Laptop suitability & megabase compatible rig configuration

[je11693]

Also, where do you guys save your games, SSD or HDD?

Funny enough i didn't even notice the second interpretation of that ambigious question.

Where do i install my games?
→ On the harddrive, because modern games tend to be tens of gigabyte in size.

Where do i save my savegames?
→ Most modern games put progression data either in "my documents" or %appdata% on your main system drive (i.e. your SSD). If you install factorio via the installer or steam it'll do this too. You often don't get a choice on this.

Factorio is so small that putting it on the SSD won't hurt, but probably won't have much of a benefit either. I've recently moved it from HDD to SSD (various reasons) and haven't noticed much of a difference. Factorio is also in the weird situation that maps can get quite large, so large infact that if you save a lot your savegames will become larger than the base game data .

Factorio does not need an SSD (except, as stated, on autosaves). I feel loading time is not hugely impacted upon game launch.

My sprite atlas is 1.5GB. So theoretically loading the sprite atlas from a fast hdd would take about 15 seconds, vs less than 3s from ssd. But as it only happens once on initial launch it's not that much of a difference.

Other games, on the contrary benefit hugely from SSDs.

I don't remember any where i really noticed it. But i don't play any AAA games, so \o/. The best option is probably to install the games that you actively play on SSD, and the other ones on HDD. Steam has a "move this game to that other place" option somewhere if you're scared of manually copying stuff around ^^.

I downloaded it from Steam and there is a shortcut on my desktop. I didn't change anything if the Steam settings when I bought/downloaded it - how can I find out which storage device it saved to? Is moving it from one to the other just a case of cutting and pasting it? Sounds like SSD may be marginally better, but I probably won't notice either way. Would still like to know though.

[Jap2.0]

→ Most modern games put progression data either in "my documents" or %appdata% on your main system drive (i.e. your SSD). If you install factorio via the installer or steam it'll do this too. You often don't get a choice on this.

Thanks for pointing that out, I forgot that I moved my save location to the Factorio folder.

[eradicator]

I downloaded it from Steam and there is a shortcut on my desktop. I didn't change anything if the Steam settings when I bought/downloaded it - how can I find out which storage device it saved to? Is moving it from one to the other just a case of cutting and pasting it? Sounds like SSD may be marginally better, but I probably won't notice either way. Would still like to know though.

Disclaimer: I don't know much about steam (don't like it :P).
As far as i know steam stores all games inside it's own program directory, i.e. if you installed steam to C:, then your games would also be on C:. There's a "library" option somewhere that lets you define different storage locations (you can have more than one location), and each game (right lick -> preferences) then has an option to chose in which "library" it should be stored.

Changing factorios save location requires editing config-path.cfg in the factorio directory, and possibly also config.ini, it's not a simply copy/paste. Factorio doesn't magically know where you moved the files. There was an old thread about the details... but if you didn't change anything it's probably all on C: anyway.

You can try this command (win+r):

Code: Select all

cmd /c cd /d C:\ & for /f "tokens=*" %p in ('dir /s/b player-data.json') do explorer "%~dpp"

which will open an explorer window for your savegame folder (if it is on C:, otherwise you'll have to change the letter in the command).

Edit:
Wiki article on save locations. Grabbing the .zip package from the main site is easiest for that, you can just extract it and copy/paste it around as you want. The savegames will always be inside the unpacked folder.

[je11693]

How do I access my SSD and HDD? When I open My Computer the only thing I see in "Devices and Drives" is the Local Disk (C) drive.

Edit: the C drive I see says it has 191GB of 222Gb free, so perhaps this is my SSD? (I have a 240GB SSD).

[eradicator]

At least that definetly answers the question where your games are ;).
Totally forgot that internal harddrives don't come pre-formatted unlike external ones. You'll need to partition and format the hdd to use it. First google hit for "format harddisk" comes up with a guide that looks half decent: here. (Windows does it automatically during installation for the drive it is installed onto, but not for any additional drives.)

