Friday Facts #96 - The fixing phase

[psihius]

While redoing the theme art, DO NOT FORGET ABOUT THE TRAIN!

I want my CHOO-CHOO MOTHERFUCKER poster in high quality!

[DerivePi]

The game, to me, is about building up a machine to forward a final goal. The Factorio poster I have in my mind would display a rocket launch in the distance (the end goal) with the factory workings in the foreground (the gameplay fun) and the biters charging against a fortified wall (the antagonist). This game is not about pollution (although it has pollution in it). The steampunk vibe does register well with me though.

Now how will you incorporate zombies in order to do better in the Japanese market?

Make sure you include the demo with the Steam release - I don't see many games that offer demos anymore.

[Darthlawsuit]

While that image looks cool it would look more like a background to someone that knows little about the game or its structures. You need to get some cool looking factories and video from in-game. I never look at concept art or anything that isn't ingame because its irrelevant, you buy a game to play it not to look at concept art.

[Chaoseed]

I've enjoyed playing Factorio for months, although...



¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[SWSe]

So, you want the game to just hang for a few seconds as it autosaves? In that case, you're out of luck – we definitely want to tell the user that the game is doing something instead of just hanging for a bit.

Yes, I do.

You don't forget about unexperienced users, which is good and important. But many actually understood what autosave means before this.
That's why I said "optional".

There's an entire thread filled with other proposals that don't interrupt someones experience this much. E.g. showing the progress bar (or a turning factorio cog) in a corner, continuing to play the background sounds and not turning the screen darker.

[Enigmatica]

You should look at paradoxes DLC model. It has worked wonders for their games and I keep on buying the dlc. How it works is every so often they release a new set of dlc. That dlc is more like a traditional expansion for games but you can play the game with or without it; they also release minor dlc with their major dlc that has music/sprites. They use the constant flow of dlc to provide free patches to everyone and continue to keep their game fresh with new features. Really look at the crusader kings 2 and Europa universalis 4 model.

Imagine adding an entire warfare dlc where you can wage a war on a group of the natives, not a passive war but both sides trying to anhiliate one another.

I know some people foam at the mouth when they hear dlc, because of EA milking it, but a good dlc model is more of a modern expansion/patching model that allows "free" patches and even if you lack the dlc you can still play with the person in multiplayer.

DLC models work well for games that aren't as easily moddable. What's to stop someone from simply releasing a mod containing everything from a DLC, other than moral obligations and prohibiting such mods from being posted here on the official forum? That said, if Factorio were to take this direction, I would happily pay for DLC if it was as you proposed (more like expansions instead of small additions, something like Dytech or another big mod). I've definitely got my $17.75 USD out of it.

I've enjoyed playing Factorio for months, although...



¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Windows Factorio update checker is broken, at least for 64bit iirc. You have to check the website's experimental releases page to get the latest version.

[max2605]

I hope one day Factorio Looks like the Picture and in 3D, so i can Stack the Transport belts.... m that's maybe a Feature Stacked Belts

[ratchetfreak]

So, you want the game to just hang for a few seconds as it autosaves? In that case, you're out of luck – we definitely want to tell the user that the game is doing something instead of just hanging for a bit.

Yes, I do.

You don't forget about unexperienced users, which is good and important. But many actually understood what autosave means before this.
That's why I said "optional".

There's an entire thread filled with other proposals that don't interrupt someones experience this much. E.g. showing the progress bar (or a turning factorio cog) in a corner, continuing to play the background sounds and not turning the screen darker.

There are 2 major options, pause the game or double the memory requirements

the reason the game pauses is to avoid a change during gameplay corrupting the save file. The solution to that is duplicating the entire game state to provide a immutable copy that can be written out. Duplicating the game state would also require a laggy pause unless the game engine is rewritten to allow it to use a prevstate setup

[orzelek]

So, you want the game to just hang for a few seconds as it autosaves? In that case, you're out of luck – we definitely want to tell the user that the game is doing something instead of just hanging for a bit.

Yes, I do.

You don't forget about unexperienced users, which is good and important. But many actually understood what autosave means before this.
That's why I said "optional".

There's an entire thread filled with other proposals that don't interrupt someones experience this much. E.g. showing the progress bar (or a turning factorio cog) in a corner, continuing to play the background sounds and not turning the screen darker.

