Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Show RAM usage on multiplayer games.

What ?

Show RAM usage on multiplayer games so people can easily know if their system has enough RAM to join the game.

My idea on what it should look like:

Why ?

Computers come in different shapes, sizes, core/thread count, cpu speed, ram size, and other things. Some people create megabases that consume large amounts of CPU and RAM. Depending on how much RAM you have and the size of the map joining a multiplayer game can easily lockup your computer if you do not have enough RAM. I've done this a few times when trying to load megabases.

As once was told on LTT forum, ram is not GPU, it still pretty cheap + there swap/virtual ram things
If you lacking of ram just get more

IMHO factorio is nicely optimized, i don;t thing it able to use more than 3gb of ram, and i don't think that anyone in whole world still hawe pc/notebook with less than 4gb of ram+ most of humans now (steam-using gamers at least) hawe mostly 16gb of ram (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)

Defective_Soul wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 23, 2022 10:50 pm

IMHO factorio is nicely optimized, i don;t thing it able to use more than 3gb of ram, and i don't think that anyone in whole world still hawe pc/notebook with less than 4gb of ram+ most of humans now (steam-using gamers at least) hawe mostly 16gb of ram (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)

Maybe valid for typical vanilla runs, but OP specifically cited multiplayer megabases as the problem. On my heavily-modded 1000-hour multiplayer map, my Windows 10 PC with 16GB of RAM gives a full 11.5GB to Factorio when loading the save and 9-10GB when running. I don't know if all of that is absolutely necessary, but it does use it when offered.

Defective_Soul wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 23, 2022 10:50 pm

As once was told on LTT forum, ram is not GPU, it still pretty cheap + there swap/virtual ram things
If you lacking of ram just get more

With the proposed suggestion, you could know which games you could join, and which games require you to buy more RAM.

Now where it is clear what’s really needed I would change this suggestion to something more like:

Don’t offer a player games, that his/her computer would not be able to handle.

This is much more complex, but how would the average player know, if his computer can handle this game? He eventually doesn’t know the RAM size of his/her computer! And depending on what he/she is doing (makes some big rendering of videos in background, streams his game live, etc.) this changes also. Because it depends on RAM, CPU, Graphics card RAM and eventually possibly (edited on 28.Jan, 6 pm) much more details.

It’s clear for me, that this is very complex and so I would implement this in the first iteration as a filter-option “show only games, which my computer surely can handle”. Whit the word “surely” this algorithm can guess much more and add some safety gap. I can think also of something like a test-algorithm which can be triggered to make this guess tougher.

Maybe show save file size based on previous auto-save ? not the same as RAM but same ideas.

Atm the only thing that can help guess the "state" of a game you could join is the time passed on a game, you know if you are coming in a starting map or a map that has 1000 hours.

But a 200H map can be very different if there was 12 players on average all time, or just me playing slowly.

I have learned not to click on games where i says 1000+ hours on my laptop because it can't handle it.

But that's not very precise and sometimes wrong because not everyone build megabase in 1000H, sometimes it's just a server 24/24 and the map is not much built despite the time running.

Well, I see here two things quirked together, which are dependent, but not really need to be changed in one go:

A) is the game playable with my computer?

That solution is in my opinion still my post from yesterday. The player don’t need to know the size of the game to decide if this is playable or not. This is much too complex to use only the RAM size for such a calculation.

B) how “big” is a game-map? What area-size does this map currently have?

I think that should be counted in revealed chunks. Which is a very good measure, to compare, because a chunk is an area of 32x32 tiles and they reflect also more or less directly the used RAM. I think that would be a very good information to be added into every map-save and displayed with the other meta-info on screen.

I have played on multiplayer maps that had Factorio's RAM usage go up to 32 GB. And I've seen people play maps with 62 GB RAM usage. I like this idea, though it's not that good of an indicator of whether you can play the map or not. Mostly when you can't join a map it's because your PC can't keep up with the server.

It would also be nice to also see an estimated download size to join the server too. Makes you think twice before joining that 500 MB map.