General Issues with Automated Mod Downloading

[GregoriusT]

So I think this should be the right Board for me to talk about this, if not then sorry, would you please move it to the right place? It's more of a Development Design Problem, or a "Review/Rant" than a Report of anything.

You recently added the Automatic Mod Downloading System for joining Servers, which sounded amazing to me at first, until I had to use it a couple times.

But first for a little contrast, the old "System" we had before the Automatic one was usually as follows:

Step 1: Get a zip with all the Mods and Configs from the Server Host, usually as a Download Link of some sort. In some cases it was just a "here is a list of mods, go download them yourself, we only changed the Configs X, Y and Z, so that should be easy enough to do"
Step 2: install all Mods in one go and make sure you have the right Version of the Factorio Base Game itself.
Step 3: Start the Game. That will usually take 10 mins or so with a typical Mod Set.
Step 4: Join Server and everybody is happy unless the Base gets wiped by Biters.

Now that sounds like an alright System to me, sure it's not convenient or anything, but when we come to the current Automatic System, it cant be worse than this manual way, can it? Well I was surprised to find out that it can be much worse than that.

First of all the problems: The sheer existence of the Automatic System gives Hosts a psychological incentive to no longer provide the zip with all the Mods, or even a List at all, making the Manual way pretty much impossible to use, since "The Automatic System does it for you, why would I need to do anything?".
I do not have proof for actual people having this behavior, considering I only played with one of my Friends, but this is how the System feels to me if I was to make a Server.

But why is the Automatic System bad in the first place? Let me show you how a typical updating of a Modpack treats the End User in the worst possible Case, compared to the ~10 minutes Manual Way.

Step 1: Launch Factorio, that will take 10 Minutes.
Step 2: Try to join the Server, sadly the Server updated the Factorio Base Game Version, so it will reject your request for giving you a Mod List.
Step 3: Update Factorio Base Game, launch again, takes 10 minutes again.
Step 4: Some of the Mods you have happen to not be compatible with that newer Base Game, so you need to disable them and retry for another 10 minutes.
Remember the whole point of trying to join the Server was to automatically update Mods to the right Version, but you got rejected at Step 2, before you even got the Mod List. This has fatal consequences to your Configurations and Keybindings as those will get wiped for the Mods that are temporarily disabled just to get the Game to launch again in the first place!
Step 5: Try to join the Server again, now you finally get a Mod List, and the prompt to update all the Mods and specific Versions that need updating.
Step 6: Yet ANOTHER 10 minute waiting time for restarting the Game with all the Mods.
Step 7: Try to join the Server AGAIN, but fail because the Host has changed one single Startup Config, that you should have had before launching. No problem just sync the Configs and restart. It's totally not that bad...
Step 8: wait yet another 10 Minutes for the Restart with all the Mods and Configs you need to take Effect.
Step 9: After a total of almost one frikkin HOUR you can finally join the Server, but you are too tired of this crap to play, or you dont have any play time left because you have real life things to do. But not only that you also lost your Keybinds for some of the Mods and need to configure them back, because nobody should be expected to backup their Configs if an Automatic System supposedly takes care of everything for you.

To make it short, my opinion of this System is, that it's even worse than Modded Minecraft when it comes to Mod Management, simply because of this one glaring Issue. Like it is really hard to be worse than Minecraft Mods, but this System did it for me, as much as I love its general concept.

You guys REALLY need a Launcher for Factorio, something that can sync the Mods and Configs with a Server and download Mods, before launching Factorio itself, because having to launch the Game itself really wastes a shitload of time and risks losing custom Keybinds.
Or have the Main Menu of the Game show up before launching the actual Game, so you can configure everything and then wait the 10 minutes after having configured the Stuff, instead of having to wait 10 minutes for the Main Menu to show up and then another 10 minutes after configuring the things.

I have already wasted multiple hours trying to join OvermindDL1s Home Server just to update Mods, something that was way easier in 0.16 where we just did everything manually and he gave me the changed Mods and Configs, and I was able to join within less than 15 minutes.

Also downloading Mods from in the Main Menu instant restarts Factorio without asking, what if you wanted to change some options after you downloaded the Mods, before restarting Factorio? Well you can't do that either. Not to mention it will restart Factorio, meaning you cant just prevent it from starting again, because what if you wanted to close Factorio after updating Mods, since you need to do some other Stuff first before launching it again? Well you need to wait 10 more minutes whenever that happens...

