Supporting cloud services

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ssilk
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Supporting cloud services

Post by ssilk »

First a bit off topic: Lately I experimented a lot with BitTorrent Sync. What I can say is: yeah, this rocks. The first free and stable cloud sync, which has no problems to synchronize really big hard disks (I synchronized my 4 TB NAS without any problem and worked on it really hard, doing really ugly things with it, of course I had a backup :) (I tried some others before that)).

Well, what I'm thinking is, that it would be cool, to synchronize maps for multiplayer or other stuff (modules) like that, instead over the game. The reason is: the game needs only one client to save the maps, players can continue playing, even if the initiator leaves... I really dunno exactly, but I see that as a cool possibility, we can play around with.

The point is, that it needs to be supported by the game in two ways: when auto saving a map, only one client to do so. The game should be told "autosave the map only once" and then he can choose either "only my client" and then the game will warn the other players, if this client leaves, or "the fastest client" and that will enable the game to auto select the saving client.
The same is it with loading maps: I can tell the game to use a file instead of synchronizing, as fallback it still synchronizes, but having this option would be cool.
Also cool would be to tell the game: use this directory for all the files, this means, it makes its autosaves and default save dir here. This is, cause the common things about cloud based services are that they can be based on directories. File based clouds are a special case.

Did I forget some edge case?

Well, I know of course, with a working synchronization this all is not really needed. I see this only as a special edge case, someone which wants to make experiment with a map. A group of users continuosly want to play a map, the last one saves it to the cloud, without thinking much. And more such stuff.
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Zenith
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Re: Supporting cloud services

Post by Zenith »

I was thinking of a related feature (auto-syncing maps between devices but not for MP) and actually started work on a Factorio Loader. When run, this would give you a GUI in which you can synchronize your save files, e.g. from dropbox etc. Instead, I decided to just use a symbolic link to point my save folder to one within the dropbox path (dirty but means I don't have to do anything).

I did think at the time it would be nice if factorio could automatically link with cloud services to backup your save games/configuration etc. I haven't actually played MP yet (haven't got any friends lol) but I like the idea of having the map itself hosted on the cloud and then 1 client is the 'master' who saves changes back to the cloud. Then, as you said, should this master client leave the game, the remaining clients negotiate among themselves who will be the new master (maybe based on ping or something similar) who then takes over the job of saving the map back to the cloud.

Maybe the synchronizing to the cloud could be done on a per chunk basis, so the game doesn't have to save the entire map it simply uploads the changed chunks since the last save (this may be what happens now with map saving, I'm not sure).

ssilk, i like it :) nice idea well explained.

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Re: Supporting cloud services

Post by warmadmax »

i'm already "cloud sync'd" for single player,

Using symbolic links / junction points on the save and mods folder for factorio and redirecting them to a dropbox folder.

Dropbox uploads automatically after each save, each machine downloads automatically,
If it gets to Steam, their cloud sync would be awesome as well :D


luckily the multiplayer already handles itself on a peer to peer basis,
one host drops, the others can resume without,
on some games it does struggle with uploading it to other players that join the session, i've not played multi for a while (since the early 0.11 builds) but more than 3 people in a game caused some serious syncing issues.

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