Friday Facts #265 - Nomenclature & Steam networking

[Vxsote]

Regarding steam networking, I generally think it's great that you are adding capabilities to make things easier for players to connect and play.

However, my personal experience with steam networking while playing Space Engineers has been less than great. That game itself has some issues (if you guys ever wanted to go across town and lend some of your awesome know-how to KSH, I would cheer), but aside from that, I have found that when I connect to a dedicated server via some of the steam proxies instead of directly, the proxy causes me significant packet loss and latency issues.

Obviously you mentioned that this solution is mainly aimed at games hosted on home networks instead of dedicated servers in a datacenter, so there might not be a lot of other options, but I wanted to make you aware of the potential issues. I also wanted to suggest that use of steam networking be optional/controllable. In SE, I don't have any control in-game over how that connection is made (direct or via proxy), so I have resorted to adding an outbound firewall rule on my home network to block any connection attempts to known-bad steam proxies, and that forces my connection to be direct. That's not really a viable solution for most people, so having use of steam networking be configurable would be nice.

[Optera]

Steam is good for all those still believing the myth Factorio MP only works with Hamachi.
Most people don't know what upnp is or how to manually forward a port.... though basic knowledge should be a requirement to use a device, just like a drivers license requires you to know how to plug in charger cables.

Personally I will never use steam for any game that i can get to run without it.

[Gergely]

Screenshot from 2018-10-19 17-12-33.png

Loader confirmed??

Loaders are in the game already.

Use this to unlock them:
/c game.player.force.recipes["loader"].enabled = true game.player.force.recipes["fast-loader"].enabled = true game.player.force.recipes["express-loader"].enabled = true

[dannyant]

Nice FFF, I like the changes and I found some of that language confusing when I was starting, especially around which items can use productivity modules.

The complaint that I have, is it seems like this does not really apply to anything in the roadmap for 0.17, unless you count this as part of the GUI rewrite. And then that roadmap item is all encompassing

I have friends that do not want to play until 0.17 comes out.

So my request would be that either with the next FFF or some reddit posting that we get a roadmap update on how much of each roadmap item is remaining.
A list of open jira epics would also be fine if that is easier on your side.

Thanks, and I do really enjoy playing Factorio it is a great game!!!

[Nexarius]

Screenshot from 2018-10-19 17-12-33.png

Loader confirmed??

Loaders are in the game already.

Use this to unlock them:
/c game.player.force.recipes["loader"].enabled = true game.player.force.recipes["fast-loader"].enabled = true game.player.force.recipes["express-loader"].enabled = true

Loaders don't have any textures and are unobtainable without the console. That not what I would call "in the game already".

[ske]

*bitters

[Oktokolo]

Whatever you do - avoid using the term build.
It is ambiguous in Factorio where you make items by hand or in an assembler out of smelted ores mined from ore fields and liquids or gases pumped from oil deposits, wich are then placed on the ground as structures or vehicles (you are calling them entities).
And i was surprised, that pick up as the action of getting items and structures/vehicles from the ground into an inventory or hand was not in the predefined lists. You even used the term in some Questions.

[Trblz]

For the English google doc - key element is WHICH English rules(z) you want to follow?

British vs American English can be a big difference in grammar. Like the storage of the car, call it a boot or a trunk?
In your google doc, you have things like
"put an item" vs "place an item" (*)
"pickup an item from the ground" vs" remove an item from the ground"

As for the funny ones (thanks KoS and others) like "Underneathies" - a mod or a funny 3rd English translation can always be made. In this one you can use more slang like trashing etc.

[Reika]

We could theoretically change the vocabulary of the game to be more consistent, reasonable, and generally more helpful to players. Then, as new players join the community, this new language will slowly replace the old.

This is unlikely to happen in any reasonable timeframe, especially when you consider this:

People may actively dislike some term that others have chosen, due to them finding it misleading, or difficult to use (pronounce, spell, etc), or just stupid. The most readily available example is your option of "underneathies" for underground belts. What kind of name is that? I can safely speak for myself and quite a number of others that that name is absolutely ridiculous - to put it nicely - and that I will refuse to use it, even in the (hopefully unlikely) event it became the official name. I will continue to call them underground belts (or, in a modding context, belt-to-ground as per their internal names), 'underneathies' idiocy be damned.

That last point also bears expansion: Not everyone "mentalizes" the game the same way, or is discussing the game from a specific mindset. In particular, modders and other developer-types are much more likely both to want and to use names related to the internal names, as that is what they have to deal with. It is data.raw["express-transport-belt"], not data.raw["blue-belt"], regardless if the latter is a decent shorthand for gameplay. As a result, if you try to force naming, you are likely to just end up with multiple "domains" of nomenclature which have difficulty communicating.

