Cloning as massive UPS improvement (Factory-Streets)

[Deadlock989]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[NotRexButCaesar]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[NotRexButCaesar]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Guenni7]

Ssilk will not be amused where (t)his tread is going.... let's keep on topic and be nice.

My 10 cents:
I'm always short on UPS, so everything that helps is much appreciated. Cloning (or similar ideas in other treads) might be a way to push the limits,
but I somehow think it will be very difficult to do it without loosing the special gameplay for what factorio got so famous.
If some mechanism like cloning would be implemented, I think it must work completely in the background without the player even noticing it,
something like a clone detection, and when it finds a clone you get reduced processing time.

[ssilk]

Huh, this gets complicated.

@blazspinnaker: sorry, I didn’t mention your part of the idea. But now you have done that yourself.
Meta: I mean, this are just suggestions. Nobody will ever know where it comes from, nobody will ask for that, and in the end it’s a mixture of influences, happy accidents and the biggest factor is the dev/the team that implements it. I don’t await to be mentioned in the release notes, even if some of my ideas had been implemented.
What I tried to say with “not needed to write the same thing twice” was this:

That all said, I posted here and on reddit about supporting UPS efficiency with a late game mod. Very little traffic or engagement. I'm skeptical there is much demand here in numbers except from an overly dedicated niche few.

And somehow I thought I already read that from here

I do not think that at this stage of development, the developers would add something like this - in my opinion Factorio is mostly focussed on the early to mid game, where most players spend their time, and not the super-late game, where UPS becomes a considerable concern, meaning that these changes would be difficult, bug-inducing, hard to use, and rarely used.

but it seems, that I totally mixed that up. Not written by you (ok, both names begin with “b” ). And both are not really equal... I’m sorry, sometimes I should more distinct between webmaster and my personal interests.

And no, I won’t make that subject even broader as it is to also make a post into mod-requests.

Not thinking in detail: I can make that, but I think it makes no sense. I’m not developing this. And it would make the effort and length of reading much bigger, without knowing, if it really works like so. We can use loaders for the input/output, chests for the input/output buffer, and so on,I thought through that all, but I would give too much bias into that, preventing others to have better ideas. And this is what this board should create: ideas.


@deadlock: I like your posts, they contain always some truth.
Yes, using Factorissimo will not speed it up much, but it will show, if this idea makes fun to play with. Implemented into C++ this has really a big speed up potential.
I didn’t speak of huge areas. The example showed a green circuit production. It could be a blue circuit production feed only with raw materials. I think there are examples, that are made an unbalanced blue-circuits production within one chunk. And you clone it 10 times... so that will be 10 times faster than if I would produce now.But it could be also a single smelter, duplicated 200 times. It will take then - when operating - only 1/200 of UPS. That is massive. What I don’t know is, how much more we need to built around that, to work smooth. That could eat up some savings. We can know such things only, if we test it. And before that I would like to have it more positive.

It is just another way to think factories. You need to think “how can I make something, that I can repeat over and over again but is still working as with one”. It cannot be compared with how factories are currently built.

Destruction: A container is of course not indestructible. Once the fence is open, and something is destroyed, it will fall out of sync and stops working. Think to the containers as if they are dump and controlled by the master only.


And the good question is, if that will make fun. I understand that I’m involved into that and maybe it will have questionable results when it is really implemented. That’s the reason, why I think this should be implemented as mod first. To be tested.

[ptx0]

having several cloned areas around the map that behave identically without simulating the actual factory... sorry, but that's not what Factorio is about, to me.. what's the issue with Scaled Machines mod?

[ssilk]

The difference is not so much but so high...

A) everything inside the container is moving as it should move. You can see, how something is made, just many times at once. It will looking interesting.
B) it really produces that items, only the results are multiplied. The scaled machines are just assemblies, that simulate a production by waiting less. They have their own charms.
C) currently the only benefit in having the same structure over and over is that it can be blueprinted/copied. This changes here. It’s a way to have even more automatism.
D) A structure, copied multiple times will suddenly behave quite different than the single structure. It begins to behave chaotically.
E) many more things are possible with this, things we don’t know yet, enables more creativity; scaled machines are fixed somehow...

[Deadlock989]

The difference is not so much but so high...

A) everything inside the container is moving as it should move. You can see, how something is made, just many times at once. It will looking interesting.
B) it really produces that items, only the results are multiplied. The scaled machines are just assemblies, that simulate a production by waiting less. They have their own charms.
C) currently the only benefit in having the same structure over and over is that it can be blueprinted/copied. This changes here. It’s a way to have even more automatism.
D) A structure, copied multiple times will suddenly behave quite different than the single structure. It begins to behave chaotically.
E) many more things are possible with this, things we don’t know yet, enables more creativity; scaled machines are fixed somehow...

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]
[Moderated back again by Deadlock989: on topic] I assume there is some kind of language barrier at work here because only 10% of what you have written on this thread makes any kind of sense. I feel like I'm on drugs reading the above, for example, and not the good kind. It reminds me of the Wisdom of Chopra.

