects would be needed, and that could get crazy because a developed build could easily have hundreds of mining machines. I love this quote, brb...

Saving on the wrong end, but perhaps you're just sick of the game and want a last hurrah from the supercasuals.
I'm just a regular casual and the more simple you make the game the less I have to look forward to mastering.

I even like the idea mentioned in the OP regarding furnace warmup; it's a bit of a pain in IC2 for Minecraft waiting for the blast furnace to warm up, but something relatively short, like the way the BG works in KS Power could be a motivator to pay attention to machine utilization, especially ones with thermal cycles. Paying attention to thermal cycling in real-life lead to the most revolutionary invention in thermodynamic engines, i.e. James Watt didn't invent the steam engine, he invented the condenser. It was such a big deal that most people don't remember that important detail, and think he invented the steam engine itself, Newcomen, Savery, and Papin be damned.

I'd like to add something specifically for Klonan: Keep modding! Specifically, mod in ideas to change the game's complexity; stuff like KS Power. I hardly play without KS Power, I'm liking the wind turbine. You're really good at "faking it" (is that a real term in the modding forum?) This could be a good ground for playtesting the changes. Make a mod for 0.16 that restores the health of the axe so that we never have to replace it, for example. Actually, I think it would be fairly easy to mod literally everything in FFF-266 into 0.16, including automatically materializing the steel axe for the tool slot when that tech is researched. If it's kinda robust so I get a new axe when I remove the old one, I'll probably boot it up with Reverse Factory to amuse myself for a minute or two

[eradicator]

I have no clue if there even is a proper definition of "engine" in a gaming context. I called it that because it's an easy to understand term for everyone.

The interpreter engine leaves open the possibility that axes can be modded back into the game via the expensive control.lua route, especially if one can stash an object somewhere that has an inventory slot and then put a GUI element on screen somewhere, preferably somewhere in the lower right, but I've only seen upper left implementations to date, and control.lua modifies the player's mining rate based on what's in that object, wearing it out and breaking it as necessary.

Yes, exactly. But nobody going to do that. The only way (i know) of implementing a right-bottom-corner button is incompatible with every other mod that uses GUI elements. If i ever find the time i'll probably experiment with it, but it's of doubtful usability.

I even like the idea mentioned in the OP regarding furnace warmup

Many things have been sacrificed to appease Yuu Peyes the Alaccelerating. And while it sounds interesting, the game-mechanic impact would be negligible as furnaces usually run full time. IC2 btw allows you to simply disable the feature at the cost of a tiny bit of power.

[featherwinglove]

I have no clue if there even is a proper definition of "engine" in a gaming context. I called it that because it's an easy to understand term for everyone.

There is, but I've explained it enough already that I'd probably get banned for off-topicness if I got further into it. That's what makes it an inappropriate word to use the way you used it.

Yes, exactly. But nobody going to do that. The only way (i know) of implementing a right-bottom-corner button is incompatible with every other mod that uses GUI elements. If i ever find the time i'll probably experiment with it, but it's of doubtful usability.

I think that situation has already changed in 0.17, but I sincerely hope the Wube guys just come to their senses and put the native code back in so we can mod it back the efficient way.

I even like the idea mentioned in the OP regarding furnace warmup

Many things have been sacrificed to appease Yuu Peyes the Alaccelerating.

Huh?

And while it sounds interesting, the game-mechanic impact would be negligible as furnaces usually run full time. IC2 btw allows you to simply disable the feature at the cost of a tiny bit of power.

Hardly, unless there's some config option I missed. If you're referring to slapping a lever on the side and frobbing it, that doesn't cancel the initial warmup period, which is quite impressive. Anyway, first thing I do is build the Immersive Engineering blast furnace 'cus it's much faster and I usually have more coal coke than I know what to do with by that point in the game. There is a machine that has exactly the sort of behaviour I'd expect from Factorio's furnaces: KS Power's burner generator. Try it: it takes a little while to warm up and then it takes a little while to cool off when its fuel runs out. The 0.12 version is a little bit cheaty: It starts up instantly, but takes a little while to cool off when its fuel runs out. In the Badlands (my modpack), I've sliced up the logs with the burner manufacturing unit in no-coal games to take advantage of it. Then I figured out that it was smarter to go straight to wind turbines in the no-coal start.

One mod I was kinda hoping for and thinking about for Factorio would be called "Don't Go Hungry in Factorio" (can't call it "Don't Starve in Factorio" 'cus Klei would probably sue us.) An expensive part of that mod would probably be spawning biters out of thin air for low sanity.

[eradicator]

I have no clue if there even is a proper definition of "engine" in a gaming context. I called it that because it's an easy to understand term for everyone.

There is, but I've explained it enough already that I'd probably get banned for off-topicness if I got further into it. That's what makes it an inappropriate word to use the way you used it.

Please add it to wikipedia, because they don't have a magic definition to perfectly seperate all engines from all non-engines.

Yes, exactly. But nobody going to do that. The only way (i know) of implementing a right-bottom-corner button is incompatible with every other mod that uses GUI elements. If i ever find the time i'll probably experiment with it, but it's of doubtful usability.

I think that situation has already changed in 0.17, but I sincerely hope the Wube guys just come to their senses and put the native code back in so we can mod it back the efficient way.

There is nothing in the 0.17 api preview that suggests anything has changed about how mod guis work.

Many things have been sacrificed to appease Yuu Peyes the Alaccelerating.

Huh?

UPS optimizations.