Changing the length of a tick, from 1/60th to 1/30th second, is exactly what I'm suggesting. Sure, it'll touch nearly every area of the game, but in a minor way. I don't know why you think solar would be an issue. Panels produce twice as much energy per tick, days are half as many ticks long - not complex.Deadly-Bagel wrote:Circuit logic updates every tick so that will be seriously messed up, and what you're suggesting is essentially changing the length of a tick relative to game time. This would also affect things like solar power etc so would require a rewrite of... basically the whole game.
There would be so much additional work for the processor to synch it back in you're probably looking at -at least- 75% of the work, not half.
I'd hope (but don't know) that most things are defined in terms of real time (seconds, minutes, etc) within the code, and a compile-time constant is used for ticks per second. Change the constant, then test to see if anything breaks/changes.
I'm not suggesting that the code tries to fake it - run at 30 UPS and still make it appear to the player it's 60 UPS - that would be silly. Yes, circuit network timers would need changing, but that's pretty minor compared to the breaking changes seen in each major release. Factorio is still alpha, things change.