Wube is such a unique game studio. They do a lot of very solid technical work and look like they have fun doing it. I particularly appreciated their recent post about porting Factorio to ARM64. They had a business reason to do it but it's clear the team was mostly just curious about whether ARM64 was a viable gaming platform now. And then shared the results with us. They seem like fun hacker guys.
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.
nerusskyhigh 58 minutes ago [-]
The modern doom saga gives me the same vibes. The team really poured their hearth in it!
ainiriand 39 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Sir_Twist 8 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
mitxela 2 hours ago [-]
Remember that Factorio does not release its 3D models. Everything in the game is a 2D render of a 3D model, which is why the game uses so much VRAM.
gizmo686 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
vlyan 1 hours ago [-]
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.
katzenq 46 minutes ago [-]
Do they really load so many spirites into memory it's heavier than 3D?
Sohcahtoa82 19 minutes ago [-]
There are assumptions being made about texture resolution.
The high quality sprites are 64 pixels across per tile. With each tile being 1 meter, 1 pixel is 1.56 cm (About 0.63 inches) across. By today's standards, that's a very low texture resolution, though they can get away with it when your camera is so far away.
But if the game was 3D, you could expect players to put the camera closer to your objects. You'd need significantly higher texture resolutions. And you'd need a texture for each part of the object.
Meanwhile, consider a 3x3 object. That's 192x192 = 36,864 pixels. Assume it has a 60 fps, 2-second animation loop. That's 4,423,680 pixels. With 8 bytes per channel and 4 channels (RGBA), that's about 17.7 MB, which allows you to store 56 objects per GB.
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but we're making some huge assumptions. Not all objects are 3x3 tiles. Most don't have 120 frames of animation.
And as I mentioned in another comment, you don't need to store ALL the game's art in VRAM at once. Only what's on the screen. And you can certainly fit an entire screen's worth of animations in a 2 GB GPU.
mitxela 17 minutes ago [-]
Yes. Several GB. I had to enable half resolution to play modded Space Age.
conorcleary 1 hours ago [-]
Somehow the engineering behind this will help that fly and all his viewpoint windows
schobi 26 minutes ago [-]
Oh - but only touching them?
I was hoping for an iteration of a factorio belt that could actually move!
1 hours ago [-]
Cieric 2 hours ago [-]
I'm (hopefully) getting a G1X soon, so I think I'm going to put it to work printing this stuff out. I'm now excited for this as a use case and I kind of hope someone builds something to convert an existing factorio world into a 3d model, though it might be to big to actually print so maybe a way to take a section would be even better.
throwaway219450 2 hours ago [-]
Blueprint would be easiest. Grep for printable entities, count how many you need and the grid extent.
(Also unrelated, I think by clearance they mean tolerance?)
atemerev 15 minutes ago [-]
Real-world Factorio, aka composable manufacturing, aka "factories building drones building factories", aka universal constructor, is the next trillion dollar company.
darkmighty 12 minutes ago [-]
The entire planet taken as a whole is already a form of universal constructor ;)
thendrill 2 hours ago [-]
I love this <3 Wube should be the example the game industry follows
breckenedge 2 hours ago [-]
The factory must grow.
ill-ion 2 hours ago [-]
This project looks simple until you realize how much engineering went into it.
The original assets were never meant to be physical, so they had to completely re-engineer isometric tricks and floating geometry for 3D printing. Releasing the files instead of an expensive collector's edition is a classic Factorio move, and I personally love it. Now the community can remix these and build some awesome stuff that the original devs could never imagine. Awesome stuff!
lastscattering 2 hours ago [-]
Fun thing about taking Factorio physical is that the game already has a real scale. A tile is a metre, that's what the km/h readouts for vehicles are based on. So a yellow belt moves at basically walking pace, and the engineer runs everywhere at about 30 km/h all day without getting tired. The mining drill that eats a whole ore patch is a 3x3m box.
Rendered at 17:47:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-446
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.
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.
The high quality sprites are 64 pixels across per tile. With each tile being 1 meter, 1 pixel is 1.56 cm (About 0.63 inches) across. By today's standards, that's a very low texture resolution, though they can get away with it when your camera is so far away.
But if the game was 3D, you could expect players to put the camera closer to your objects. You'd need significantly higher texture resolutions. And you'd need a texture for each part of the object.
Meanwhile, consider a 3x3 object. That's 192x192 = 36,864 pixels. Assume it has a 60 fps, 2-second animation loop. That's 4,423,680 pixels. With 8 bytes per channel and 4 channels (RGBA), that's about 17.7 MB, which allows you to store 56 objects per GB.
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but we're making some huge assumptions. Not all objects are 3x3 tiles. Most don't have 120 frames of animation.
And as I mentioned in another comment, you don't need to store ALL the game's art in VRAM at once. Only what's on the screen. And you can certainly fit an entire screen's worth of animations in a 2 GB GPU.
I was hoping for an iteration of a factorio belt that could actually move!
https://wiki.factorio.com/Blueprint_string_format
(Also unrelated, I think by clearance they mean tolerance?)
The original assets were never meant to be physical, so they had to completely re-engineer isometric tricks and floating geometry for 3D printing. Releasing the files instead of an expensive collector's edition is a classic Factorio move, and I personally love it. Now the community can remix these and build some awesome stuff that the original devs could never imagine. Awesome stuff!