Factorio Forums

Me and my friend in a far foreign country decided to play Factorio together.
However, we quickly found out that Factorio had a horrible latency problems with foreign players. (Well technically speaking it is the lack of latency hiding techs.. but whatever)
It was bad to the point of being unplayable.


I understand that the game's development is at the Alpha stage and Multiplayer is only experimental.

I'm not demanding a 'NOW!' solution since that is bratty and also not possible.
Me and my friends bought the Alpha and Alpha is what we got, fair and simple.

However, I at least would like to know whether maybe in the near future, I will be able to play with my friend or not. (Maybe this is a tall order since we each have 500 ping)
Does anyone have speculations? educated guesses? or a developer diary/quote which indicates multiplayer improvements?

If so, please, let me hear them.

My educated guess will be not if both of you dont havce a fastpath option from whatever ISP you have.

IMHO it would not be feasable to use a server/client architecture which is the only feasable way to get low latency on each end.
Since Factorio is P2P based thanks to the large amount of syncing needed it wont happen.

Just my educated guess though.

It is on the roadmap to put great optimisations into MP including the mentioned latency hiding techs.

But I am to lazy to search the devs information about it. Maybe in one of the Friday Facts

Phillip_Lynx wrote:It is on the roadmap to put great optimisations into MP including the mentioned latency hiding techs.

But I am to lazy to search the devs information about it. Maybe in one of the Friday Facts

I have not read that yet i am at least not aware how you could get past the minimum latency that is imposed especially if you play with players on different continents. This would need what is called an imperfect soulution which would mean that at least one peer needs to make an "educated guess".

This on the other hand could lead to a load more determinism issues if not done perfectly.
Although as far as i can say the factorio code is super super solid especially for an alpha so if someone could pull it off they can.

Have found the post ...

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ing#p50323

You might try setting the latency slider to 500 ms when starting the game. This means that you will have to wait for 500 ms before your actions appear (this is where the missing latency hiding would help), but the game should run smooth. Theoretically. We've never really tried it with this extreme pings. Please report your results :-)