Friday Facts #266 - Cleanup of mechanics

[emp_zealoth]

The worst part is that those changes threaten to split vanilla and modded games way apart technical wise, for very miniscule gain in playability and miniscule gain performance wise (or so I assume)

I also feel like they strip out some soul out of the game. Steelaxe is so friggin cheap, carrying a stack of iron plates and steel plates isn't that big of a deal if one runs out...And if one runs out its something to break up the pace - sure it's annoying but after a few times it doesnt happen often and even that annoyance adds some spice to the game. Another thing is, if you are playing vanilla, don't you already have to cart in trainloads of building materials to do anything anyway?

Resistances/damage types are another thing. If you believe there is too many of those, why not simply hide some and set them to 0/0, so that the modders can change the values later without resorting to some frankensteinian code butchery? Similar thing with ores and mining (although I could see this impacting the performance the most?) Set the values to neutral and leave them in the game. Ditto efficiency.

Those changes proposed in the FFF seem like they either will require the game engine to be effectively forked/code butchery by modders/mod butchery

PS. As I said before - proposed assembler changes will make the game blmeeeh bland. Sure, it could use a rework - I do
remember the confusion why the machine would not obey me - but it does not require you to make it so dreadful

[Rseding91]

Those changes proposed in the FFF seem like they either will require the game engine to be effectively forked/code butchery by modders/mod butchery

There's a simple answer to that: mods can't do that. So they're forced to just not use pickaxes in any way because they no longer exist in the game engine and they can't change the game engine.

[5thHorseman]

I however don't agree with the detractors that removing the pickaxe will dumb the game down to the point that the unwashed masses are going to suddenly want to start making factories instead of trying to beat their high scores in Flappy Bird,

The problem with that kind of argument is that removing a single element is never going to instantaneously convert the game from x to y. It is the accumulation of tiny changes.

And the problem with that is that it's the "slippery slope" argument and I've seen that eventuality not happen far too many times to even consider it with no evidence other than it could in theory happen.

By that logic, by now there would be hundreds of gun types in the game because once they added a couple more guns. Or biters would be removed entirely because they removed biter science. Or we'd have colonies on the Moon in 2001 because a dozen or so people managed to land rickety space ships there in the 70s.

If for no other purpose, you should be not worried about this because the game is 95% complete according to Wube. I'm actually surprised they made a change THIS big, this late in the dev cycle. They don't have the time to turn the game into a linear point-and-click adventure game even if they wanted to, which as someone who's followed the development of the game for some years I am pretty confident they don't.

[Jap2.0]

The weapons : Pistol, machine gun, shotgun, combat shotgun, rocket launcher, flame thrower. These are a one time craft (at most), also infinitesimal in cost... Getting the weapons as passive upgrades on appropriate research makes totally sense.

And how would you propose we switch weapons?

Well seeing as they just freed up the Tab key, they could use that.

So would that just be cycling through the highest tiers of all unlocked weapons? What about mods, which could add many more weapons? Some people might not want to have to press tab 10 times to go between their combat shotgun and nuke launcher.

[Confusador]

This is an exciting enough update that I wanted to comment on it, for once, but I had to do some testing beforehand that I only just got around to, so here I am just in time for the next FF.

I'm really excited about these changes, but at first I was skeptical about the assembly machine change. Making things that let you make more complicated things so that you can then make even more complicated things is the core gameplay loop, and it felt like the tiered assemblers fit right into that. I thought that removing those steps would take away some important moments of advancement. In actually testing, though, the important things I found are:

- Because tier 2 is required for green science, they get researched immediately.
- Because tier 2 is required for building tier 1, they get automated at the same time.

Basically, they *could* be designed in a way that that provides a nice sense of progression, but it would require rebalancing a bunch of recipes to be simpler, so that automation 2 could require green science and therefore come later. That seems infeasible at this stage, and as a result removing them seems like it will make the early game feel better, with the possibility of researching speed upgrades down the line. At this point, I've even started thinking that there's really no need for fast vs regular inserters!