[Amarula]

Yes to more consistent terminology!
Yes, being able to host MP via Steam is something I will use.
Thank you again for all the hard work and progress!

Before I do anything stupid, can I edit my answers after submitting?

And yes DanGio, you can edit your post if needed.

[torham]

Well, personally I support unified codex of naming. New names are easily learned, If it makes the game more coherent. I have already filled the survey, thank you for asking.

[Vornicus]

I can think of three things that come in 7 colors/flavors:

• Science packs (1, 2, 3, production, military, high tech, space)
• Inserters (burner, regular, long handed, fast, filter, stack, stack filter)
• Throwable items aka capsules (grenade, cluster grenade, poison capsule, slowdown capsule, defender capsule, distractor capsule, destroyer capsule

Other things that I thought of actually come in more flavors:

• 8 chests (wood, iron, steel, active provider, passive provider, storage, requester, buffer)
• 8 fluids (water, steam, crude oil, heavy oil, light oil, petroleum gas, sulfuric acid, lubricant)
• 8 barrels (empty, and one for each liquid except steam)
• 9 true raw materials (raw wood, stone, coal, iron, copper, uranium, crude oil, water, and fish)
• 8 mobile enemies (4 sizes each of biters and spitters)
• 9 ammo types (regular, piercing, and DU rifle rounds; regular and piercing shotgun shells; regular, explosive, and atomic rockets; and flamethrower ammo)

[sniderthanyou]

I just finished the questionnaire. What a fun exercise! And I applaud your effort to increase consistency and reduce ambiguity. A couple of notes:

For belts, I always use yellow, red, and blue to identify them. This feels sloppy, but it's terse and completely unambiguous. It's easy to forget whether Fast or Express is faster.

Using a blueprint, and adding a ghost entity, should be the same verb. I have no strong opinions on what that verb should be.

Construction robots construct and deconstruct things. They are doing that job so I don't have to, so apparently, I also construct and deconstruct things.

Improving consistency doesn't mean you should just use fewer words. It's okay to use specific language when it makes sense, such as mining iron vs pumping oil vs chopping or gathering wood. Same idea with grenades / capsules / combat robots.

Also, the game's lingo does not have to perfectly match the players' lingo. I will casually refer to a mineral deposit as a patch because it's just more terse, and usually unambiguous due to context clues. I think the game text should always use the word deposit, because it's more in line with the industrial feel of the game.

For all that is good and holy, don't use the word build

Thank you for including us in this effort

[Merssedes]

About hosting expierence: I've tried to host game from home, but failed due to multilayered NAT (3 layers in my case, only one of which is mine).
About Steam: I don't use Steam (apart from option to buy the game).

[eradicator]

Oh. Language talk! How lovely. I've dabbled in translations before and a "significant words" list is always the first thing i make to ensure a consistent translation. Each language has different sets of overlapping concepts (i.e. in english "build" overlaps with "craft" (and lots of other concepts), but in german "errichten" does not overlap with "herstellen".), so you have to be very careful about building that list to exactly describe the part of the word that you actually mean, as opposed to just saying "build" is an important word. You need to include actual usage examples to limit the possible meanings (if you want to attempt to unify term usage in all languages).

_____
Let's look at the questions from the FFF:

Name the action a player performs when they add an entity to the world?

• I'd prefer "construct", as "build" can be misinterpreted as "craft" (e.g. "Build 10 assemblers."). But construct doesn't apply to cars, so place (down).

Name the action a player performs when they remove an entity from the world?

• Deconstruct sounds nice if paired with construct, but that was ruled out. So either "pick up" or "remove", but remove sounds too boring. Ignoring the singular exception of cars "de-/construct" is probably the best and easiest pair of terms to use overall.

Name the action a player performs when they add a ghost entity to the world?

• Honestly? "Plan". The whole "ghost" concept is a silly internal-name leak. Ask anyone who never played factorio what a ghost is and they most definetly won't start talking about construction plans. Besides the deconstruction planner already has it in the name.

Name the action a robot performs when they add an entity to the world?

• Same as for players.

Name the action a robot performs when they remove an entity from the world?

• Same as for players.

Where do biters come from?

• They come from underneath! Biter nests. Do people call them enemy bases?

I come in 7 colors, what am I?

• Science juice! Cool Aid! No, really. You brought that one onto yourself. "Pack" is the most common term i guess, but it doesn't fit the visuals, which causes inherit cognitive dissonance. "Science Kit" might be viable, but it's not that different from "pack". Maybe "instruments"? If you don't want to call them bottles then don't make them look like bottles...

