Why no more single-lane belts?

[immibis]

I first played Factorio back in 0.2, after the fundraising campaign. And back then, belts still had two lanes - items could be on the left or the right - but they could also travel along the center of a belt. Items in the center of a belt would block items in both lanes, so this was not an actual extra lane.

If a belt was placed pointing directly away from a miner or inserter, the item would be in the center, unlike how currently it starts in the center and then snaps into the left or right lane.

I remember this being quite intuitive, because lanes aren't obvious - if I put items on a belt, they just go "on the belt", not "on the left/right side of the belt". Why would belts have sides? Then I found out they had sides, and I thought I'd discovered something totally awesome.

These days, it is not awesome when you discover that belts have two sides, because the game basically tells you - if not in the tutorial, then by forcing all items to one side of a belt.



Think of item compression. It's not something you think of much unless you're an advanced player trying to squeeze as much performance as possible out of your belts. As a new player, you probably wouldn't even realise there is such a thing as compression. When you did discover it, you'd feel clever and proud ("Hey guys! Look what I found out! Turns slow down items on belts!").

Now imagine if this was taught in the tutorial. Day one of Factorio, the game just straight up tells you "Turns slow down items on belts". Now it's a gameplay mechanic just like any other. It's not mysterious, it doesn't need to be discovered, and it doesn't seem awesome when you realise you can move more items by avoiding turns.

Once upon a time, this also applied to lanes - "Hey guys! You can put TWO lines of items on a belt at the same time! How cool is that!". And making new players feel like they did something awesome can't be a bad thing. That's why I'm wondering why the center-lane mechanic was removed (a long time ago).

[spacesloth]

Hmm, I love using curves and using all three lanes.

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

i wasn't here on .2, But i like the way it is now.


@Spacesloth
I've really not found much use in 3-lane belts. I have seen your design spacesloth, but it uses up quite a lot more space compared to a horizontal or vertical line, What advantages does it actually provide?

[spacesloth]

@Spacesloth
I've really not found much use in 3-lane belts. I have seen your design spacesloth, but it uses up quite a lot more space compared to a horizontal or vertical line, What advantages does it actually provide?

Not much really that was just a shot of where I have been testing with it. Not found much use for it in an actual playthough though. Might be decent if it didn't take so much finicky setup to get stuff onto the three lanes.

[ssilk]

There where some reasons for removing it:
- bug reports, that the belts "stuck", cause it was placed in the middle
- players, that don't understand the two lanes
- The wiki tries in many cases not to explain the simple basic mechanics, but most you tubers do, and the players in this forum and on reddit do

The belts have then be changed, that items on it are moved silently to one of both lanes.

Currently the issue is:
- belts still can stuck, I can show an example, where everything is built correctly, but the items will stuck.
- CPU issues. Every item on the belts are moved. Long belts with many stacked items become a problem.(but I guess this!)
- curves aren't understood and once it is understood this is just annoying. (Also guess!)

[n9103]

GCF
Mainstreaming
Mass appeal

What happens when the Casual market is the mainstream, and Entitlement becomes acceptable?
The death of learning the rules of a game before believing there is something wrong with the game.

[immibis]

GCF
Mainstreaming
Mass appeal

What happens when the Casual market is the mainstream, and Entitlement becomes acceptable?
The death of learning the rules of a game before believing there is something wrong with the game.

I don't see a problem with center lanes and mass appeal. A belt with one stream of items on it is easier to understand than a belt with two streams of items, unless you've played Factorio for a while already.

Everything that can be done Factorio can be done while only using one lane per belt. My first auto-smelter (in 0.2) didn't even use belts at all (I don't remember whether I'd discovered lanes before then or not) - only regular and long-handed inserters.

[Nova]

A game without a need to learn the rules is always better than a game with this need - at least if everything else is equal.

[n9103]

It's the auto-aligning that removed the center lane, and it was people whining when their belts got too cluttered (due to poor comprehension of lanes) that led to auto-aligning.

[Cdr.MaS]

A game without a need to learn the rules is always better than a game with this need - at least if everything else is equal.

couldn't disagree more
a game that doesn't require learning the rules and using a pen and some paper isn't worth playing, it's trivial and by that simply not entertaining

[immibis]

A game without a need to learn the rules is always better than a game with this need - at least if everything else is equal.

What about a game where you don't need to learn the rules, but learning the rules (by playing, not by sitting down with a manual or anything) lets you be more efficient?

[n9103]

That should be the implication of Nova's statement, since in most games you can blunder around without knowing what you're doing.

[Nova]

"Learning the rules" can happen with ingame tutorial which are no tutorials. The commentary for the game Portal shows how this is done: People should learn the game without a tutorial, but just intuitively do things and as this learn how it works. That's very complicated to do for everything more complex than a basic jump-and-run. If the player character starts in a pit where he can't escape only with the control pad, then the player will automatically learn how to jump, without any tutorial. Well, or he/she just stops playing the game, but that is not likely. ^^

A game without a need to learn the rules is always better than a game with this need - at least if everything else is equal.

couldn't disagree more
a game that doesn't require learning the rules and using a pen and some paper isn't worth playing, it's trivial and by that simply not entertaining

Factorio doesn't meet this goal, so what do you do here?

