Factorio on Stadia please

[srfin]

I'd love to buy Factorio again if it were on Stadia.

Google's Stadia is out, and works great for me. Makes it possible to play high-performance games on my wimpy hardware. I'd love to be able to access my mega factory from my laptop. Should also make it possible for the factory to grow much bigger before UPS starts to drop.

Stadia might make much larger multi player possible. There are probably other things that Stadia would enable that I'm not thinking of, but just the basic game would be great.

[Silvus]

Made an account just to post this. Pretty please this. It's not like we need more buttons than a controller offers, and sweet jesus the possible processor options!

[James_Epp]

I don't mean to derail the thread but the OP has given me the following thought. How much of the game processing is accomplished by the server in a multiplayer game? I imagine being able to run the game from a multiplayer server from any popular cloud provider and then accessing the server with the standard Factorio client. I'd assume the server process does the bulk of the processing (tick events?). Sure, you'd have to knock your graphics settings back by quite a bit, but then you don't have a vendor lock-in to Alphabet's platforms.

[PyroFire]

How much of the game processing is accomplished by the server in a multiplayer game?

Literally none. Zero. Nothing.
100% of the game processing happens on every game client in syncronization with eachother.
Each and every tick will always have the same result, and end in the same state.
If it doesn't, you get what's known as a desync and you get booted off the server.
Meaning everything you theorized about after this statement doesn't relate to reality and doesn't apply to anything related to this discussion.

Now, looking into what stadia is...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Stadia

Stadia works atop YouTube's functionality in streaming media to the user, as game streaming is seen as an extension of watching video game live streams

Seems interesting.
And it sounds like it is a video and audio stream, so what you're actually getting is a computer to render the game and then stream you the frames and audio.

This technology has existed for quite a while now, and with far less limitations, though stadia looks like it's being developed specifically for processing-intensive games. My question is, why force players off steam and onto your own platform? Because reminder: You probably need to re-buy the game on stadia. No one likes the epic games launcher, why would googles be any different?

Stadia requires users to purchase games to use over the service

It might be good or big someday, but today i don't believe it is enough to warrant any changes... but who knows, maybe the devs might disagree with me.

[orzelek]

How much of the game processing is accomplished by the server in a multiplayer game?

Literally none. Zero. Nothing.
100% of the game processing happens on every game client in syncronization with eachother.
Each and every tick will always have the same result, and end in the same state.
If it doesn't, you get what's known as a desync and you get booted off the server.
Meaning everything you theorized about after this statement doesn't relate to reality and doesn't apply to anything related to this discussion.

<cut>

Small correction - server also fully simulates the game. So it does all the game processing just no graphics side.
And desync happens if any of the simulations - server or clients gets different.

[conn11]

My question is, how good is stadia optimized for mouse and keyboard games?
And remember any semi decent pc or laptop can run factorio.
Actually I‘ve runned a rather big base with an potato (Laptop with i5 7200U, Radon R5 M420 and 8GB DDR4 Ram) over the holidays and got decent FPS (of course on a small integrated screen and researching nothing). But my point is, condsidering the steam stream function any machine a little bit better than this example should be able to stream the game on practically every screen and like PyroFire explained beeing able to do MP.

[James_Epp]

How much of the game processing is accomplished by the server in a multiplayer game?

Literally none. Zero. Nothing.
100% of the game processing happens on every game client in syncronization with eachother.
Each and every tick will always have the same result, and end in the same state.
If it doesn't, you get what's known as a desync and you get booted off the server.
Meaning everything you theorized about after this statement doesn't relate to reality and doesn't apply to anything related to this discussion.

Thank you for the clarification. I'm kinda surprised by that, but I'm sure there are good reasons for it.

[PyroFire]

Small correction - server also fully simulates the game. So it does all the game processing just no graphics side.
And desync happens if any of the simulations - server or clients gets different.

Is true, but for all intents and purposes, the server is only running the game world so it can check for desyncs.
I was more going for how the server doesn't really do anything for the game client beyond that.

I'm sure there are good reasons for it.

It's because distributing entity updates/changes (belts, inserters, assembling machines, combat etc which can number in the hundreds of thousands) is very impractical, near impossible to do with a traditional server/client setup.
It is better to run the entire game world deterministically on each individual client so you can minimize the amount of network traffic to a level that is physically possible.

Note when i say server i'm talking about the factorio game server, so this is all a little off-topic.

[urza99814]

My question is, how good is stadia optimized for mouse and keyboard games?
And remember any semi decent pc or laptop can run factorio.
Actually I‘ve runned a rather big base with an potato (Laptop with i5 7200U, Radon R5 M420 and 8GB DDR4 Ram) over the holidays and got decent FPS (of course on a small integrated screen and researching nothing). But my point is, condsidering the steam stream function any machine a little bit better than this example should be able to stream the game on practically every screen and like PyroFire explained beeing able to do MP.