Eliminating mechanics that are outside the core gameplay and which unnecessarily complicate things is one of the most important ways to polish a game, but it can be really hard to identify those things. Everything in this update seems like it's going to make the game even more engaging; keep up the good work!

[bobucles]

I'm not sure I like having all the weapons available as unlocks. Sorting through weapon lists can become a chore, especially on mods that add more weapon types. Leaving weapons as items means that a player can pick and choose the only weapons they ever want to care about at that point in time. Don't like flamethrowers? Then don't carry them.

[Koub]

In the eventuality my idea gets into vanilla, why not give the choice to the player to choose amongst all the available weapons ? The slots are there, just allow the player to tell which weapon he wants in which slot, and that's all (the way any MMO allows the player to place whatever item or skill the player wants in any toolbar slot. a simple dropdown would do the trick, or allowing the player to drag and drop from the military crafting tab directly into the slot, I don't know.

[Durabys]

Those changes proposed in the FFF seem like they either will require the game engine to be effectively forked/code butchery by modders/mod butchery

There's a simple answer to that: mods can't do that. So they're forced to just not use pickaxes in any way because they no longer exist in the game engine and they can't change the game engine.

"So Fuck Modders and Fuck Game Fanatics? Fuck the players? Right-o? YES! Fuck THEM ALL!"

I do not believe the game would have been eating too much RAM and CPU time if you left those resources in the background for modders and fans to use.

Why not also remove guns, ammo, armor and any and all armor equipment as well?

You know what? Fuck this noise. I am buying Satisfactory the moment it is out.

The problem is that I had a connection with the character when I could equip him/her. You slowly taking that away.
When not if, you remove weapons too? This game will basically become an RTS-wannabe that regular RTS's will eat for breakfast.

[Mike5000]

There's a simple answer to that: mods can't do that. So they're forced to just not use pickaxes in any way because they no longer exist in the game engine and they can't change the game engine.

As long as I don't overwrite 0.16 I'm not losing anything, although decent terrain generation would have been nice.

[emp_zealoth]

Those changes proposed in the FFF seem like they either will require the game engine to be effectively forked/code butchery by modders/mod butchery

There's a simple answer to that: mods can't do that. So they're forced to just not use pickaxes in any way because they no longer exist in the game engine and they can't change the game engine.

Which is covered by option 3 - mod butchery

My point is, those changes provide minimal gain in accesibility for new players or (by my rough personal reasoning) in performance and are a big deal for a sizeable chunk of a community (me included) and effectively steamroll over some of the biggest, most loved mods with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of downloads. And for what?

PS. That response really left a sour taste in my mouth.

[Reika]

I however don't agree with the detractors that removing the pickaxe will dumb the game down to the point that the unwashed masses are going to suddenly want to start making factories instead of trying to beat their high scores in Flappy Bird,

The problem with that kind of argument is that removing a single element is never going to instantaneously convert the game from x to y. It is the accumulation of tiny changes.

And the problem with that is that it's the "slippery slope" argument and I've seen that eventuality not happen far too many times to even consider it with no evidence other than it could in theory happen.

By that logic, by now there would be hundreds of gun types in the game because once they added a couple more guns. Or biters would be removed entirely because they removed biter science. Or we'd have colonies on the Moon in 2001 because a dozen or so people managed to land rickety space ships there in the 70s.

If for no other purpose, you should be not worried about this because the game is 95% complete according to Wube. I'm actually surprised they made a change THIS big, this late in the dev cycle. They don't have the time to turn the game into a linear point-and-click adventure game even if they wanted to, which as someone who's followed the development of the game for some years I am pretty confident they don't.

Then let me provide an example of it happening - modded Minecraft, on which Factorio was initially based or at least heavily inspired.

