Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch™

[landmine752]

Quite the news, Factorio heading to Switch. Hope it does well as it can't have been an easy port. Though, I am very curious as to why the Switch? Wouldn't think the audience is a stellar match nor is controller imput intuitive and simple, so was it to make the game mobile (says it was started pre-Steam Deck)?

[Davolution]

Been playing more than 2000 hrs on PC, like others, I am happy for switch owners (like myself), but still disappointed.

Was really hoping to hear a bit of an update on the expansion. Nothing been said since april except: we are right, it took more than a year to develop it.

Dont get me wrong, i bought this game to myself, gifted it how many times to friends and bought two t-shirts so far. I like, i love this game! Just want to play new vanilla content!

I am not expecting any release date, but some kind of update to the expansion progress would be so appreciated... like it is still going to happen?

Keep up the good work!

[FuryoftheStars]

like it is still going to happen?

Well, they're still marking bug reports as fixed for 1.2 (as recently as two days ago), so... yes?

[CobraA1]

Tbh, while I am really happy for the team, and especially for Twinsen, that must have been a great and entertaining challenge, I am disappointed.

For years we hear "Arm will not be optimised for, there will be no arm builds", because "Determinism, weak systems, yada yada" and yet, for 1,5 years a port has been in the works for a completely proprietary, closed system on based on Tegra(!).
Let's at least hope this is a step towards more builds for more architectures, and not "1.2 and all future updates will be oriented towards a 20W handheld console" (And don't tell me I am hyperbolizing, crossplay, and that means future updates) are said to be available on the Nintendo™ Switch™ console with their patented JoyCon™ for the epic gamers™)
For the team, great job, for the switch players - congrats.

It will be interesting to see what challenges they had with the port.

Honestly, I'm not sure there's a lot of ARM devices I'd like to see Factorio on?

I've tried games on cell phones - even when they run well, games that are essentially PC / Console ports suffer a lot from poor controls on the touch screen. My cell phone screen is small, my fingers are large, touch screens can be slow to respond. They aren't gaming devices.

M1 Macs also come to mind - although long gone are the heydays of Macs being serious gaming platforms. They are powerful enough, but don't really have the audience.

The Switch - well, it's huge in the gaming space. Love it or hate it - Nintendo is one of the top dogs of gaming. The Switch is the next logical place to go if you want to expand beyond PC.

That said, there will likely be a side benefit - more optimizations will benefit everybody, and controller support will eventually benefit the Steam Deck and those who use controllers on PC.

[aka13]

Arm builds are interesting for very cheap/easy-on-the-power hosting.

Also, I have no idea, what gaming you mean. Literally no games are on switch, which interest me. Bing bing wahoo is a different audience.
Same with controller support - literally could not care less. It's always a personal preference. Judging by "top dog", genshit impact and mobile is lightyears ahead. I doubt, that optimising factorio to be a lootbox gachi game would be productive though.

[astroshak]

I suppose the biggest question I have is, why put it on the weakest dedicated game platform?

I would have thought that with built in mouse/keyboard support that either of the other two big platforms, both of which are stronger and more capable platforms, would have made more sense to port to? Referring to PlayStation and XBox, though with the way Microsoft is basically tying Windows and XBox together it may be practically on the XBox already…

[aka13]

I suppose the biggest question I have is, why put it on the weakest dedicated game platform?

I would have thought that with built in mouse/keyboard support that either of the other two big platforms, both of which are stronger and more capable platforms, would have made more sense to port to? Referring to PlayStation and XBox, though with the way Microsoft is basically tying Windows and XBox together it may be practically on the XBox already…

IMHO this has been a successfull pet project of Twinsen, which he definately can be proud about.
Everything else makes 0 sense to me.

[PrgSkidmark]

I will buy this just to support the project, and to have another game on my switch. I will probably not get far enough to launch a rocket. I played so many years ago on PC and never launch a rocket. Once I started transporting oil and building bots it got so overwhelming.

[<NO_NAME>]

Why no mod support? I’m guessing it’s either:
1) Lack of CPU power and/or RAM
2) Trouble porting the Lua library, since it uses JIT, and the Switch won’t let unsigned code be marked as executable. Also, not using JIT would make 1 even worse, as well as fragmenting the codebase
3) Issues with community content moderation

Pretty much 1 and 3.
While "mod it 'till it crashes" is ok for most PC players, console games are generally expected to be much more stable(the are exceptions, but they are rare). With the limited amount of RAM, most mods could quickly end up crashing the game.

There is a lot of mods that only replace textures / constants and do not have impact on the performance at all. And there is even more mods that have some impact but it is small enough to be negligible even for Switch.

If there is some issue with Lua or something technical like that, I will understand but otherwise I think many console players would appreciate the option to try some mods. The game already have good recovery options for a case when some mods crash.
Why not just give players a warning on the mod screen about the drawbacks of using community-created content and let them decide if they want to take the risk?

[FuryoftheStars]

Why no mod support? I’m guessing it’s either:
1) Lack of CPU power and/or RAM
2) Trouble porting the Lua library, since it uses JIT, and the Switch won’t let unsigned code be marked as executable. Also, not using JIT would make 1 even worse, as well as fragmenting the codebase
3) Issues with community content moderation

Pretty much 1 and 3.
While "mod it 'till it crashes" is ok for most PC players, console games are generally expected to be much more stable(the are exceptions, but they are rare). With the limited amount of RAM, most mods could quickly end up crashing the game.

There is a lot of mods that only replace textures / constants and do not have impact on the performance at all. And there is even more mods that have some impact but it is small enough to be negligible even for Switch.

If there is some issue with Lua or something technical like that, I will understand but otherwise I think many console players would appreciate the option to try some mods. The game already have good recovery options for a case when some mods crash.
Why not just give players a warning on the mod screen about the drawbacks of using community-created content and let them decide if they want to take the risk?

