Friday Facts #230 - Engine modernisation

[Klonan]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230

[iseebelts]

Great write-up as always!

That last gif makes me dizzy.

[orzelek]

Really nice special effects there

[mmppolton]

i hope it increase ups for bigger mega base
more faster like 5k or 10k all belt some bots

[Yehn]

It's always nice to see that not only do we get new features, but the underlying code/foundation to the game is being looked after as well. I want Factorio to have a very long lifetime.

[Esterni]

[Moderated by Koub]

This sounds like an awesome step forward. Does this mean that there will be graphical improvements? Or is this more of a "better engine, more optimized, same look" kind of deal?

[doppelEben]

Great write-up as always!

That last gif makes me dizzy.

imagine you get hit by a specific biter and from then on you see all things like that, for about 10-30 minutes :> :> :>

drugstorio <3


great work @ devs, as always

[Koub] Please look at the red light here ... Nothing happened



@ jitka/t-shirts: Do you have plans to make other colors? Or even a hoodie? Totally would buy a blackish factorio-hoodie, or a colorish factorio-polo

[Esterni]

[Koub] Please look at the red light here ... Nothing happened


I can feel special if I want to. Don't be that guy that calls out that guy.

[Inglonias]

I can't even bring myself to tear apart a factory to fix it, much less tear apart the rendering engine to a game that's been in the works for as long as this one. I would have shrieked in horror and ran away from your office screaming if you asked me to do that. Bravo, Factorio devs, for being made of sterner stuff than I.

And whenever anyone talks about computer graphics code, I have to bring up one of my favorite pieces of computer code that I've ever laid eyes on and failed to understand: the Fast Inverse Square Root function.

[kellerkindt]

Please don't split the renderer. This just causes either more work for you or one renderer to be favored while the other runs bad and/or with bugs.
Please. think about OpenGL 4.5 only or Vulkan.

[Frightning]

I can't even bring myself to tear apart a factory to fix it, much less tear apart the rendering engine to a game that's been in the works for as long as this one. I would have shrieked in horror and ran away from your office screaming if you asked me to do that. Bravo, Factorio devs, for being made of sterner stuff than I.

And whenever anyone talks about computer graphics code, I have to bring up one of my favorite pieces of computer code that I've ever laid eyes on and failed to understand: the Fast Inverse Square Root function.

That was fascinating!

[Matthias_Wlkp]

Does the new engine affects system requirements at all?

[ledow]

As a programmer, I could never get on with Allegro. It's history is older than SDL (I believe, I can't be bothered to Google) but it was always something that people ended up ripping out later on.

SDL, however, has always served me well and since 1.3/2.0 where OpenGL was an integrated component it's pretty easy and seamless. Its letdown - no in-built GUI library. But Factorio obviously has a GUI so that shouldn't be much of an issue.

I look forward to some performance improvements (hopefully) with the new shaders, but I won't hold my breathe. Since the latest stable, my poor gaming laptop has cut its Factorio FPS in half. I'm guessing it's not GPU-bound as I've had to turn the graphics options right down and its still not great.

[_alphaBeta_]

I appreciated the humor in this FF. There's nothing like firing up an initial attempt at a change or optimization and not quite finding what you expected.

On a more serious note, where are we with belt compression?

[Proxy]

tyc┴?L!o

I'm wondering why everything was flipped, red and just looked like literal hell.

but i think the answer would be too complex for me.

good luck with redoing all graphics, while doing so you could also make lighting more dynamic and make it seem like there is an actual sun in the sky? becasue it kinda gets weird to look at a lamp, lit, being right next to a shadow of a nearby object, or stuff like wire shadows being over objects themself.

[Gergely]

Wow. They are very good at this.

From what I can see on the screenshots, the first one was definitely unintentional, the second as well but the third...

I do not think the third was unintentional.

Does the new engine affects system requirements at all?

It will. It will be compatible with more things.

[QGamer]

Good luck with all the graphics

But you don't need luck; you have skill! The screenshots look nice. Love the better graphics already.

I always love reading the FFFs. Keep up the good work!

[doppelEben]

First!
Damnit...not actually first.

oh pleeease stop that crap already again; or better dont even start with it!
Please dont act like on hltv (or severall other fanboi-pages) where every article 48329 dudes/dudinas spam *first* just to try to be first Oo

I can feel special if I want to. Don't be that guy that calls out that guy.

since it is "cancer" in severall forums; no; you are not special with that. Just one of N others.... so sorry, you can't be a special snowflake with the fiiiiiiirst stuff ;D better luck next try tho

[OBXandos]

You should use the upside down Factorio loading screen for an April fools update
Good luck on that monumental task!

[admo]

Not going to advocate DX12/Vulkan here but I do wonder how much of the game's CPU budget is eaten up in rendering code? From the start developers told us they wanted DX12 because the driver is too expensive (CPU-wise) because we do too much state tracking. Factorio is uniquely one of those games that can easily get CPU-bound so I'm hoping developers could weigh in on their experiences here.

From the driver's point of view DX12 drops half the work of the driver onto the apps to do themselves but the app teams are unwilling to put in the man-hours to do it right, so in the end they regress performance wise. Even big engines like Unreal are going about it wrong, but they have compelling reasons for that.