Thanks DEVs for FACTORIO

[Onimir89]

I would just say thanks and support your work buying a copy of the game.

Just a question, after the release of the final version of the game are you planning a graphic upgrade?

Thank you and good work

[Ranger_Aurelien]

Just a question, after the release of the final version of the game are you planning a graphic upgrade?

I'm not a dev but I watch these pages from the front page of the official wiki:

https://wiki.factorio.com/Roadmap

https://wiki.factorio.com/Upcoming_features

Looks like 0.17 is slated for "More High-res entities/Redesigns." with 0.18 "High-Resolution sprites for the rest of the game".

[netmand]

I feels me a merge coming...

my answer to the question though: Probably not. The devs have done a lot of work around the graphics and interactivity of all parts of the game. An "upgrade" would mean they would need to re-address a whole new range of challenges. I'm sure their development road-map is focused on moving to version 1.0, not version 2.0.

[slippycheeze]

I would just say thanks and support your work buying a copy of the game.
Just a question, after the release of the final version of the game are you planning a graphic upgrade?

Also not a developer, but:

I think the most useful answer for you is "yes, but" -- the upgrade will be a higher resolution, refined version of the current look. There will not be a big change in style, overall color, etc, as part of it.

So if you are worried about seeing the pixels, the answer is yes.

If you think it looks boringly beige right now or something, the answer is (probably) "no".

[BlueTemplar]

Relevant (about Vulkan) :
viewtopic.php?p=400889#p400889

Also, relevant :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/cheddar

[slippycheeze]

Relevant (about Vulkan) :
viewtopic.php?p=400889#p400889

FWIW, that thread seems to be pretty confused about what, if anything, Vulkan could do for the problem of "my hardware is too old for the March 11, 2010 version of OpenGL to be available." Which is, at heart, "nothing specific to Vulkan in any way", since the same solution in Vulkan could equally apply in OpenGL.

There is definitely nothing wrong with Vulkan, but it isn't a magic pixie-dust that'll improve anything automatically either. It may allow Wube to do things they couldn't before it rolled out, but that takes work, and isn't free.

Same thing as DirectX 12 where an API that could be used by the highest end engines to remove a bottleneck, with substantial work, seemed to give people the impression that it was some sort of "turn on DirectX 12, moar framez" don't suck button the developers were refusing to press.

For all practical purposes Vulkan support ... probably mostly means more graphics driver bugs, but otherwise, not all that much day to day. In fact, the most likely initial state would be that Factorio has Vulkan support and looks literally identical, because it is literally identical: same graphics, different API putting them on the screen identically.


So, yeah, I don't think that thread is particularly relevant to the question the OP asked. Doesn't seem like Factorio has a performance bottleneck on in-driver or in-API locking at this time (though, of course, that could be an issue Wube face), and so even with a dramatic rewrite to the new less-lock-contention API it wouldn't be likely to change much.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, I totally derailed that thread...
Couldn't help myself, when OpenGL 4.4+ was mentioned (and the Vulkan suggestion was initially meant as a joke).

You have to remember that at that point 0.17 with its new graphic engine wasn't released yet, and Factorio was still suffering from poor performance issues when lots of particles(?) were on-screen, like when smoke or trees (or biters?) were present :
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-264
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281
(But it looks like, for smoke at least, it was just a bug.)

And the early proto-Vulkan demos, even though for 3D games, seemed like they were handling massive amounts of particles really well?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elzpPFg8O_Q