Factorio Forums

Hi - is it still the position of factio devs that the tile limit of 255 will remain? It makes it difficult to install more than one decorative mod, and with modpacks like se depending on alien biomes, it is a very real practical limit on which combinations of mods can be installed. For example, it's impossible to play se with the full dectorio or asphalt roads tiles installed. I don't know exactly how you pack your memory, so perhaps there's a hard practical resource limit when trying to manage tile textures on graphics hardware, but these days there isn't really a problem with doubling the tile ID in main ram or file save.

Unfortunately, I believe it is, yes.

I believe the issue they cited has to do with the fact that they keep all tiles loaded in memory at all times. This means an equivalent area of 50k x 50k will use over 2 GB of RAM, a 100k x 100k would be over 9 GB, etc, on just the tile ID alone. Increasing the tile ID from 1 to 2 bytes would of course double those numbers.

That said, I would absolutely be for them increasing the tile limit if they can, either by finding a way to reduce the load on the RAM in other ways, or by just saying screw it.

I do wonder and question, though, if it’s really necessary to have all generated tiles across the entire map constantly loaded into memory….

I think it's not so much that they're keeping the tiles in memory, but they're keeping absolutely everything in memory (as well as synced across all clients in multiplayer) and that includes tiles. Keeping it on disk is probably not a useful approach; while the visual appearance of the tile isn't needed when it's not being rendered the collision mask is derived from tile ID and probably required more frequently.

Some form of in-memory compression might work, but that's easier said than done. Especially since I have no idea what the requirements would be.

This here is the thread where I got my information from:
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=56619