Factorio Forums

I'll "amend" one point in the above here: the only one who has the right to "impose" 'challenge' on a user is/are the ones making the game. And even that statement is technically false: a user always has the ability to "cheat" or "mod" the game to change it. The only obvious exception is online experiences (MMOs, multiplayer, etc).

People, FFS, we're talking about an Engineer who is so genius that they are able to take a few meager resources after crash-landing an interstellar ship that's slightly larger than a modern shipping truck, and go from "Steam Age" to "Nuclear Age" to "Space Age" within a matter of months or years without any working electronic information sources.
No... No! It's beyond even that. We're talking about an Engineer who is so absolutely, absurdly genius that they are able to make a fully automated manufacturing plant - only slightly larger than a small, two-person, car - out of nine Iron Plates, five Iron Gears and three Electronic Circuits - and those "Electronic Circuits" are made out of one Iron Plate and three Copper Cable. Not only is that literally not how circuits work (Cathodray tubes were more complicated than that) but this is dramatically in excess of modern technology computer capabilities...

So, you're telling me that someone so genius isn't able to figure out how to make a small box that can return two separate conditional signals? A box, mind you, that is about as big as they are? When modern technology is able to produce something the size of "look at the tip of your pinky finger" that can return thousands, if not billions of signals more than that many times in a second?

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Ok... Ok... I know what some of you are thinking. "Since when is Factorio a 'realism' game?"
Um, I'm not talking realism here. I could list so many things that shatter that expectation... 2D is at the top of my list (no one in their right mind would lay out transport belts along a single layer...).
No. It's about this nonsensical argument about "challenge."

Earendel, who made the Space Exploration mod, among many others, and even helped with the Space Age expansion (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373 says it all...) has many great ideas. Yet they have one mindset that a LOT of people don't like: their idea of "challenge." Robot Attrition is almost a universally hated mod that has Reddit threads telling people how to lobotomize it and even a mod to effectively disable it. The very notion of "spaghetti" in Factorio is about the challenge of using belts and inserters (and trains) to transport things 'most efficiently'. The people who praise the "spaghetti" mindset claim that any "solution involving logistic bots trivializes the challenge."
...
Ok...

Now, let's take a step back and analyze this for a moment. Factorio is a game. The original/main developers of the game added logistic bots to the game. They gave the player a choice to utilize this feature... or not... without consequence. So, who is literally anyone else to take away the choice of how we, as players, take on a challenge? Who are "they" (not Earendel, specifically, but those demanding their idea of "challenge" be 'imposed' on the rest of us) to disable or force consequences on our ability to decide if we want to play one way versus another?
And... Think about this another way. At any point in human history did we, as a species, go "Eh, oh well, I can only do things this way and no other so I'll accept this challenge and live with it?"

Um, no. Throughout history, we've "spat in the face of" 'challenge' with "innovation" and "creativity" to make things easier for ourselves and others. That's where science and technology come from. That's where we come from.


So... I ask you, all of you, those for "greater challenge" and those for "more accessibility" and those for "more features" (and those I can't think of "words" for, sorry), do you really believe that the Engineer would completely and utterly disregard possible solutions just to make things difficult? Or do you think that the Engineer would consider every possible solution and choose which one to utilize? Do you think they would simply limit their genius by default, or decide when to make a game out of the complicated vs when to utilize the resources around them to come up with the "best" and "simplest" solution?

I know what "my" Engineer would do. Both.


Honestly, even if anyone wants to argue that a combinator is more of a mechanical device than a "computer" device (something I would find hard to provide real evidence for) there still exist purely mechanical (versus computer) devices that can conditionally output two (or more) different "signals." Three+, if you count "off" as a signal. Radio transmitters, video projectors (even as old as those first adding sound), just to name a few (and not make this page twice as long as everyone else's posts...)
-- Note: "mechanical" in the sense that it doesn't require a computational processor, not in the sense that it doesn't utilize "electricity," as the combinators DO require electricity... --

Final thoughts:

People, people. If you want to make extremely complex, sprawling landscapes of wires and connectors... that's your choice. We won't deny you that. You always have the option to simply not use a feature, but if a feature doesn't exist it denies the rest of us the ability to utilize it. Why? For what purpose?

Besides, before 2.0 to count the quantity of an item on a strip of transport belts, you had to link each and every belt with wire... Now, with 2.0, you have a two-click option to "Read entire belt."

Finally, someone attempted to argue that adding an "else" output option would be more TPS-intensive than two combinators. This is absurd. Adding a toggle to an operation only adds complexity to that operation IF that toggle is ON. If nothing is selected in the "Else" output it would function identically to the current model.
Additionally, within the Assembly language, there exists a single operational operator: jump. How this is spelled depends on the Assembly language used (depends on the CPU, etc), but it exists. Therefore, with a single operation, you can add an "else" statement in Assembly. ... Adding another Combinator? That duplicates the entire code of the first Combinator.
QED: a function in the most basic (human-readable) language known to computer processors, or duplicating the entire cost of an entity plus connections to and from it; which do you think is more expensive for the CPU to do?
--> There exists no circumstance where adding an "else" output would be "more costly" than adding additional Combinators... with the sole exception of "Bad Programmers" and I would like to think that by this point Wube have proven themselves to be anything but...

with more words and probably written more poorly than the following:

This isn't F'ing "Dark Souls," people don't come to this game to have their soft parts kicked in repeatedly.