In the days of modded 1.5.2 and earlier (circa ~2011-2013), mods were very much defined by three characteristics:

• You are given tools to a solution, not the solution itself. For example, you are given a set of machines, three of which when used together might be able to accomplish a simple goal (eg automatically farm a crop), and a different nine which when combined in the right way might be able to build an automatic fuel production facility from renewable resources.
• Everything is tangible. By that I mean everything is visibly and acoustically "alive", such that you can tell at a glance what is doing what. Engines animate and make sound, and differently based on status, as do machines. Quarries have large moving digging arms, and harvesters have similar visual cues. You can see power, water, and other things flowing through pipes.
• Failure is entirely possible, and not a mere slap on the wrist. For example, engines require coolant, and will suffer a violent failure (read: explosion) if this is not provided for too long (warnings being provided by increasingly threatening colors and increasingly aggressive animations). Reactors can be designed poorly, such that they produce nothing, or, worst case scenario, enter a spiral of out-of-control reactivity and eventual meltdown.

Things continued that way, until some time after Minecraft 1.6.4 had become the primarily-used version. Over the course of 1.6.4's lifecycle, community attitudes started to shift, with some vocal elements becoming more prominent. Namely concerns related to "lag", "grind" and "excessive punishment". Wrong as it may be, an idea took root in many that those three characteristics above were the direct source of those problems. People started to believe that animations, sound, and complex code (for complex machine logic) caused lag. People started calling having to design a solution from parts "grind". Any possibility of failure was treated as more and more draconian.

So, towards the end of the 1.6.4 lifecycle, Thermal Expansion, along with some of its associated mods, such as BigReactors, made major design changes, the chief of which was the introduction of a new power system, the (in)famous Redstone Flux ('RF' in common parlance). Internally, RF was and still is coded as a fluid, using fluid transfer code, meaning it has no concept of things like voltage/potential, flow rate, or thresholds. It is merely a resource which is generated and "pools" in machines until they have a sufficient amount to do one "work cycle". It was and still is, despite frankly baseless insistence to the contrary, incredibly simple compared to older power systems and designed to remain that way.

Thermal expansion also ditched everything that could conceivably be called lag. Models, animations, sounds, et cetera; all were scrapped in favor of inert boxes for which the only indication of functionality was a progress bar in a GUI (TE did end up adding sounds back in late 1.7.10, around 2016). Nothing had complex functionality logic like adjacency, or environmental requirements (think like waterfalls for waterwheels); it was all reduced to "Do I have power? Check. Do I have an item to process? Check. Then I do my thing." There was no concept of failure at all - the only way a machine could not work at full capacity was to be deprived of input power or items.

This all became important when, during the switch to 1.7.10, many of the older mods, in part due to heavy public pressure, switched from their power systems to RF. With that switch came an inherent loss of complexity, particularly in anything related to power generation.
But the real damage was more subtle: Now that the older, more complex mods were using the new, simple power system, they felt incongrouous. People starting demanding to know why those mods were being "more difficult to use", why they would "punish the player for nothing". Everything was compared to Thermal Expansion as some sort of "standard", in part due to that mod's unprecedented popularity. Some developers immediately caved to the demands. Others only did so once they were called "obstinate" or people told them that their mods would become "dinosaurs" that would be "relegated to the dustbin".

However, over time, over the course of 1.7.10's lifecycle (going up until fairly recently), a very obvious trend emerged. Mods were growing increasingly simple, increasingly "hand-holdy", increasingly visually inert, almost entirely due to community pressure to do so. Some of those flagship defining examples I referred to above? Gone.

It was not very long - maybe a year and a half - before the "old" style of modded gameplay was a relic that one had to actively work to achieve, often with limited success. (I have a modpack designed in part to bring back the "glory days"; do you have any idea how much work it has taken? Months and months, much of it patching other mods' code. And even that is only an echo of what it once was).

It is rare now for mods to have much "going on" in them; the majority are comprised of simple place-and-they-work machines (commonly referred to as "magic boxes") with no complex logic or requirements. Power generation is no longer a heavy focus of logistics as it once was; it is now largely simplified to "build this power generation multiblock, that, once complete, generates 500000 units per tick, and you can just copy the design online anyways". Things are so simple and uniform that even minor departures from that, something that would be completely unremarkable years ago, generate huge attention for how "innovative" they are. (Example: "Wow! that mod sends power through the air instead of wires! that's so cool!") For all intents and purposes, the "old" gameplay style of modded minecraft is dead. And many of the old players have simply moved on; they are no longer able to play the game they enjoyed, so they found other games entirely (of which Factorio is one).

