Friday Facts #156 - Massive Multiplayer

[slpwnd]

Title says it all. See at https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-156

[Rockstar04]

Very cool seeing that many people online in a single game!

[Dev-iL]

Those who want updates on ongoing multiplayer games with a large amount of players should join us in [url=irc://irc.esper.net/factorio]#factorio[/url], where a bot exists (courtesy of Trangar) that reports about these games.

[Xeteth]

Damn that new terrain looks great! I have a question about it though - when it is implemented will it roll nicely into existing worlds or will we see the same sort of 'tearing' as we did jumping from 0.12 to 0.13 when the player loaded a 0.12 map and explored new areas?

[Jonathan88]

That 400 player game looked insane!

I have too suggestions:
1) Make the dessert a little less pink and more red - I think it could do with looking a bit more 'martiany'
2) Possibly add the blueprints as a steam workshop thing. I know you put the mods on a separate website to allow all players to use it but I think small things like blueprints could work well in the workshop.
If not, add the functionality to make user created 'collections' of mods or blueprints in the mod/blueprint portal. (i.e. main bus blueprints, pretty pattern blueprints etc.)

[Nic]

Great to see you still play on my first ever map occasionally

[dauphin]

One thing that should probably go along with the blueprint library is making it harder to accidentally clear a blueprint. Shift-click happens a fair amount in this game, and unwanted muscle memory has lost me more than one blueprint over the many hours I've played.

Basically, if blueprints become a truly shared commodity, let's just make sure that we can't delete/clear them from our shared library without double-confirmation at the very least. Otherwise there will still be a need for manual backup, which would be frustrating.

[Xterminator]

That 400 player game was crazy last night. Couldn't even see the map cause it was covered in so many names. Very impressed with how the game handled it though. Major props to Kovorex and others.

The blueprint library sounds quite interesting. I think it will be a great a addition to help with the current need to remake so many blueprint when you die, etc. Would be awesome if perhaps an easy way to export or share them was included with it. I know we have some mods for that now but would be great to have it in the vanilla game I think.

A sharing portal would be awesome I think. Would make sharing them so much easier (esp if there was a way to export to the portal directly from in-game ), plus finding new designs would be fantastic.

[aubergine18]

Why not have a "Blueprint" mod type... Users can put blueprints on the mod portal to share with others. The blueprint would determine what mods, if any, it needs and have it's own dependencies in it's info.json.

EDIT: Ah, others beat me to it while I was typing.

[aubergine18]

Will there be significant changes to the modding API for GUI stuff?

More specifically, how soon can we get details about it and test it to give feedback?

Prior to it being fully available, could it be exposed via an undocumented API so modders can start playing with it as soon as possible (with obvious proviso that it's not production ready)?

I have a bunch of mods backed up waiting for details on the new GUI.

P.S. Please add ability to re-order child elements, and things like draggable items (constrained to an ancestor entity) would be wonderful. Being able to embed multiple elements in a clickable element would also be highly desirable (eg. button containing a glyph and a label). Margins, including negative margins, would also be desirable

[GeniusIsme]

As for GUI, there is open source implementation of Cassowary constraint solver ( which is used by apple for their GUI on respective platforms ).
https://github.com/nucleic/kiwi

There is not much point for (re)implementing GUI positioning algorithms all by yourself.

[golfmiketango]

Man, that new desert looks great. On the first stream Arumba mentions that the multiplayer was originally retrofitted to a codebase designed only to be single-player. That's super-impressive; congrats on making it work so well.

Finally, after months spent maximizing my alone time, I am once again interested in having friends

[Lee_newsum]

Blueprints stored locally in the game. Here the use case is simply not to lose (as mentioned above) blueprints for the current game when their respective items are lost.
Player's personal blueprint collection accessible in all of his games. Here we are pretty sure (=)) that players will build their own collections of favourite setups which they use over and over.
Access to other players' personal blueprint collections in multiplayer games. This is the same as point 2 but for multiplayer

So if you do this we will have Blueprints from the start but that will not work till you research "Blueprints" because "ghost-time-to-live" = 0.

Hello, I checked the savegame.

The problem is, that you don't have the automated construction enabled.

This researched adds to the live time of ghost 5 minutes, without it, the ghost live time is 0 minutes, so they disappear instantly, so you have to research it first.

Move to not a bug.

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3052
so this "not a bug" may be add in

[ssilk]

I think with the massive multiplayer we need some kind of smaller organization-forms. Many players know squads (I have been playing for example Battlefield 2 some years). That are smaller groups - for example up to 10 or so.
Someone can create a squad like "Repair Junkies" or "Outlaws". Other can join.
They have just their own group-chat. And on the map the squad members are somehow enhanced. Nothing very complex, but very useful stuff if you are in a game with 150 players.

[Ratzap]

I was in the games last night and it was truly impressive.

I think that you could improve things a bit though. All the names on the screen and the notifications being sent to every client about people connecting/disconnecting - do they need to go to everyone? At times there were so many names being rendered that it was impossible to see the ground. Maybe as games become more crowded start throttling the non-essential information going to all clients. Or if > 10 people on screen at once, don't show me names?

[Mengmoshu]

I think we need a setting in the options, and maybe a hotkey that isn't mapped by default for toggling player names both on the main screen and in the maps.

A similar arrangement could be made to filter messages. Let players hide (but still invisibly receive) connection/disconnection messages and the like. If they unhide them then the messages could be displayed as if they were never hidden. The same hiding mechanism could be used to "mute" players.

[Mooncat]

With that number of players, the minimap is unreadable.

Regarding the GUI improvement, I don't understand what's the ASCII about, but I know it will be better than the current system.
And when I see the word "rich text", I immediately know I have to make this suggestion.

[vedrit]

What are those things on the bottom belt in the last image?

[Radioactive Pretzels]

Indentifying griefers who delete lots of things might be easier if there was a way to query a player's # of objects built, # of objects deleted (built by self) and # of objects deleted (built by others).

A delete-happy griefer would have a high number of other-peoples-objects deletions compared to the other two numbers. Not at all evidence of griefing, but maybe a clue to help identify suspects in any crude mass deletion. Especially once a 200 player swarm factory has robots and deconstruction planners..

[Bartimaeus]

The new terrain reminded me of Australia, which developers seem to be sourcing lot of their inspiration from.
I managed to go there over the summer and in one place (Gravity Discovery Centre near Perth) I felt like I got ported into the Factorio world


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