I've never played a game where it was more obvious that the developers really played and enjoyed their game. It's just brimming with QoL features.

It helps they don’t have a publisher to confuse them with quantitative and qualitative pattern matching. Just make the game you play and judge it honestly. Of course, the second part is a rare ability.

Yes but they have fallen into a success trap. I have seen the same trend with Mincraft, KSP and Subnautica. An indi developer starts with a great concept and a true open world game. The player can progress through the tech tree how they choose but doing so requires exploration. All is good. Then the developer starts to tighten the reigns. The tech tree become more rigid. Exploration must happen in a more specific order. And then the graphics department takes over, adding more and more objects until a previously huge and open world is a tightly cluttered mess.

Think of how subnautica moved. The second game was very literally denser to the point that they slowed down movement to preserve any sense of space. And each step inthe tech tree required specific tools from a specific place. No more free explorations. No more alternatives. The player lost control over the story. Subnautica 3 is now so dense and linear I gave up after a week. It is more fishtank than open world.

I still play factorio (at 1000x) but I do not play the new planets. That whole process is so locked down that there is little for me to enjoy. I get bored whenever there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.

This is what being very successful (but still focused) gets you.

I still believe Factorio fundamentally rewired the way I think about software and engineering more broadly... prepared me better for my first software internship than any class I'd taken

The whole game really drills in what it means to "think like a computer scientist". Abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, etc

Which Monday?

It's a great way to rebuild a sense of agency for me. I find the weekend binge a good way to feel like I can effect changes in the world.

A bit like the old Bill Hicks joke: "I was a weekend drinker - I would start on Saturday, and then by Friday I..."

you can stop?

As far as the game in concerned, the sprites are all just 2D assets. The fact that those assets came from a 3d model during development has no effect on performance. They also do manual post-processing on most of the 2D renders.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-146

?

The game doesn't consume that much VRAM. It plays on 4 GB GPUs just fine. The GPU only needs to keep resident what's currently on the screen. Even including every animation frame, that's 1 GB tops.

Hell, the minimum requirements are a GeForce 750 Ti, or Radeon r7 360. Those are 2 GB GPUs.

it does?

I don't have it installed now (lest I get tempted into a quick 2-hour session and end up being late for work 12 hours later), but IIRC it performed the same for me on iGPU and 4090, even on the big saves running below 60 FPS/UPS.

> Everything in the game is a 2D render of a 3D model, which is why the game uses so much VRAM.

Surely from first principles one'd expect 3D models to be heavier than the 2D renders, due to the extra axis?

Do they really load so many spirites into memory it's heavier than 3D?

Somehow the engineering behind this will help that fly and all his viewpoint windows

Blueprint would be easiest. Grep for printable entities, count how many you need and the grid extent.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Blueprint_string_format

(Also unrelated, I think by clearance they mean tolerance?)

There was an attempt, with a very well known board game designer. They got along well, but didn't find a board game in it.

Until then, there's Factory Fun, and Factory Funner.

not you? Is that an expression I should know, meaning the opposite presumably?

The entire planet taken as a whole is already a form of universal constructor ;)

What a good AI-generated summary of the article!

guessing the suit has an exoskeleton built into by default, and the exoskeleton equipment simply boosts the performance