Normally, I bring this story up to complain about how I, as one of the last developers who refuses to switch their mods over to simplicity, face ever-growing hostility for it. Today, however, the focus is different. I raise it as a cautionary tale, to show that yes, a game can indeed go down that path, due to nothing more than ceding to demands for increased simplicity. To show where that ultimately leads. To strongly indicate that the foundation for such a shift already exists (cough cough "should nuclear/fluids be axed for UPS concerns?") And to, I hope, demonstrate why that path must be avoided.

And before anyone makes the argument that modded Minecraft is different, that modders just want popularity and so cater to the lowest common denominator:
Do games not also do that to some extent, to increase sales? They have just as much - if not more - motivation to do so. And some of this recent near-constant focus on "new players" has very much felt like this for Factorio.

By that logic, by now there would be hundreds of gun types in the game because once they added a couple more guns. Or biters would be removed entirely because they removed biter science.

I have feared for a long time that biters will eventually be removed. A huge portion of the playerbase disables them, and many people vocally consider them superfluous. But such a drastic change would ruin the game for everyone else, for whom they represent an integral part of the game. Not to mention the thousands of mods that would be made irrevocably dead, and not just direct enemies mods; what is the importance of things like space or pollution without biters?

[Rythe]

@Reika - Speaking of biters, I've a solid game mechanic suggestion that will allow biters to be more than they are, that is reasonable to add to Factorio, and most players will enjoy and use for one reason or another.

Gives the Radar new life too. ...I suddenly have this feeling someone already suggested it years ago, but we'll see.

Plan to write that up tonight.

[Koub]

I'm amazed at how the removal of a useless act (crafting the object pickaxe) is prophetized to end the world. Honestly, I can't understand how not having to manually craft oneself a pickaxe has any chance to drastically change the game into anything else. The mining animation will still be there, we're only going to get rid of the "Why am I so slow mining ? Ah damn, forgot to craft myself that bloody pickaxe again" at every single new map. And ... that's about it.
From the start, the pickaxe (and its speed) could have been considered a passive ability. It's not as if the player had to continuously switch between tools, as in Minecraft. We have ever had only 2 tiers of a single item, that's used to do everything. Mine, chop trees, deconstruct a building, ... Why not say it's there and that's all ?

[Reika]

I'm amazed at how the removal of a useless act (crafting the object pickaxe) is prophetized to end the world. Honestly, I can't understand how not having to manually craft oneself a pickaxe has any chance to drastically change the game into anything else. The mining animation will still be there, we're only going to get rid of the "Why am I so slow mining ? Ah damn, forgot to craft myself that bloody pickaxe again" at every single new map. And ... that's about it.
From the start, the pickaxe (and its speed) could have been considered a passive ability. It's not as if the player had to continuously switch between tools, as in Minecraft. We have ever had only 2 tiers of a single item, that's used to do everything. Mine, chop trees, deconstruct a building, ... Why not say it's there and that's all ?

You are being disingenuous. None of this is about "oh no, no more pickaxe". It is because there are far more dramatic changes that you are conveniently ignoring, and the fact that these changes are being forced on us, with no possibility of mods to undo them.

[Rythe]

Why not say it's there and that's all?

I've spent a lot of time answering that question: Thematic introduction of game's core ethos. NPE transition schema. Immersion. Cohesive experience. Greater/concrete feeling of significance to early advancement.

Others have added: Appropriate slot for Mods to do an ability check for $task, allowing tasks to be equipment dependent in a concrete way.

It's fine if you don't care about any of that, but at this point it's like you're trying to be deliberately obtuse.

[quyxkh]

I'm amazed at how the removal of a useless act (crafting the object pickaxe) is prophetized to end the world. Honestly, I can't understand how not having to manually craft oneself a pickaxe has any chance to drastically change the game into anything else. The mining animation will still be there, we're only going to get rid of the "Why am I so slow mining ? Ah damn, forgot to craft myself that bloody pickaxe again" at every single new map. And ... that's about it.
From the start, the pickaxe (and its speed) could have been considered a passive ability. It's not as if the player had to continuously switch between tools, as in Minecraft. We have ever had only 2 tiers of a single item, that's used to do everything. Mine, chop trees, deconstruct a building, ... Why not say it's there and that's all ?

