For those wondering why this game about factory management keeps showing up on the front page of HN, it’s because the gameplay reminds its fans of software engineering in subtle ways. People who are good at one are likely to be good at the other. More about this here - https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/factorio-and-software-enginee...
Have you tried Factorio multiplayer? I tried it with some other people and it really is like real life.
Somebody put in an ugly hack to deal with scaling rather than rearchitect? Well, I'd like to fix it but it'll mean downtime that'll interrupt player 2's OKR of getting the rocket control units made.
Plus, we didn't allocate enough space, so I need to talk to player 3 who owns the adjacent area (and whose functionality I don't understand). Player 3 doesn't like the idea of moving or redesigning that area, so I'm going to try asking Player 2 or Player 4 to help me rebuild it in an undeveloped area.
Building the new section while the old section is still running has overdrawn on our electricity capacity, which has been oversubscribed for a while but we just kept accumulating tech debt on electrical with ugly hacks. Which brings me back to step 1.
Having a PM to help me stay focused would not be a bad thing when I play Factorio. However, that would probably come bundled with having a PM constantly ask me to half-ass (I mean MVP) three different new projects in the factory in the time it would normally take me to full-ass one project.
I'm of the first type. I love Factorio, I bought it when it was still pretty much unknown (I'm a hipster like that), but I can't bring myself to play it while I'm in my current state of extreme burnout. I have a hard time writing code, I really can't muster the strength to play "programming and refactoring, the game."
I've seen this said literally hundreds of times and can only imagine that these comments are hyperbole now.
I've given Factorio dozens of shots now, and have played for hours and hours with people who are great at the game, but it just isn't for me. I get bored in the monotony of the early game, and I'm too stupid to keep things going in the mid game.
When I first picked up Factorio I loved it for about ~12 hours. Then I just felt, everything is too hard and there isn't a sense of purpose.
For me, I think it would me a fun game if there was more strategy or something else to do besides build the factory. It seems to me the progression system is actually really linear.
> I get bored in the monotony of the early game, and I'm too stupid to keep things going in the mid game.
This is my other big issue. I don't like putting in much effort when playing video games. It seems like just getting blue science takes hours of work, and those hours were fun for the first factory, but now it's just repetitive.
The invading bugs sort of are the purpose, to defend against those. But I find it tedious, so I like to turn them off, and then yes, the game is even more noticeably lacking purpose.
I think though that making train networks is my big pleasure with the game. Very satisfying.
My recipe to monotony of early game was to design a really small starter base (~20 red/green/black/blue science per minute) with the explicit target to produce construction bots. With bots, things become easier.
That being said, I understand the sentiment. I have been playing lots of modded Minecraft and Factorio over the past decade, and lately I felt a bit of guilt because I feel I could be working on some other, more meaningful, project.
Maybe that's why I don't enjoy it... Feels like I could be getting work done on any of my side projects when I play. Don't have that same feeling when I'm playing other games.
That being said, I do enjoy it at LAN parties because I just build walls and hunt biter nests
The comment that really made it click for me is that there are two diametrically opposed responses for engineers playing Factorio:
* "This game is scratching the same itches as my day job, but with more dopamine and less bureaucracy - how can I play this all the time?"
* "This game requires me to expend the same brain-effort as my work/side-projects, but I don't even get anything tangible out of it? Why would I ever 'play' this?"
Neither of them are wrong - and I suspect that the same person might even have different reactions at different points in their life.
I'm square in the second group. Factorio is fun for a while, but after somewhere around mid-game you realize that it's much more frustrating and less enjoyable than actual programming.
I can't easily "refactor" parts of my factory without fearing it will break some pipeline that depends on the changes. I wish there was a way to "write" "tests" or do mass changes safely. Blueprints and robots help automate things, but it's not that flexible.
I wish I could use a "debugger" and step through the execution and play with changes to see how it affects the factory.
And then I finally get to the conclusion that this would all be easier from a text editor using proper programming tools, and more enjoyable to work on a real project that could have tangible benefits (and then never finish that either...).
Most of my games ending when I realized that I have to rebuild half of my base because of some thing and I don't want to spend so much time with inactive base. And my internal perfectionist can't live forever with quickly-hacked sub-par solutions.
I absolutely understand where you're coming from. The closest thing I found to "tests" was that you could hook up alarm klaxons to belts/containers that would alert you when a certain resource was below a given level - but that's very much a in-production canary of "tell me when things are going wrong", not a mid-development "tell me how this change will end up looking".
An interesting thing about Factorio to me (beyond what’s stated in the linked article), is that it contains a nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to software concurrency.