The problem here is, how do you tell them all apart? As it is now, tags on the mod portal are assigned by the modder. There is no automated way to tell what a mod does or doesn't do and what the impact will be, so unless you spend the time (and money) on dedicated people to not only inspect mods when released, but every time they get an update (mods sometimes evolve), there is no way to separate them. As such, you either have to allow all, or allow none.

It should be noted, too, that while a graphics mod doesn't (directly) impact performance, it does impact (at the very least) GPU memory, and if you go too far on that, it will start to have a performance impact.

[ptx0]

I would love a physical release!

i will withhold my inappropriate jokes

[ptx0]

The problem here is, how do you tell them all apart?

it's trivial to mark prototypes as read-only, not allowing new graphics assets to be loaded at data stage time.

it's also trivial to mark mods as incompatible if they use control stage (e.g., lua runtime scripting) features in control.lua

so, data-stage only mods that add prototypes without new graphics assets should actually be fairly easy to achieve. but it wouldn't be very fun. i wouldn't want wube to do that and compromise that experience.

but what this is, basically ends up as soft-modding. scenario support. don't know if that's here, but if it is, that's really all you need on Switch.

[FuryoftheStars]

I would love a physical release!

i will withhold my inappropriate jokes

Sometimes I wish this forum supported voting or reactions to individual posts....

The problem here is, how do you tell them all apart?

it's trivial to mark prototypes as read-only, not allowing new graphics assets to be loaded at data stage time.

it's also trivial to mark mods as incompatible if they use control stage (e.g., lua runtime scripting) features in control.lua

so, data-stage only mods that add prototypes without new graphics assets should actually be fairly easy to achieve. but it wouldn't be very fun. i wouldn't want wube to do that and compromise that experience.

but what this is, basically ends up as soft-modding. scenario support. don't know if that's here, but if it is, that's really all you need on Switch.

Wouldn't this then result in the switch user downloading a mod, to restart the game and then get told "oops, sorry there, but you can't use this one"? Or I suppose it could check before restarting, but I don't think there's currently anything in place for it to be able to read this kind of information from the mod in the mod portal prior to downloading (or even showing to the end user)?

[ptx0]

Guys,

Nintendo Switch is ARM. Does that mean ARM factorio (at least servers, maybe clients) are an option now? And HOW THE HECK did you manage to achieve determinism between ARM and x86?!

IEEE 754 has been around since the 90s. lol. any platform that conforms to this already guarantees the results will be deterministic across all platforms for basic math, like multiply/add/divide/subtract. you can do pretty much anything with those 4 operations.

[ptx0]

Wouldn't this then result in the switch user downloading a mod, to restart the game and then get told "oops, sorry there, but you can't use this one"? Or I suppose it could check before restarting, but I don't think there's currently anything in place for it to be able to read this kind of information from the mod in the mod portal prior to downloading (or even showing to the end user)?

like i said, it's a subpar user experience and in order to make it mildly less awful it would be a lot of work for little gain, e.g. the things you describe here to pre-calculate the dependencies and mark mods as using certain features via tags programmatically. dubious value.

[gillonba]

I _do_ hope this is a cruel joke. We've been waiting for what, a year and a half(?), for even a hint on what the expansion is going to be, yet all the team wants to talk about is porting the base game to mobile? I mean, they can do what they want and good for them if they get some more sales but ffs. What a way to crap all over the original fans who just want more PC content. "Don't you guys have phones?"

[FuryoftheStars]

I _do_ hope this is a cruel joke. We've been waiting for what, a year and a half(?), for even a hint on what the expansion is going to be, yet all the team wants to talk about is porting the base game to mobile? I mean, they can do what they want and good for them if they get some more sales but ffs. What a way to crap all over the original fans who just want more PC content. "Don't you guys have phones?"

Posted by Twinsen on 2022-09-13

For the past one and a half years I've been working on a secret Factorio project.

Just saying....

[ske]

What is this? A factorio for ants?

[gillonba]

I _do_ hope this is a cruel joke. We've been waiting for what, a year and a half(?), for even a hint on what the expansion is going to be, yet all the team wants to talk about is porting the base game to mobile? I mean, they can do what they want and good for them if they get some more sales but ffs. What a way to crap all over the original fans who just want more PC content. "Don't you guys have phones?"

Posted by Twinsen on 2022-09-13

For the past one and a half years I've been working on a secret Factorio project.

Just saying....

...and apparently that secret project was porting Factorio to the Switch. Yay. If/when that changes, I will happily eat my words but until then, show me the lie

[FuryoftheStars]

I _do_ hope this is a cruel joke. We've been waiting for what, a year and a half(?), for even a hint on what the expansion is going to be, yet all the team wants to talk about is porting the base game to mobile? I mean, they can do what they want and good for them if they get some more sales but ffs. What a way to crap all over the original fans who just want more PC content. "Don't you guys have phones?"

Posted by Twinsen on 2022-09-13

For the past one and a half years I've been working on a secret Factorio project.

Just saying....

...and apparently that secret project was porting Factorio to the Switch. Yay. If/when that changes, I will happily eat my words but until then, show me the lie

You missed the point completely. I specifically put emphasis on the lines I was trying to point out.

But I also gotta ask, what makes you think that in working on the expansion, that they are working exclusively on it? I mean, there's going to be times when some of them don't have anything to work on either because their piece is done or they're waiting on someone else to finish their piece(s) or they're trying to avoid burnout.

Would I like to see news about the expansion? Absolutely.
Do I agree with their current philosophy of keeping everything about the expansion under their hat? Heck no.
But I certainly wouldn't go pissing about it when they happen to post news about something else they finished.