So we get:
"Use a [blueprint] to [plan] the [placement] of 10 assemblers." (sounds good)
"Use a [pickup planner] to [plan] the [picking up] of 10 assemblers." (sounds bad :|)
"Use a [pickup planner] to [mark] 10 assemblers for [pickup]." (sounds better)

Renaming the [deconstruction planner] to fit any sort of new naming scheme sounds like a daunting endeavor.

I also did the google survey, but i'm not sure if it worked. Clicking ok at the end just made the whole form empty again without any affirmation that it succeeded? It's also sad that the form is multiple-choice, this heavily biases the answers towards the choices given instead of opening up actual new possibilities.
______

The influx of players that are to be expected from 1.0 give us an interesting option. We could theoretically change the vocabulary of the game to be more consistent, reasonable, and generally more helpful to players. Then, as new players join the community, this new language will slowly replace the old.

Language change occurs all the time. Doing it on purpose? I don't know, probably is less common and when it happens the people doing it don't usually tell anyone, because that might raise resistance and thus foil their plan. I like that option a lot though. But it would be very difficult to do correctly.

The problem is that with an active modding community around, you won't be able to completely phase out e.g. things like "entity" in favour of e.g. "object", because modders will (sub-)conciously use the term they're more familar with. And Suddenly you face the problem of trying to "unify" the vocabulary of two distinct communities. As a modder i want to say "entity", but as a player i detest seeing that term used in-game.

"Spawn" is actually a pretty good word for biters. At it's an actual word for reproduction of animals/plants, despite being often used in video games for "spontaenously starting to exist".

[0mega]

How many hours did I play before realizing that there are alternatives to the "sushi belt" setup?

(Back in 0.12) The first time I tried to automate science packs, I built a loop of belts and put all the ingredients and immediate products on it. Some items eventually took over the lanes leaving no space for the more important ones. I built some sort of buffer with smart inserters, (filter inserters were called that back then) that collected the items into an array of chests only to let a slower inserter dump them back into the "main loop". After a lot of manual crafting (green science) I finally got to the circuit network research. I thought that would help me build a green science factory in a similar way.

It was so frustrating because I never played a game of this kind before. I just didn't know how to properly do it.

I was thinking about quitting the game. I felt like I was scammed because the demo version ends right before the introduction to technologies. Though I had a feeling that I might have got everything wrong.

Then I saw that one guide on steam that taught me a valuable lesson: Only one item type per belt lane.

I'm not kidding. That really how it was the first time I played Factorio.

I know the feeling. My first TWO bases were built exactly like that. I had a miles long sushi belt, several belts wide, large buffers and every inserter connected with wires to a request system to prevent the belt from filling up. A rocket was launched but man did it take time.

[Jonathan88]

The whole "ghost" concept is a silly internal-name leak. Ask anyone who never played factorio what a ghost is and they most definetly won't start talking about construction plans.

This is a good point - a great example of what the FFF was trying to emphasise. A word which without thinking of we've assigned a name based on internal game programming, and now doesn't make any sense to someone joining the game from scratch.
Plan sounds like a reasonable replacement.

[pleegwat]

For some things, like yellow/red/blue belts and grey/blue/yellow inserters, even though practically all players use those names I think the game probably shouldn't. transport/fast/express belt carries at least some indication of their relative speeds.

You might refer to 'yellow transport belt', 'red fast belt', and 'blue express belt' in long form text though. Not sure what the colourblind think of that.

[Killcreek2]

Why not just use "Extract" for ore miners / oil wells?
Much better than the other options listed on the form imo ~ "gather, mine, take, collect" ~ which kinda miss the point or are too ambiguous with other actions.


Using as few clearly-different terms as needed would be best:

+ Players & bots both "construct" & "de-construct" entities;
+ Planning ghosts & BPs are "placed" (as they are "placeholders");
+ Resource gatherers "extract" raw materials from "ore / oil fields";
+ Items are "crafted" & "inserted" by machines & players.

Does not matter if the action is taken by a machine or by the player ~ the game should use the same action-terminology every time, to encourage & support the shift from hand-crafting to full automation that new players go through.

The word "Deposit" should be avoided for resource fields ~ as it is confusing with various other actions.
Eg: "the miner mines from an ore deposit then deposits the ore in front".
Alternatively: "the miner extracts from an ore field then deposits the ore in front".

P.S ~ You missed a common use case from the form: What is the term for when an item is taken out of something? (Chest / assembler / etc.)
"Remove", "De-insert", "Take", "Collect", ??

[0mega]

...
P.S ~ You missed a common use case from the form: What is the term for when an item is taken out of something? (Chest / assembler / etc.)
"Remove", "De-insert", "Take", "Collect", ??

An inserter inserts inserters into an assembling machine, another inserter de-inserts the crafted fast inserters and inserts then into a chest.