There are 2 major options, pause the game or double the memory requirements

the reason the game pauses is to avoid a change during gameplay corrupting the save file. The solution to that is duplicating the entire game state to provide a immutable copy that can be written out.

Variant duplicating memory usage would be quite viable for a lot of people that use 64 bit version.

[ThaPear]

So, you want the game to just hang for a few seconds as it autosaves? In that case, you're out of luck – we definitely want to tell the user that the game is doing something instead of just hanging for a bit.

Yes, I do.

You don't forget about unexperienced users, which is good and important. But many actually understood what autosave means before this.
That's why I said "optional".

There's an entire thread filled with other proposals that don't interrupt someones experience this much. E.g. showing the progress bar (or a turning factorio cog) in a corner, continuing to play the background sounds and not turning the screen darker.

There are 2 major options, pause the game or double the memory requirements

the reason the game pauses is to avoid a change during gameplay corrupting the save file. The solution to that is duplicating the entire game state to provide a immutable copy that can be written out. Duplicating the game state would also require a laggy pause unless the game engine is rewritten to allow it to use a prevstate setup

He's not suggesting not pausing the game. He's suggesting not shoving the autosave in your face.
To me the autosave is quite jarring. It's a reminder every minute: "You're playing a game". Removing the darkened screen would improve it for me, (re)moving the progress bar out of the center of my screen would solve it.
I'd still know there's an autosave but it wouldn't interrupt me as much.

I understand a random short hang every minute would be strange to new player, but that's why he suggested it be optional.

Autosaves to me

HEY HEY I'M AUTOSAVING... SAVIIIIIINNGGGGGG! THIS MEANS YOU'RE PLAYING A GAME!
Ok I'm done saving bye

[Oxyd]

So, you want the game to just hang for a few seconds as it autosaves? In that case, you're out of luck – we definitely want to tell the user that the game is doing something instead of just hanging for a bit.

Yes, I do.

You don't forget about unexperienced users, which is good and important. But many actually understood what autosave means before this.
That's why I said "optional".

There's an entire thread filled with other proposals that don't interrupt someones experience this much. E.g. showing the progress bar (or a turning factorio cog) in a corner, continuing to play the background sounds and not turning the screen darker.

There are 2 major options, pause the game or double the memory requirements

the reason the game pauses is to avoid a change during gameplay corrupting the save file. The solution to that is duplicating the entire game state to provide a immutable copy that can be written out. Duplicating the game state would also require a laggy pause unless the game engine is rewritten to allow it to use a prevstate setup

That's not true. We could simply stop updating the map and start storing modifications to the map as the game continues. Once the autosave is done, we're left with an old map and a diff to the new one, so just apply it and you've got the correct new map. The additional memory requirement would then be proportional to the time it takes to finish an autosave. Only problem with this is that someone would have to actually program it. And it doesn't sound particularly easy.

Moving the progress bar somewhere to a corner might happen in the future. I would also love to see autosaves to happen faster. But if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath for getting rid of the progress indication entirely.

And yes, you are playing a game – remember to take regular breaks away from your computer. I hear that's what's recommended.

[ratchetfreak]

That's not true. We could simply stop updating the map and start storing modifications to the map as the game continues. Once the autosave is done, we're left with an old map and a diff to the new one, so just apply it and you've got the correct new map. The additional memory requirement would then be proportional to the time it takes to finish an autosave. Only problem with this is that someone would have to actually program it. And it doesn't sound particularly easy.

Moving the progress bar somewhere to a corner might happen in the future. I would also love to see autosaves to happen faster. But if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath for getting rid of the progress indication entirely.

And yes, you are playing a game – remember to take regular breaks away from your computer. I hear that's what's recommended.

That's option rewriting the game engine, and means you need to account for the potential presence of the diff everywhere.

[Arnos]

You could move the auto save to the bottom right corner and make it a little more subtle, that would be simplest and would feel a little less disruptive. The very middle of the screen is prime real estate and I would be happier if the box didn't appear there for the 0.5 seconds it currently takes me to save.

[slpwnd]

So, you want the game to just hang for a few seconds as it autosaves? In that case, you're out of luck – we definitely want to tell the user that the game is doing something instead of just hanging for a bit.

Yes, I do.

You don't forget about unexperienced users, which is good and important. But many actually understood what autosave means before this.
That's why I said "optional".

