My thoughts on Factorio and some questions for the Devs

[Twinki]

Alright well, the first bit of this will be a story with more than likely bad grammar and wording, and maybe an insult to the Devs (It isn't a direct insult.. depends on your opinion.. but please keep reading before you turn away)

The Story
I'm going to start off with how I found out about Factorio, and it really isn't surprising. It was Quill18's video about it, after watching it I immediately checked out the website and searched over Google from some images and general information about the game. Being a Minecraft Automation Mod / Tech Mod addict, and immediately wanted to play the game and try it out myself. I'm not a fan of game demos as they usually contain restrictions, but I wanted to try out the game so badly I looked over the Demo page, and saw that it only contained some basic mechanics. Whenever I play games I cannot stand limits or restrictions set on players, they don't personally make sense to me and they give me an instant turn off. I don't ever have any money to spare on anything, games, entertainment, any of that I don't have the income for, and certain medical conditions I have does not allow me to get a job. So I reverted to obtaining an old version of Factorio through other means.. *Hint Hint* (Please hang in there ) I was able to find a 0.9 version, I booted up the game and just went straight for the New Game / Sandbox mode where it just throws you in a game with no objective but to survive and automate your heart out. I don't like doing Tutorials, I prefer just being thrown in the game. After going around for about 10 minutes and finding out how stuff worked, I started getting an automated Iron Plate system going. I'm personally not a fan of 2D games, and I do wish Factorio was 3D, but regardless I loved it. After about an hour I definitely found where all the inspiration came from, I could see the similarities, and I was hooked. I started looking for mod support, and sure enough there was. DyTech, Endless Resources, F-Mod, and TreeFarm. Those were the main 3 mods I used. I ended up playing Factorio non-stop for several days, never got into the advanced higher tier stuff as I wanted the new versions really badly with new content and more mods.

I wanted to throw money at the devs to keep going and making this a thing and hopefully a new genre, but I couldn't.

So I waited for about 2 months, until recently I was able to do some work for other people on the interwebz to get enough to buy Factorio. For the past 2 days I've been automating like no other.
My progress so far:

First game on 10.12

Iron + Steel Automation


Pathetic Copper Automation, will soon be upgrading to Electric Furnaces


Science Pack 1 and 2 automation, working on Pack 3's


Steam Engines powering pretty much everything


Front line Defense and auto-repair bots


Northern most Defense, and Advanced Circuit setup for testing TeleBelts mod


Wall Making setup


Organized Fluid Automation, my proudest setup. Made an island just for this with the Landfill mod. Tried to make it as organized as possible while still being effective, but it doesn't seem like it turned out effective considering i'm out of Petroleum

So there it is, that's the long version of the story, i'm sure it was organized terribly.. and I hope I won't be sued for it... hopefully the Devs don't have that attitude...
Now for some questions..

Questions and stuff
I'm fan of Minecraft and it's Tech Mods, very big fan. Being a person who loves messing with general software and programs, specifically network based, for about 2 years I've been messing with and learning about Modded Minecraft Servers. Servers with most of the popular MC Mods (Applied Energistics, IC2, Mekanism, BigReactors, ThermalExpansion, EnderIO, ETC.. the list goes on and on). For about 6 months I've helped run a what used to be very popular Minecraft Technic Pack called BusinessElite. It used to be in the top 10 Technic Packs until the Owner of the pack was hacked and the pack was deleted. The owner left, and I helped take over running the server and pack. Modded MC Servers are what I believe the hardest to run. The Mods are the most infuriating part of it. Anyways, these questions are mainly directed to the upcoming Multiplayer addition.

1. Will there be a Minecraft like Multiplayer, where you can enter a IP and dynamically join and leave a server, or will it be like a co-op game?

2. Will there be Mod Support for the Multiplayer?

3. If there will be dynamic joining and leaving an open server, do you think you'll ever add the support for Modded Servers? (Like Bukkit for MineCraft with Plugins and so on)

I've found myself having a lot of fun running Modded MC servers, I get really enjoyment watching other players creations and setups with mods. It's truly a payoff seeing players come up with this massive and effective automation setups. I loved it. Recently I've left the BusinessElite server team due to disagreements on the direction of the pack, and I hope to create some of the best running and most fun servers for Factorio, I hope to one day make it my job.

Thanks for reading.. I really hope you don't take this the wrong way Devs... I love your work, I love your game, and I can't get enough of it.

[SilverWarior]

All the question you are asking have already been asked right at the start when developers shared their intention on implementing hte multiplayer support. So if you search a bit back on the forums you will find more information on this. I belive that biggest discusion about this happened in one of Friday Update threads in which developers confirmed the plans for multiplayer support.