A game without a need to learn the rules is always better than a game with this need - at least if everything else is equal.

What about a game where you don't need to learn the rules, but learning the rules (by playing, not by sitting down with a manual or anything) lets you be more efficient?

Well, don't know. I can't make any statement about that. That's sounds like a good thing, but don't rely on that statement. ^^

[n9103]

Well, this is entirely off topic still, but what the hell.

The early levels of almost every game are the tutorial. Factorio is not different in this regard.
I don't even understand how you think the first two levels don't qualify as tutorial levels. I suppose the 3rd could be argued either way.

Your argument/statement about not having to learn supports the idea that it's perfectly acceptable for someone's first game to be multiplayer.
Unless the other player is expecting to do everything on their own, this isn't going to be an enjoyable experience when compared to the alternative. (The new player having spent time learning beforehand.)

In multiplayer, I don't expect perfection, but I'm also not interested in cleaning up after incompetence.
I imagine most Factorio players feel similarly.

[Cilya]

A game without a need to learn the rules is always better than a game with this need - at least if everything else is equal.

I disagree. There is a part of truth in what you said. The rules for a good game is that it must only contains what's necessary and remove what's not. Usually, the learning phase is superfluous : you don't play, you learn how to play. During this time, the player is not having fun. It's important then that this learning phase is as small as possible. The game mechanics should be simplified as much as possible, so the player can have fun immediately. So, in some way, for most games, you are right.

But what if the learning phase is actually part of the fun of the game ? I believe this is the case of Factorio. This is quite common in construction/optimization game and you have the same thing with some MMO/moba/hack&slash/RTS games : you have to learn how to build your strategy/character/stuff. Without that, all those games would be much less appealing. It's so popular, they have given it a name : "theorycrafting". I insist it's important for those game to allow players to "theorycraft".

I believe that "learning gameplays" are not well understood by most game designers. (I'm not understanding it well either) There are not many games who consider that learning is actually a part of the game and exploit this. In Factorio for instance, there is no real mechanics to introduce the complexity progressively and force the player to learn everything : you can play without optimizing, it is not critical to optimize. It doesn't stops us from playing, but it selects a class of players in which we all fall here : the players who wants to understand the game and get the maximum from it. We have fun playing because we can choose our own objectives in the game, and we have fun reaching it and learning.

There are some successful learning games though. Mainly all the reflexion games based on evolving/complexifying mechanics. I'm thinking of SpaceChem or Braid. Not really mainstream games, i'm not sure if the genre can be very popular. It's hard to design this game and find mechanics which are interesting, worth to learn and fun to learn.

[n9103]

M'thinks thou didst forget the revered Portal and it's successor.

[Cilya]

Oh yes, they fall into this category and are mainstream. There is not much to learn in this games though. They are not the best examples.

[n9103]

15 levels of how the physics of portals work isn't much to learn?
Any more and it would be edutainment.
Seems like you might have mixed up your terms, or are confused about the concepts.

[Cilya]

The same concepts are used in all portal challenges. Portal 2 adds two new concepts. But all this is fast to grasp. (At least, compared to Factorio mechanics which require a lot of wiki pages to be fully explained.) The rest of portal is solving, using what you learnt, not really learning.

[Gandalf]

I agree that it is perfectly acceptable for a game to have a learning curve. The question is rather if you can learn everything by playing or if you need external resources or an extensive tutorial.

Comparing it to a few very successful other games:

• * Simple first-person-shooter Counter Strike requires you to figure stuff out before you can do anything, mostly controlls. While there isn't much to learn there is also practically no help whatsoever.
  * Portal is a riddle game. The physics are entirely intuitive and don't require you to learn anything beyond getting to know the few in-game entities (portals, lasers, pistons, buttons, cubes, gates). Everything else is solving riddles, which you obviously don't want any help with.
  * Minecraft is the only game I ever came across that literally requires you to spend hours reading its wiki so you can use all of its mechanics. There is just no way to stumble upon every crafting receipt in the game. Online research is practically a part of the game, that is if you want to do more then buidling houses. And yet *some* people seemed to like it…

Compared to all of those, factorio is closest to Minecraft, in that it is a construction game. There are no riddles (unless you try to micro-optimize, in which case some research will always be in order) and the controlls are (thankfully) right there in the menu.
The tutorial in factorio is very concise. It has a perfect balance between explanation and exploration (for me anyway) and points you in all the right directions. Most of the stuff it leaves open can be found out via some quick trial-and-error.
And, most importantly, factorio is mind-bogglingly intuitive. I have on multiple occasions compared it to professional development software like programming IDEs or Photoshop. All the little gimmicks like organizing your tool belt by assigning slots and auto-refilling your cursor from inventory just makes sense without having to read anything, the only limitation being that you need to know about those features' existance.
And the same goes for the two or three lanes on belts. You just need to know that it's possible, after that its really just a matter of intuition.

So far the only thing in factorio that required me to go online and learn about it before using it properly was building tracks. And that is, according to the wiki, still something that developers intend to simplify.