[je11693]

At least that definetly answers the question where your games are .
Totally forgot that internal harddrives don't come pre-formatted unlike external ones. You'll need to partition and format the hdd to use it. First google hit for "format harddisk" comes up with a guide that looks half decent: here. (Windows does it automatically during installation for the drive it is installed onto, but not for any additional drives.)

Ao my C drive is really my SSD.. Do you know what size Factorio is? The SSD I bought was 240GB but my C drive only has 222GB, of which 191GB is free.

[Koub]

Ao my C drive is really my SSD.. Do you know what size Factorio is? The SSD I bought was 240GB but my C drive only has 222GB, of which 191GB is free.

This is totally normal, and one of the oldes oddities in computers. IT people count in powers of 2 (because that's how computers work at the more fundamental level, dut to the smallest bit of information being binary 0 or 1). Then a byte is 8 bits, each being able to take 2 values, ... the thing is that 2^10 is 1024, and it's close enough from 1000 to be given the "kilo" suffix.
Then the mega- suffix was given to 1024 kilo-, and the giga- to 1024 mega-.
But multiplying powers of "close enough" gets you increasingly big differences as you loose the "powerrs of 2" usefulness.
1 Gigabyte is 1024x1024x1024 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes, and 222 Gigabytes would take ... owait 238,370,684,928 bytes.
So disk manufacturers count bytes in scientific prefixed (kilo- is 1000, and giga- is 1,000,000,000), and sell a 238 (rounded to 240)GB disk, but your computers always works in binary, so its internals read 222x1024x1024x1024, that's 222 GB my friend !

Some people have invented new affixes for "binary power-of-two thousand-ish" : you may see form time to time kiB, MiB, GiB, but it's not widely spread.

Factorio is currently around 1GB (or is it 1 GiB ? haha). It shouldn't harm your SSD capacity.
To know where Factorio is installed when used with Steam : in your library, right-clic on Factorio > Properties > Local files (see below).

pic

2018-10-25 08_19_15-Factorio - Propriétés.jpg (34.38 KiB) Viewed 4359 times

Koub wrote: ↑24 Oct 2018 06:24
Other games, on the contrary benefit hugely from SSDs.
I don't remember any where i really noticed it. But i don't play any AAA games, so \o/. The best option is probably to install the games that you actively play on SSD, and the other ones on HDD. Steam has a "move this game to that other place" option somewhere if you're scared of manually copying stuff around ^^.

LOTRO (Lord Of The Rings Online). If you have time to experiment, install it on a HDD, and on a SSD, and time the full loading time (including after the character selection, up to when you can actually play).

[eradicator]

Some people have invented new affixes for "binary power-of-two thousand-ish" : you may see form time to time kiB, MiB, GiB, but it's not widely spread.

Those "some people" who invented the binary prefix are actually the International Electrotechnical Commission. Invented it twenty years ago according to wiki. I agree it's not widely spread in colloquial speech, i always forget which one is which, so i simply write M or G, etc, instead of worrying about MB vs MiB :p. @OP but yea, totally normal. The file system itself also reserves some space, so you don't ever get a harddisk that has as much usable free space as it says on the packaging. Your 1T HDD will also only have about 931G.

LOTRO (Lord Of The Rings Online). If you have time to experiment, install it on a HDD, and on a SSD, and time the full loading time (including after the character selection, up to when you can actually play).

I doubt i have enough free space left for a game of that calibre. But it confirms my suspicion that it "only" affects loading times. Sure, can be annoying, but it's not that SSDs magically improve framerate ^^.

[je11693]

Some people have invented new affixes for "binary power-of-two thousand-ish" : you may see form time to time kiB, MiB, GiB, but it's not widely spread.