There's an entire thread filled with other proposals that don't interrupt someones experience this much. E.g. showing the progress bar (or a turning factorio cog) in a corner, continuing to play the background sounds and not turning the screen darker.

There are 2 major options, pause the game or double the memory requirements

the reason the game pauses is to avoid a change during gameplay corrupting the save file. The solution to that is duplicating the entire game state to provide a immutable copy that can be written out. Duplicating the game state would also require a laggy pause unless the game engine is rewritten to allow it to use a prevstate setup

He's not suggesting not pausing the game. He's suggesting not shoving the autosave in your face.
To me the autosave is quite jarring. It's a reminder every minute: "You're playing a game". Removing the darkened screen would improve it for me, (re)moving the progress bar out of the center of my screen would solve it.
I'd still know there's an autosave but it wouldn't interrupt me as much.

I understand a random short hang every minute would be strange to new player, but that's why he suggested it be optional.

Autosaves to me

HEY HEY I'M AUTOSAVING... SAVIIIIIINNGGGGGG! THIS MEANS YOU'RE PLAYING A GAME!
Ok I'm done saving bye

This is actually what I have in mind. There would be a small well-integrated progress bar / indicator somewhere at the edge of the screen. The current solution does feel a little bit like abusing the player experience every time there is an autosave. Hmmm it shouldn't be such a big deal to do actually.

[piratelord]

I personally disable the autosave, and save manually. The default frequency and layout/display is just too intrusive and annoying.
I've also got a big distrust of autosave, in many games that use that feature, it just corrupts your game.

[torham]

I just set the autosave to 30 min. The game is already so amazingly stable, you really do not need to autosave every 10 minutes. I am yet to experience a single crash in factorio, so far it has been running totally smooth.
I personally really do not mind the autosave message, its just a reminder that yet another 1/2 hour has passed, and I should be doing something more productive ...

PS: when was all this cool music implemented? I haven't been playing for a while, and I have just started with the new 0.12 and I really, really like the new music!!

[MasterBuilder]

The problem with autosaves is that it interrupts the UI. Is it possible to use something similar to the 'latency' system from MP in such a way to leave the UI responsive and delay all the changes to the game state?
Can we not save the user input and simply delay the action whilst saving?

Or what about freezing the UI for a shorter time just to duplicate the game state? Once duplicated, perform the save with the duplicated copy on another thread. (I'm assuming serializing the data is going to take longer than duplicating the state. You could even malloc a 'buffer' area to copy the state into a few frames in advance.)
It's not how it's presented that's intrusive. It's that it prevents us (often interrupting something) from doing anything. Anything that minimizes the time frozen is an improvement.

Even something small like letting the player move around (even if we can't interact with anything) will help.

[Enigmatica]

The problem with autosaves is that it interrupts the UI. Is it possible to use something similar to the 'latency' system from MP in such a way to leave the UI responsive and delay all the changes to the game state?
Can we not save the user input and simply delay the action whilst saving?

Or what about freezing the UI for a shorter time just to duplicate the game state? Once duplicated, perform the save with the duplicated copy on another thread. (I'm assuming serializing the data is going to take longer than duplicating the state. You could even malloc a 'buffer' area to copy the state into a few frames in advance.)
It's not how it's presented that's intrusive. It's that it prevents us (often interrupting something) from doing anything. Anything that minimizes the time frozen is an improvement.

Even something small like letting the player move around (even if we can't interact with anything) will help.

The game only pauses to duplicate the game state already iirc.

Personally with Factorio only using 700-800mb of RAM, it has a relatively small footprint relative to other games. And I'm not sure if it needs double the memory to background copy the gamestate and save it. Either way, an autosave feature that doesn't pause the game would be nice. Even though I have a SSD and sometimes don't even feel the pause, it's still sometimes 0.1-0.2 seconds.

[vampiricdust]

The only thing that really bugs me about the auto save is how it interrupts anything you're doing. I've had it break mod GUIs so I had to close them and open them again to get them to respond. The research window is almost as annoying in it's interruption of gameplay.

I wouldn't mind a count down to autosave so i know it's about to interrupt what I am doing.

[FishSandwich]

The research window is almost as annoying in it's interruption of gameplay.

In case you don't know; In the options you can disable the research window so it acts the same as in multiplayer.