Let's recap all the parts that have gone in just this round: even the simplest modeling of Carnot's law (heat engine efficiency), material hardness and fluids sloshing, so basically all the atmospherics around fluids and materials, all the little touches of verisimilitude are gone from the sim. I'm waiting for whatever this obsession for stripping the grace notes from the game is to get around to removing the ragged lamp lighting again, or the variation in the smoke direction.

And that's just the grace notes, the little "you are here, this is a world" bits. I'm guessing you'd blanch at removing the music from the game, right? Is it really so hard to imagine other parts of its ambiance have value of the same kind? It's your game, you get to do what you want with it, but if you're going to defend what's being done, defend what's being done, don't pretend it's just the pickaxe and deny the rest by excluding it from the discussion, by refusing to admit it. There is some point of view in that office that's got some sway over the decision making that regards ambiance and grace notes as worthless. It seems to me, one of the rankled, unsurprising that that might rankle the people who love your game at least in part for its ambiance and grace notes.

But that's not all that's gone. There's also the let's-not-just-strip-the-unnecessary-bits-of-skin-off-the-game moves, there's the let's-strip-these-unnecessary-bits-of-meat-off-it-too moves. Ingredient bucket counts in assemblers, they just get in the way, ... of what, again? It's a little puzzle, it's an early puzzle, it's easy to figure out, it drives you back to the tech tree, you see you want automation 2 for full electric-powered-automation production, and you're done with that puzzle, okay build more miners and furnaces while I'm waiting for resources, got it, oh, hey, I could string these together and automate them, right?

It's the first such puzzle you encounter. Is that what makes it "unnecessary", that it's the first and easiest?

Now there's a new first and easiest puzzle, what is the argument against taking that out that distinguishes it from this one? I mean, besides this impulsion to blow past all the puzzles and obstacles to reach whatever end (victory? over what?) these people are pursuing.

Players have to research and build bots, why not say they're there and that's all? Is it that they're not the first and easiest research? "Yet" is where you're going with this logic, Koub. People have to research and build every single item in the game, why not say they're all there and that's all? The pickaxe has its place in the progression. Fix the UI so holding the pickaxe works for doing what you do with pickaxes, same as holding a blueprint works for doing what you do with blueprints or holding anything else works for doing what you do with that.

While you're at it, make holding a gun work for firing it if you want, there's no reason that shouldn't work.

The auto-equip-from-the-tool-slot is a nice touch, a considerate designer with an eye for detail who cares about players thought that up. But it's not necessary. It'd be great to see what I'm about to fire the next time I decide to carry a nuke launcher, care to guess the reason I don't? But really, why not just take guns out, why not say they're there and that's all? Could it be that "I made that myself" brings some small satisfaction, and an accumulation of countless small satisfactions that took some familiarization and practice (and later on even some planning and increasingly hardcore puzzle-solving) to achieve is the point of the game, that any game is nothing more than its meat-and-potatoes challenges and whatever ambiance and grace notes it delivers as reward and milieu that come with it?

[Lithane]

I love the idea of starting a new game and being able to skip crafting an iron pick, so much wasted time...

[mcdjfp]

Well, I am extremely disappointed. What I want is a mod with different tools that go in the tool slot. Maybe an axe that only cuts trees and not the ore underneath. Or maybe a tool that only removes buildings so I don't have to chop multiple trees simply to pick up a segment of wall/track. A whole bunch of options just went away, Great.

[Lithane]

I'm amazed at how the removal of a useless act (crafting the object pickaxe) is prophetized to end the world. Honestly, I can't understand how not having to manually craft oneself a pickaxe has any chance to drastically change the game into anything else. The mining animation will still be there, we're only going to get rid of the "Why am I so slow mining ? Ah damn, forgot to craft myself that bloody pickaxe again" at every single new map. And ... that's about it.
From the start, the pickaxe (and its speed) could have been considered a passive ability. It's not as if the player had to continuously switch between tools, as in Minecraft. We have ever had only 2 tiers of a single item, that's used to do everything. Mine, chop trees, deconstruct a building, ... Why not say it's there and that's all ?