Those "some people" who invented the binary prefix are actually the International Electrotechnical Commission. Invented it twenty years ago according to wiki. I agree it's not widely spread in colloquial speech, i always forget which one is which, so i simply write M or G, etc, instead of worrying about MB vs MiB :p. @OP but yea, totally normal. The file system itself also reserves some space, so you don't ever get a harddisk that has as much usable free space as it says on the packaging. Your 1T HDD will also only have about 931G.

LOTRO (Lord Of The Rings Online). If you have time to experiment, install it on a HDD, and on a SSD, and time the full loading time (including after the character selection, up to when you can actually play).

I doubt i have enough free space left for a game of that calibre. But it confirms my suspicion that it "only" affects loading times. Sure, can be annoying, but it's not that SSDs magically improve framerate ^^.

Yep, the HDD drive I labelled as drive D has ~931GB if I remember correctly.

[Koub]

I doubt i have enough free space left for a game of that calibre. But it confirms my suspicion that it "only" affects loading times. Sure, can be annoying, but it's not that SSDs magically improve framerate ^^.

I agree, at least partly. Believe me, you'll prefer swapping on a SSD instead of swapping on a HDD when you're short in RAM ^^ (being granted that the best thing is to have enough RAM not to have to swap).

[eradicator]

I doubt i have enough free space left for a game of that calibre. But it confirms my suspicion that it "only" affects loading times. Sure, can be annoying, but it's not that SSDs magically improve framerate ^^.

I agree, at least partly. Believe me, you'll prefer swapping on a SSD instead of swapping on a HDD when you're short in RAM ^^ (being granted that the best thing is to have enough RAM not to have to swap).

If the main program you're currently running regularly needs to swap to disk you have a huge problem either way and should close ram heavy background applications. I have enough though because i like playing with virtual machines that eat ram for breakfast. I tried running some small games (<10G) directly from ramdisk in the past, but never saw much of a difference, possibly because it's all cached anyway.

[je11693]

I just registered on the Factorio website and linked to my Steam account. Is the version on the Factorio website (16.51, alpha, stable) the same as the version I have already downloaded from Steam, or should I download the Factorio website version and delete the one I got on Steam?

[Koub]

Same version

[eradicator]

Same version :)

Gameplayer wise yea. Technically the one downloaded from factorio.com directly (i.e. the "non-steam version") doesn't support any steam features like inviting friends into your multiplayer games (though apparently that's going to change in 0.17?). And it doesn't require steam to be installed to run. [Disclaimer: Having never used the steam version myself this is based soley on what i've seen other people on the forum say.]

[je11693]

Same version

Gameplayer wise yea. Technically the one downloaded from factorio.com directly (i.e. the "non-steam version") doesn't support any steam features like inviting friends into your multiplayer games (though apparently that's going to change in 0.17?). And it doesn't require steam to be installed to run. [Disclaimer: Having never used the steam version myself this is based soley on what i've seen other people on the forum say.]

I presume anyone who downloaded it from Steam can save it to their PC and then they would still be able to play even if they delete their Steam account/lose access, etc? And as long as they have registered on Factorio they will still get updates etc?

Is there a confirmed release date for 0.17 yet?

[Koub]

There are actually differences between both installs. You get exactly the same game, but whatever has to do with steam will only work from within steam ecosystem.
Sync to Steam Cloud, the soon-to-be steam multiplayer, The Steam achievements, ... will be Steam only, and won't work without Steam (which makes sense).

[eradicator]

I presume anyone who downloaded it from Steam can save it to their PC and then they would still be able to play even if they delete their Steam account/lose access, etc? And as long as they have registered on Factorio they will still get updates etc?

Is there a confirmed release date for 0.17 yet?

You can try that yourself. Close steam (completely, including the background task-icon thingy), then try starting the steam version without starting steam. If it works, then it works, if it forces you to start steam, then it doesn't work. Steam's offline mode has a time limit, so it's not an option. And i'd guess that because the steam version updates via steam the internal updater is disabled?

No.

[Loewchen]

This is solved and getting off topic, closed.