But in short the answer is as such:
Initially Factorio multiplayer support is will be more intended for LAN based multiplayer with COOP and PVP modes.
With the difference of Minecraft where in multiplayer most game processing is done on dedicated server Factorio uses a different approach where each client does processing of its own stuff and the game state of multiple clients then gets periodically syncronized.
The main advantage of this is that you don't reauire a dedicated server software and there is basically no limitation of how many players do play together in one game except when network bandwich doesen't allow clients to exchange their game state data fast enough to keep them all syncronized. So you are not limited by the server processing power.
The mian disadvatage of such approach is that it is much harder to keep multiple clients propery synchronized between each other.
Anywhay the developers didn't ruled out that some dat they might make a dedicated server software for Factorio.
As far as mod support in multiplayer goes teoretically it should work fine that is if all mods are made in a way to be totaly deterministic.

At the moment developers are making sure that game core is fully deterministic first which is required for maintaining proper game state syncronization between all clients. And that required developers to rewrite large portion of the existing game already.
So in short they are making small steps toward multiplayer. But given of what I have seen from developers so far (I have been playing factorio now for over a year) I can say give them enough time and they will make Factorio multiplayer even better than the one in Minecraft is.

[Twinki]

All the question you are asking have already been asked right at the start when developers shared their intention on implementing hte multiplayer support. So if you search a bit back on the forums you will find more information on this. I belive that biggest discusion about this happened in one of Friday Update threads in which developers confirmed the plans for multiplayer support.

But in short the answer is as such:
Initially Factorio multiplayer support is will be more intended for LAN based multiplayer with COOP and PVP modes.
With the difference of Minecraft where in multiplayer most game processing is done on dedicated server Factorio uses a different approach where each client does processing of its own stuff and the game state of multiple clients then gets periodically syncronized.
The main advantage of this is that you don't reauire a dedicated server software and there is basically no limitation of how many players do play together in one game except when network bandwich doesen't allow clients to exchange their game state data fast enough to keep them all syncronized. So you are not limited by the server processing power.
The mian disadvatage of such approach is that it is much harder to keep multiple clients propery synchronized between each other.
Anywhay the developers didn't ruled out that some dat they might make a dedicated server software for Factorio.
As far as mod support in multiplayer goes teoretically it should work fine that is if all mods are made in a way to be totaly deterministic.

At the moment developers are making sure that game core is fully deterministic first which is required for maintaining proper game state syncronization between all clients. And that required developers to rewrite large portion of the existing game already.
So in short they are making small steps toward multiplayer. But given of what I have seen from developers so far (I have been playing factorio now for over a year) I can say give them enough time and they will make Factorio multiplayer even better than the one in Minecraft is.

Sounds great, thanks for the reply. I haven't done much digging for information, and I didn't want this to be a bother for them to answer. I'm sure they get swamped with already answered questions all the time.

[SilverWarior]

I'm sure they get swamped with already answered questions all the time.

Fortunately for now they arent's swamped with same questions over and over again due to the fact that Factorio comunity isn't to big and still quite slowly expanding.
But unfortunately that will probably quickly change once Factorio gets to Steam (which is suposed to happen sometime after multipleayer gets implemented and stabilized) as it would bring large anout of new players to the forums each having their own questions and ideas.

I still remember how it was when Kerbal Space Program went to Steam.
Before that its forums were already a bit hard to folow as it was already quite popular even before it got to steam (somewhere between 20 to 100 resposnes to threads in suggestion parts of the KSP forum per day).
But once KSP got to Steam keeping track of its forums has become a living nightmare. There were from 5 to 10 new suggestion threads every two hours with countelss responses for existing threads and quite soon it ended up with doesens of threads suggestion the same thing over and over again.
Now you can barely see any KSP developer to do any posting on their forums as it would literally take their whole time just reading them even thou hte sitaution has improved greatly from the one just after the Steam launch.

But here on Factorio forums you can still see developers comonly responding to the comunity even thou they are a bit quieter lately. But that is due the fact that they are working so hard on implementing hte multiplayer that they would definitely deserve a nice vacation once it is done. But that probably won't hapen as the bur reports will probably skyrocket just after the multiplayer gets implemented and developers will do everything in hteir power to solve those bugs as fast as possible.

[kovarex]

1. Will there be a Minecraft like Multiplayer, where you can enter a IP and dynamically join and leave a server, or will it be like a co-op game?

This is the way it works now, one player starts the game and others can join or leave.

2. Will there be Mod Support for the Multiplayer?

The base game is technically also just a mod, so as long as the mods don't do something nasty, it should work out of the box as long as all players do have exactly the same mods (versions included).

3. If there will be dynamic joining and leaving an open server, do you think you'll ever add the support for Modded Servers? (Like Bukkit for MineCraft with Plugins and so on)

As there is nothing like dedicated server, the modded server is also not needed. Things like Bukkit shouldn't be needed as the mod support in Factorio is native, this is something I wanted to do the right way from the start

I've found myself having a lot of fun running Modded MC servers, I get really enjoyment watching other players creations and setups with mods. It's truly a payoff seeing players come up with this massive and effective automation setups. I loved it. Recently I've left the BusinessElite server team due to disagreements on the direction of the pack, and I hope to create some of the best running and most fun servers for Factorio, I hope to one day make it my job.

Thanks for reading.. I really hope you don't take this the wrong way Devs... I love your work, I love your game, and I can't get enough of it.

Let's see how it works with Factorio, but I'm eager to see it too