Let's recap all the parts that have gone in just this round: even the simplest modeling of Carnot's law (heat engine efficiency), material hardness and fluids sloshing, so basically all the atmospherics around fluids and materials, all the little touches of verisimilitude are gone from the sim. I'm waiting for whatever this obsession for stripping the grace notes from the game is to get around to removing the ragged lamp lighting again, or the variation in the smoke direction.

And that's just the grace notes, the little "you are here, this is a world" bits. I'm guessing you'd blanch at removing the music from the game, right? Is it really so hard to imagine other parts of its ambiance have value of the same kind? It's your game, you get to do what you want with it, but if you're going to defend what's being done, defend what's being done, don't pretend it's just the pickaxe and deny the rest by excluding it from the discussion, by refusing to admit it. There is some point of view in that office that's got some sway over the decision making that regards ambiance and grace notes as worthless. It seems to me, one of the rankled, unsurprising that that might rankle the people who love your game at least in part for its ambiance and grace notes.

But that's not all that's gone. There's also the let's-not-just-strip-the-unnecessary-bits-of-skin-off-the-game moves, there's the let's-strip-these-unnecessary-bits-of-meat-off-it-too moves. Ingredient bucket counts in assemblers, they just get in the way, ... of what, again? It's a little puzzle, it's an early puzzle, it's easy to figure out, it drives you back to the tech tree, you see you want automation 2 for full electric-powered-automation production, and you're done with that puzzle, okay build more miners and furnaces while I'm waiting for resources, got it, oh, hey, I could string these together and automate them, right?

It's the first such puzzle you encounter. Is that what makes it "unnecessary", that it's the first and easiest?

Now there's a new first and easiest puzzle, what is the argument against taking that out that distinguishes it from this one? I mean, besides this impulsion to blow past all the puzzles and obstacles to reach whatever end (victory? over what?) these people are pursuing.

Players have to research and build bots, why not say they're there and that's all? Is it that they're not the first and easiest research? "Yet" is where you're going with this logic, Koub. People have to research and build every single item in the game, why not say they're all there and that's all? The pickaxe has its place in the progression. Fix the UI so holding the pickaxe works for doing what you do with pickaxes, same as holding a blueprint works for doing what you do with blueprints or holding anything else works for doing what you do with that.

While you're at it, make holding a gun work for firing it if you want, there's no reason that shouldn't work.

The auto-equip-from-the-tool-slot is a nice touch, a considerate designer with an eye for detail who cares about players thought that up. But it's not necessary. It'd be great to see what I'm about to fire the next time I decide to carry a nuke launcher, care to guess the reason I don't? But really, why not just take guns out, why not say they're there and that's all? Could it be that "I made that myself" brings some small satisfaction, and an accumulation of countless small satisfactions that took some familiarization and practice (and later on even some planning and increasingly hardcore puzzle-solving) to achieve is the point of the game, that any game is nothing more than its meat-and-potatoes challenges and whatever ambiance and grace notes it delivers as reward and milieu that come with it?

Why are you writing a story about all of these other things you wish were in the game in regards to them taking out pickaxes? Make a new thread specifically stating your actual concerns, rather than trying to mix and mash this poetic story in regards to the "Woes of lost ambiance" in regards to the removal of needing to craft pickaxes. It's an excellent removal of a senseless item that doesn't really fit the rest of the game design.

[Lithane]

Well, I am extremely disappointed. What I want is a mod with different tools that go in the tool slot. Maybe an axe that only cuts trees and not the ore underneath. Or maybe a tool that only removes buildings so I don't have to chop multiple trees simply to pick up a segment of wall/track. A whole bunch of options just went away, Great.

I don't get it, this is factorio, the game where you automate things. If you are using hand tools then you have already lost.