Yes, "a challenge" is good. No doubt about that, otherwise we'd all be playing "mindless" phone game-likes. But there are some things that can be considered "a challenge" when they are, in fact, a "contrivance" (definition 2: a device, especially in literary or artistic composition, which gives a sense of artificiality.) The argument that having the combinator(s) the way they are "adds simplicity" and "only a small amount of skill or thought is necessary to understand how to use them" is an artificial argument. One only "created" because the people who have understood them... well... understand them (and went through the process of doing so).

Yes, it requires skill. Yes, if you break it down to its fundamentals they can be understood "relatively" "easily," BUT that's not the point.
I again bring up my reference to human history. When have we ever, as a species, as a society, intentionally limited ourselves to one way of thinking, one set of methods, one ... etc... and it ended well for that group? (<- that being the important part, as there are any number of examples without it...)
Yes, there still exist tribes "in Africa, in South America, and elsewhere" that don't utilize most of the technology that has driven humans forward, and, yes, they are doing just fine for themselves... but... are they? Are they really? The term "first world problem" exists for a reason, and it isn't merely because it mocks the "problem" in question.

One of the original Star Trek movies involved time travel where the doctor (among others) disparaged the "current era's" primative methods; the doctor commenting on the "current era's" surgery as "barbaric". A "first world problem" only exists because 'so-called' "third world problems" are no longer (really) "problems" at all for that society. Is that NOT a GOOD thing?

I'm saying that to purposefully ignore known advancements completely and simply call it a "challenge" is the wrong way to look at what is being done.
One can absolutely choose not to utilize a method or technology to do a task, and that certainly can be considered a "challenge." But to do this one first has to acknowledge the method or technology to make the conscious decision to "not utilize" it. Unfortunately, that's not what is being done here.

... simply, is wrong.
The change we request will never harm others. It simply can't harm others. Other users will not be forced to utilize our change any moreso than any other 2.0 change (take the multiple input conditionals that IsaacOscar mentions. ADDING more than one is optional. If you don't click the "add" button it is effectively the same as the old version - bar a pointer to an empty location. A "few bytes" in memory won't change anything on an 8 GB RAM and a 3 Ghz processor system; needless to say, it's laughable on a 16+ GB RAM and 4+ Ghz processor.) And the employees (fellows? I'm not sure what they refer to themselves internally as...) at Wube won't be harmed coding this in (moreso than any other 2.0 change); heck, they're less harmed (getting paid) than mod makers (not getting paid).

No. We aren't wrong for requesting this change. Wube has the right to ignore us; they always have and always will (regardless of how loud we may make ourselves). Others have the right to ignore us as well; even if the change is added to the base game they can simply not utilize the change. And I'm tired of reading responses that are simply ignorant of what they are talking about. If a programmer (especially from Wube) wants to step in and explain how this change would irrefutably, irrevocably harm the game, or an engineer wants to step in and explain how this change would be any more unrealistic than anything else in the game, I'm happy to listen. But, seriously, stop responding to these requests with "that would do 'harm' to my playstyle," or "I see no reason this would be useful."

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(there exist as many "Assembly" 'languages' as there are different processors, as "Assembly" is - as previously stated - a 1:1 code:binary representation, and therefore any different processor "architecture" requires its own Assembly language)

Honestly, just for the heck of it, I decided to try and see if there existed a known and already described method to "mechanically" do an "if-then-else" ... circuit (as that's what it would be, honestly) ... While I try to provide links to my sources (should I find any, and admit I'm wrong if I don't...) I was unable to find any "official" (read: governmental, educational, or scientific) sources on the matter - mostly just other people asking the same/similar question... but, it boils down to the following: Obviously. Electronically these are done with Logic Gates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate which are represented in-game through the "Arithmetic Combinator" (so, honestly, one could simply argue that other Combinators shouldn't exist in the first place if we can do "everything" using that one alone... Please don't...)
More interestingly I discovered that this is actually possible through purely physical means: https://physics.stackexchange.com/quest ... s-and-or-x; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine.
Realistically, if any Logical formula can be represented electronically (i.e. computer code) then it should also be represented mechanically (see above "analytical engine") but through VASTLY (and, ultimately, IRRATIONALLY) more complex/complicated means.

Therefore, even any argument of: "basic engineering can't do that" does not stand, as it would be entirely possible for a "gear system" to do an "if-then-else" statement.

's sentiment of "something more fundamental" but I am going to flip it around. YES, "else" statements are absolutely fundamental to programming, or even just Logic in general, and while it is certainly possible that the devs somehow simply missed it when adding-and-then-updating the code for the game (2.0) I get the feeling that they truly didn't.
Instead I get the feeling that it's more "fundamental" than that, and instead they are adding -artificially, I would argue- a level of difficulty to the game that most of us are reverse-arguing isn't necessary.

they provided logistics robots and Active Provider, Requester and Buffer chests, but now, not only is there an achievement to not use these (until completing the game if you don't have Space Age, or after researching your first tech with another planet's science pack if you do have Space Age) they've literally disabled them for some situations entirely (mainly space platforms).
Earendel, among others, felt that even using these was effectively "cheating" as they "trivialized" any challenge that they could be used for/with - and presented methods of (effectively) disabling them in most of their mods... this has been adopted in 2.0 (or Space Age).

the lack of an 'else' function for the Combinators is more of an intentional omission, than a mistake... and, if that's the case, we may never get it added... Unless the interface for these are moddable (and I get the feeling that they either aren't outright, or are incredibly hard to do so, given the number of "new" Combinators added by mods, and lack of "changed" Combinators -- but that's my sole evidence, so...) its entirely possible that the only way we will have "else" function is with "modded" content.
I hope I'm wrong. I do... but, we'll just have to wait and see.