Friday Facts #50 Growing secretly

[kovarex]

So here it is: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-50

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

fantastic! i love even just a word of multiplayer news in the blogs

[The Colonist]

Love the progress on multiplayer

Keep up the great work!

[TheWombatGuru]

Like the honesty about maybe not being able to finish the game ever, but that doesn't matter, as long as it gets better and better and you and the team enjoy working on it

[Lyzz]

where is the factorio flag on the ship? hmmmmm?


"Factorio was inspired by Buildcraft"


that means the quarry in buildcraft is the mine in factorio D:

[-root]

The analogy between the game and a sphere is pretty apt.

Keep up the good work!

[Blackence]

The Mythical Man-Month strikes again, although I wouldn't say that Factorio is "late". It's done when it's done.

So, keep up the good work.

[Narnach]

Thank you for linking to InfiniExplorers! It looks like a 3D version of Factorio, which can turn out to be awesome. I backed them, but it looks like the dev needs a lot more backers to reach the goal.

[dusho]

hm.. so there is a change that o.10.x won't have other than experimental releases if you don't need to create 0.10.10 (no urgent bug fixes) ?
also, all the multiplayer stuff is nice, but I guess it will still take a year to get something really playable
I was really looking forward to have some tank in, or some more choices in early energies to start another world (after 0.9.x)

[mngrif]

Factorio was inspired by Buildcraft

Hah I knew it! It's about time ya'll admitted to it! Usually when I describe it as "2D Buildcraft" people are instantly interested.

Once again, you're doing amazing work. Thank you for such a fun game!

Also, BC might be drawing a bit of inspiration from Factorio. The latest update of it has what are more or less logistics drones.

[FishSandwich]

Factorio was inspired by Buildcraft

Hah I knew it! It's about time ya'll admitted to it!

Don't know if this is a joke or.. but the devs have never hidden or denied this fact.

[ThaPear]

Factorio was inspired by Buildcraft

Hah I knew it! It's about time ya'll admitted to it!

Don't know if this is a joke or.. but the devs have never hidden or denied this fact.

In fact, I've read this information several times before.

[LoSboccacc]

about that deterministic simulation, found this about how locking timestep out of renderer and into input loop for predictability

http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/f ... -timestep/

there are bits of codes as well - I get lost at xplanation but I can understand code, there are tons of other resources but this shows the code

[kovarex]

about that deterministic simulation, found this about how locking timestep out of renderer and into input loop for predictability

http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/f ... -timestep/

there are bits of codes as well - I get lost at xplanation but I can understand code, there are tons of other resources but this shows the code

But in having non fixed delta time is not a solution for us, mainly because it wouldn't be deterministic then.

[LoSboccacc]

Don't stop at the second suggestion he's showing all the process

It ends with fixed time step, variable frame and interpolation too smoth odd frames

[toaran]

Hi

I'm realy looking forward to Multiplayer.. but i hope you switch to a Server/Client model... it works pretty good in OPENTTD which i consider as somewhat similar type of gameplay (kind of)...

Well keep up the good work.

T

[SHiRKiT]

Hi

I'm realy looking forward to Multiplayer.. but i hope you switch to a Server/Client model... it works pretty good in OPENTTD which i consider as somewhat similar type of gameplay (kind of)...

Well keep up the good work.

T

Unless they are freaking good programmers, I can't see how would they develop this game to not be under the Client/Server model. They are probably doing the same as Minecraft does to sync clients with the server. Instead of sending full states, just send new things and let the client iterate in a deterministic way. With that, (hopefully) things will be exactly the same.

[cpy]

Inspiration is one thing, shameless copying is another thing. When i played this game for the first time i didn't even know what was their inspiration and i played buildcraft a lot, really a lot. But that other game? I looked at it and i immediately saw factorio ripoff. If it's only placeholder yeah. But i doubt it will be as good. Factorio is powered by some mysterious engine that for what you do there and how low cpu usage is (also multicore) i can't believe how good it runs. There is this slow single core terrain generation in map editor, but that can be forgiven, not really important that much.

[Martoon]

Out of curiosity, how do you plan to get determinism in a PC-based game (with the floating-point variance)? Are you using fixed-point math?

I worked for a small studio, doing a RTS in 2003. Everything about the game logic was designed for determinism (fixed timestep, deterministic random number generation, etc.). But I spent weeks trying to get deterministic floating point operations, with no luck. I put the math operations in assembly, set the appropriate processor flags for IEEE compliance, etc. I finally got to where I was getting consistent results on a single machine, but on different CPUs there was always cumulative drift, not matter what I did. I eventually gave up on absolute determinism, and went with a routine to generate CRCs from all the entity states, and resync the machines whenever the CRCs didn't match (which happened every couple minutes).

Just wondering what your approach is (and hoping you have better luck than I did ).

(edit: Right after posting this, I saw your post on "CRC fun".)

[kovarex]

Well, the calculations are pretty deterministic. All the problems we had to solve until now were based on gameplay mechanics problems.

I was thinking exactly that, that in the worst case, we will write some non-deterministic calculations in ASM, it should be deterministic, as long as the processor follows IEEE and we make sure to get the stuff to variables before calculations, at least it is what I hope for.

Edit: I know that Starcraft made it deterministic, so it has to be possible