For that 10% that I can understand and relate to actual facts in my head about Factorio modding, most of what you propose is completely impossible or wrong or both, deep deep into not even wrong territory. It's the old classic: "if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs". The miniscule proportion of these ideas that have any immediate practical application - the ones that have already been explored by many others such as the unitary smelter arrays / whistlestop factories / nuclear-reactor-array-in-one-entity, even the unexpected inflationary uses people are putting ye olde stacking beltbox mod to - aren't actually all that much fun when it comes down to it. Sure, that's subjective, but I'm absolutely certain I'm not the only person whose interest in a Factorio game usually dies when you get to space science. The struggle around midgame is the best bit. Have you played No Man's Sky? It's utter garbage. You shoot rocks to upgrade your gun so you can shoot more rocks more quickly to upgrade your gun again. Occasionally you go somewhere new and the rocks are a different colour. It's bollocks.

That other abstraction thread was already allowed to chunter on for 9 months. Numerous objections were raised by people with actual modding experience and they were hand-waved away (at best). Four different Factorio developers commented on it as well, and the picture was pretty clear: they either aren't interested in this other game you are talking about, or they can immediately see all the numerous expensive problems it would create if you tried to Frankenstein it into Factorio as it is today, or both. If you want some kind of constantly upscaling and constantly inflated idle game type of thing, you will have to get someone else to make it, and I don't think I would ever buy it.

[Guenni7]

The miniscule proportion of these ideas that have any immediate practical application - the ones that have already been explored by many others such as the unitary smelter arrays / whistlestop factories / nuclear-reactor-array-in-one-entity, even the unexpected inflationary uses people are putting ye olde stacking beltbox mod to - aren't actually all that much fun when it comes down to it. Sure, that's subjective, but I'm absolutely certain I'm not the only person whose interest in a Factorio game usually dies when you get to space science. The struggle around midgame is the best bit. Have you played No Man's Sky? It's utter garbage. You shoot rocks to upgrade your gun so you can shoot more rocks more quickly to upgrade your gun again. Occasionally you go somewhere new and the rocks are a different colour. It's bollocks.

This is a very subjective view. I did play No Man's Sky and it was boring like hell after some hours, but I can still enjoy many hours in factorio building new stuff, optimizing stuff or even duplicate some parts of the factory even late-late-late-game. When I got to white science that was only the beginning for me, not the end. Guess it's a bit different for anyone.
The mods you mentioned all might be cool, but for me it would feel like cheating to use them. So I don't. But if there's any way to get a bigger factory in vanilla, I'm on the boat.

That other abstraction thread was already allowed to chunter on for 9 months. Numerous objections were raised by people with actual modding experience and they were hand-waved away (at best). Four different Factorio developers commented on it as well, and the picture was pretty clear: they either aren't interested in this other game you are talking about, or they can immediately see all the numerous expensive problems it would create if you tried to Frankenstein it into Factorio as it is today, or both. If you want some kind of constantly upscaling and constantly inflated idle game type of thing, you will have to get someone else to make it, and I don't think I would ever buy it.

Well, if it is not possible or to better say: noone has found a way to implement it yet, ok. But I don't think that's a cause to not discuss it.

[Koub]

[Koub] I did a little moderation here. Reminder : don't feed the troll.

[blazespinnaker]

I think there is a certain pleasure one gets from Factorio about diving deep into the totally obscure depths of complexity just for the existential helluvit. It's fun sometimes thinking about something deeply that totally doesn't matter, and UPS extension qualifies quite nicely. Certainly more rewarding than talking about politics, these days.

Anyways, I'll let this be as I've approached the limit of my ability to be intelligent about this idea. I do hope you change your mind, ssilk, and think more about how to breath real life into this via a mod. I'd really like to think through and enumerate some easy to implement APIs we could extract out of the dev team at a minimum to enable something like this.

[Deadlock989]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Impatient]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Deadlock989]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[jodokus31]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Deadlock989]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[ptx0]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Koub]

[Koub] Enough is enough. Any post below this one that ever so slightly drifts from the thread's topic into ego wars will get its author a 1 week ban to cool off (for starters).

[jodokus31]

personally, I'll go for things like "Schall Machine Scaling" which present their own logistical challenges - they're enormous buildings that cost the same as a large number of vanilla buildings to craft, and consume a scaled number of inputs/outputs.

in other words, 16 assemblers/chemplants/refineries/nuclear reactors are condensed into one large entity that maintains all of the vanilla gameplay characteristics - no need to surround them with walls or have perfectly synchronised "anything" going on - they're just normal machines using the existing C++ prototypes, highly performant, and very reliable - there's a recipe scaling mod that helps to make them work better in the game engine.

I still have to manage their inputs and outputs effectively and without a loader mod, this is more of a challenge than you'd think - though their increased footprint gives more I/O possibilities.

if I understand it correctly, for some it's about scaling overall production and have more the focus on challenges regarding trains.
That above sounds like a realistic option. It's not so nice like real factory facades, which simulate to work, but ok. You can also replace a resource patch with infinity chests/pipes. Looks not so nice, though, but who cares.

[Tekillaa]

Well, seems to be a controversial thread..

I just want to share my point of view/opinion : I like this idea because I think that the game making different calculation for some identical blueprint seems artificial to me, and the fact that blueprint are a thing that is used by lot of player, casual or advanced ones, can be used to improve game performance overall. I'm aware that if it's added to the game, it can change how people think the (late) game, but the main goal by doing this is to let the possibility to have a mega factory (10k+) without turning off pollution or biters because of "performance".There will be new UPS limit far beyond the one we got now. I wish the game be able to go as far as possible about performance for "automation". My personnal main issue is still about those nuclear power plant, always making solar for saving performance...

It's my point of view and I'm just a player who likes the game a lot. This kind of upgrade for the game can give new possibilties for scenario/map and truely could be considered for an "automation" game.