Friday Facts #184 - Five years of Factorio

[Deadly-Bagel]

This is incorrect, the length is the factor, amount of blocks is irrelevant, make a simple setup like...

Ahh, I understand where I've gone wrong, most of my experience with this sort of thing comes from loading bays and placing spurious signals causes some bizarre pathing that is explained by signal count, but that may be to do with it picking the route that gets the train closest to its (unavailable) destination. It doesn't account for everything though.

And I have sat in a train and watched its route change 3-4 times in quick succession as it passed signals. It does recalculate frequently, but I disagree on needing a timer for chain signals. All you need to do is set up an event so that when a signal goes green it notifies any leading chain signals which then trigger a recalculation of any trains in their block.

[oolivero45]

I feel like something that would be really great for allowing open multiplayer games would be to take the existing teams/forces system, and allow players to create their own teams and invite friends to it. Each team could then have rules set on what non-team members could do, such as restricting destruction, machine inventory opening, etc.

[Darthlawsuit]

5 years since I put money into the kick starter. Damn time flies.

[nardo99]

Just want to say congratulations. I have been playing and enjoying your creation for two years - one of the games I have enjoyed the most, you guys are all amazing.

[cygnus_]

I believe a comment above said something about getting kovarex's opinion on why Java wasn't used - I second this, I'd be interested to hear!

[lawl]

Pretty crazy how far the game has come.

[kovarex]

I believe a comment above said something about getting kovarex's opinion on why Java wasn't used - I second this, I'd be interested to hear!

Apart other things, you don't have good control over the memory management in java. Also GC is just not usable in performance heavy real time game.

[BenSeidel]

I believe a comment above said something about getting kovarex's opinion on why Java wasn't used - I second this, I'd be interested to hear!

Apart other things, you don't have good control over the memory management in java. Also GC is just not usable in performance heavy real time game.

Agreed, you need to write your own memory allocator. Add on to that, that there is no deconstructor in Java, having "smart pointers" is impossible. While it is possible to write a game or other high-throughput, low latency applications, the effort required is far, far greater than doing it in C++. One thing that a Java implementation with a memory allocator has over C++ is the correct management of cyclical references, a real god-send.

Additionally the whole C++ vs Java thing for performance is a useless argument, unless you discuss the effort in vs performance out developers get. Java (both in theory and practice) gets better performance than C++ in both the unoptimised and over-optimised spaces, while C++ hits a far, far better effort vs reward" ratio anywhere in between. (read as "prototype in Java"/"Write Java instead of assembly", do everything else in C++).