• Belts are blocking CSP channels, as seen in e.g. Golang (where N producers have to share — or eventually “merge onto” — one channel representing the blocking-receive point of the consumer; which are best only used to transport messages of a single type, or if not, then the sum-typed channel must be demultiplexed at the end, with this tending to lower throughput; where messages of a given type “queue up” until the channel is full, and then all producers block when attempting to write to the channel; where if you’ve got producers producing at different rates, then the fastest ones can hog the capacity of the channel, decreasing throughput and unevenly spending input resources such that some components fail long before others; where the solution to this is to give each producer its own bounded outbox channel that multiplexes onto the consumer’s channel, such that the producer will block itself rather than blocking its siblings; etc.)
• Logistics robots are message-queue topics (where N producers can publish messages of a given type, without worrying about how they’ll get to a consumer; where consumers [demand chests] subscribe to specific event message types; where the bus itself can get overloaded, causing delivery failures of unrelated topics as delivery-threads sit around holding a message unable to deliver it; where the solution to this is to add reliable MQ-internal storage [network-linked storage chests] for the agents to offload produced messages to until demand comes for them.)
(Sadly there’s no exact equivalent to Erlang-style message-passing, where producers target messages of arbitrary type at a specific consumer, which all go to the consumer’s single inbox; and where, if that inbox is full, then the message just “evaporates” en route, since the passed message has async semantics where the producer isn’t linked to its delivery. But, interestingly, that type of concurrency totally could be added, with a not-even-very-complex mod — just add a “outbox” chest object that can be configured to “target” a specific “inbox” chest somewhere else; and a second type of logistics robot that only moves stuff from outbox chests to inbox chests, not according to “demand” but just because anything currently sitting in an outbox chest is “intended to be” in the corresponding targeted inbox chest; and then ensure that this alternate type of logistics robots have non-reliable delivery semantics, where if the “inbox” chest signals to the network that it’s full, then all active delivery-threads targeting that inbox will literally “drop their messages on the ground”.)
IMHO it’s actually possible to learn how to be an effective distributed-systems engineer, just by playing Factorio and trying to scale the throughput of a resource-constrained system. In the process, you’ll likely re-invent many real-world concurrent software design patterns. Doing this first, and then reading a Distributed Systems textbook, will have a much more visceral impact on you, because you’ll have already faced these problems, struggled with them, and now you’re being handed all the techniques for solving them on a silver platter.
I wanted, but never got around to, creating a mod that accepts some kind of data outside the game (lines of text, JSON objects, packets from the TUN driver, whatever), wraps them up as Factorio objects, and plops them onto a belt, and another that reads them and sends them back out.
The idea being that this could be (A) a cool hack (belt speed factoring into ping time, lmao), but (B) a way to visualize data flow in complex queue systems.
Hell, why not turn Factorio into a programming language?
If you can translate a real-world problem to in-game problems, it'd be so much fun to solve them that you'd probably launch a new epoch in human history - the Factorio Age
> (Sadly there’s no exact equivalent to Erlang-style message-passing, where producers target messages of arbitrary type at a specific consumer, which all go to the consumer’s single inbox; and where, if that inbox is full, then the message just “evaporates” en route
Train stations plus circuits can do this. Trains can be configured to leave a station when not empty (after receiving a
message item of any type), and recipient stations can be disabled by a circuit if the receiver is full, causing the train to skip the station. The last station on the train's route would empty it before it goes back to waiting for a message item to deliver.
Not quite the same scheduling/locking semantics, though — sure, it's "concurrent" and packet-oriented, but it's a token ring. It's similar to the original Redis model of concurrency: just have everyone make a series of tiny requests, and then loop around / select(2) from your clients, handling each client's latest request serially, with no request queuing because all requests are synchronous/blocking for the client making them.
N logistics bots are a much closer analogue to N scheduler threads each working in parallel to 1. take a message from a priority heap (really, to take a schedulable process from a priority heap and then run it to produce messages, but same difference) and then 2. synchronously shuttle that message to its destination queue.
I suppose you could get the same semantics with N parallel train tracks, one per scheduler-thread; plus an actual scheduler priority-queue implemented in circuits. But I feel like that's a "non-idiomatic case", in that, no matter how you designed your stations or where you put them, it'd be incredibly painful to design a loader/unloader for a "bus" of parallel train tracks. Especially if all the trains arrive together. It'd be a setup the devs would take one look at and say "that's too much of a kludge, and yet the kludgeyness is necessary, and that's our fault for not including a necessary abstraction. We'll just put in that abstraction."
(The alternative would be a mod that allows trains to pass through one-another on a track. Then you could have one train-line where each train cleanly represents a scheduler thread. No idea what would happen if they tried to stop at the same station at the same time, though. Ghost trains~)