As far as I know, Stadia does require using the controller, but I don't think that's really an issue. I've ONLY ever played Factorio with a controller, and I've played a few thousand hours since 0.13. Granted, I do use the Steam controller, which is a bit better as a mouse than a typical joystick, but if Command and Conquer can be played on an N64 with a joystick then I see no reason why Factorio couldn't. That game is 100% mouse controlled, where Factorio is maybe 80% mouse

I WOULD be concerned about system requirements though. I've tried to stream Factorio over Steam using a wired Ethernet connection and the performance was garbage. I'm assuming that's the combined load of running the factory and encoding the stream, since other games stream fine even over wifi. Although I do think the Stadia systems are higher spec than my R9 390X and FX-6300...

[PyroFire]

stream Factorio over Steam using a wired Ethernet connection

How?

[conn11]

...

As far as I know, Stadia does require using the controller, but I don't think that's really an issue. I've ONLY ever played Factorio with a controller, and I've played a few thousand hours since 0.13. Granted, I do use the Steam controller, which is a bit better as a mouse than a typical joystick, but if Command and Conquer can be played on an N64 with a joystick then I see no reason why Factorio couldn't. That game is 100% mouse controlled, where Factorio is maybe 80% mouse

Point taken, I‘m not a controller guy.
I do also think your example is more of a hardware matter, I‘ve tested WiFi streaming on a rather large display with a RTX 2070 and i7-9750. The quality wasn’t extraordinary, but quite good enough.
Steam is undoubtedly the most commonly used platform.

[Axios]

+1 for Factorio on Stadia!

Actually playing Stadia on my Chromebox with mouse and keyboard. No problem at all.

[ts437]

+1 for stadia!!
Id love to be able to play a decent sized base at a decent frame rate on my crappy laptop. Yes please!!!

[Da Bald Eagul]

...

As far as I know, Stadia does require using the controller, but I don't think that's really an issue. I've ONLY ever played Factorio with a controller, and I've played a few thousand hours since 0.13. Granted, I do use the Steam controller, which is a bit better as a mouse than a typical joystick, but if Command and Conquer can be played on an N64 with a joystick then I see no reason why Factorio couldn't. That game is 100% mouse controlled, where Factorio is maybe 80% mouse

Point taken, I‘m not a controller guy.
I do also think your example is more of a hardware matter, I‘ve tested WiFi streaming with on a rather large display with a RTX 2070 and i7-9750. The quality wasn’t extraordinary, but quite good enough.
Steam is undoubtedly the most commonly used platform.

You actually don't need a controller to play on Stadia if you are using a PC or laptop. On the chromecast you need the official Stadia controller, but on PC/laptop/mobile you can connect any hid compliant controller.

[CraankyPants]

Please add Factorio to Stadia. It's an awesome community and it would enable so many more people to play Factorio. It should also be cross-platform so we can play with people who are not on Stadia.

[stroodle96]

+1 for Stadia. This would be an awesome way to be able to play on mobile devices, shitty laptops and TVs! Plus with the game library relatively small the game would be easily noticed by all users and player base could grow. I know I would double dip and also buy it on the stadia platform, so you may even get double sales from some of your existing user base!

[Eplepai]

Now that Factorio is on Nintendo Switch, maybe it's not so big of a jump to Stadia? Imagine the megabases you could make with that kind of power!!!

[ssilk]

My guess is, the switch-version is a kind of test-balloon. If it works well other ports might follow.

I link to viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15011 ARM build

For further discussion.

[mrvn]

Now that Factorio is on Nintendo Switch, maybe it's not so big of a jump to Stadia? Imagine the megabases you could make with that kind of power!!!

From the comments it sounds more like Stadia is a dumb terminal. It doesn't run anything but is just a remote display.

Which makes me wonder how well factorio runs with virtual-gl.

Virtual-gl is runs a X server on the server with no display and just renders into a framebuffer in memory using the full power of the servers GPU. The content of the framebuffer is then send over the network as part of your VNC session. So you are basically just watching a video of the GPU output.

The question then is whether the factorio framebuffer can be compressed fast enough and well enough to be send over the network with 60 FPS. Or at least 30 FPS. Less becomes hard to play.

Note: This needs 0 changes in factorio as you simply run the x86_64 version of factorio on the server. All you need is a VNC client on the Stadia.

[posila]

Stadia is closed platform. As far as I know, the only way to play a game on it is to buy in Stadia store. The games have to be built against Stadia SDK (I suppose). As far as I was able to find, the games have to be using Vulkan for rendering. We don't have Vulkan rendering backend, which we don't have and would take significant effort to do. But most importantly, I don't think we have anyone on the team who is passionate about Stadia and would want to take on the project of porting and releasing the game the plaform. I kind of forgot the service even still exists
You can play your Steam of the game through GeForce NOW, though.