That's it for my Review/Rant, I hope I didn't come over as too harsh, but this is just ridiculous. I know you will probably find some way to reduce these massive issues in the Future (considering you're the best Dev Team I know so far), and I hope its fixed before 1.0 because I personally would never let a Game with that terrible of a System be fully Released, no matter how awesome the Gameplay is. But thanks for letting me know how not to do it, before I start making my own Game. ;P

Thanks for reading, I know my style of talking can be a bit chaotic, so I am open for questions. ^^

[Qon]

Step 3: Start the Game. That will usually take 10 mins or so with a typical Mod Set.

so I am open for questions. ^^

How old is your computer and what do you consider a typical mod set?

I have more mods installed then you and it takes 35 seconds to start Factorio. If I had Alien Biomes enabled then that mod would add a bit of time but it would still be <1 minute. I think a lot of your problems would just go away if you just started Factorio faster.

But I can agree that it's annoying that I have to load all my mods to be able to install or disable/enable them. And when I install/enable anything I have to restart to change the settings. And when I changed the settings I have to restart again.

[GregoriusT]

There is Mods like Science Cost Tweaker that can cause a lot of startup Lag in an Angel-Bobs based Pack. It is always the interactions between different Mods that can go exponential. I have that loading time issue in Minecraft a lot too and needed to optimize things way often just to get the average time down to below 5 minutes.

As for the oldness of the Computer, such thing usually doesn't matter anymore nowadays, since Computers are rather stagnant or even going backwards in Speed for power conservation reasons. The one in question has 1.8GHz as seen here (warning stats in German, didn't find an English variant, but if you know computers you can easily see what it is).

And when I play vanilla Factorio on my 1.1GHz Quadcore Integrated Graphics one, which is my Main one where I have everything on, it starts in less than a Minute (though it took way longer with the Modpacks, before I went with the slightly faster Laptop). It is btw much newer than the Laptop above, yet it's slower, but it has the benefit of being 100% passive cooled, and therefore absolutely silent (I have thermals on a widget, it doesn't go above 72°C at maximum load). Then there is also that one with a 1.0GHz Quadcore, but I wouldn't like playing Factorio on a Handheld.

All three of them run pretty much the same version of Kubuntu. And yes I am aware that at least on Steam the System Requirements for Factorio are listed as over 3 GHz, but that would still be over 5 minutes of loading time.

[Qon]

There is Mods like Science Cost Tweaker that can cause a lot of startup Lag in an Angel-Bobs based Pack. It is always the interactions between different Mods that can go exponential.

Those are certainly popular mods, but wouldn't consider them "a typical mod pack". The overwhelming majority of mods don't noticably slow down startup at all. Only a handful out of thousands have this problem. Sounds like there's room for optimization that these particular mod devs should look into if it's the interactions between them that takes so much time.

[Nidan]

As I happen to have the modpack in question, just for comparison, the loading times on my computer:

Greg's modpack:

Code: Select all

 379.779 Loading sounds...  (mod loading has finished)
 410.756 Factorio initialised  (main menu shown)

Vanilla:

Code: Select all

   4.206 Loading sounds...
  16.268 Factorio initialised

I'd agree that this is not typical modpack, not because of Angel/Bobs but its overall size.
Looking at the times each mod take, this doesn't seem to be a problem of a particular mod or combination of mods. Instead, my guess is the repeated construction and destruction of the LUA state combined with having the large number of things that need to be copied each time. An example near the end of the mod loading stage:

Code: Select all

 215.790 Loading mod science-pack-dependencies 0.2.7 (data-final-fixes.lua)
 [... walking the technology tree multiple times, doing stuff ...]
 216.620 Script @__science-pack-dependencies__/make_dependencies.lua:83: still loading the game, ignoring these errors for now...  (last statement this mod executes, aside from ends and returns)
 219.154 Loading mod aai-industry 0.3.8 (data-final-fixes.lua)

(I've added my own mod to the pack as this makes an excellent test case for future versions)
That's 2.5 seconds of factorio/LUA bookkeeping, which doesn't seem like much on its own but adds up as it happens between each used mod loading stage. (Maybe explore if some caching can be added here while still giving each mod a clean slate to work on?)


Back to the main issue:
This is a good example why update checks, mod portal and savegame/server selection should be available before loading the game.

[GregoriusT]

Yes some sort of Launcher Mechanism would be great.

Just wanted to fly by after I saw an Issue I mentioned here being fixed in a future Version of Factorio by saving unused Keybinds to a File in order for them to not get wiped all the time when you temporarily disable Mods.

Also another Mipmap Generation Issue caused huge loading times for Texture Loading that got fixed now. But I do want to clarify that those 10 minutes I spoke of were without that Mipmap Issue occurring, because when I loaded the Pack the very first time I waited over 30 minutes for the Game to load at that particular 95% point and just reduced the Graphics Settings to mitigate that Issue afterwards.