Friday Facts #182 - Optimizations, always more optimizations

[Klonan]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-182

[KrzysD]

So say you have 200 trains on your map and the view is showing 50 of them: each view would render its own train + any trains in that immediate area (which ended up being roughly all of them in packed factories) and the end result was you'd get 50 * 50 trains being rendered which ends up being very slow. Cleaning up how trains are drawn on the minimap gave a nice boost to the performance here. I still have some additional ideas to improve the performance of this GUI but it's at least manageable now for 0.15 it's manageable.

HOORAY! now my train bus world won't drop to 10fps when i open the map! Thanks Rseding91!!

[SaintFlow]

you can look forward to some less interesting FFF posts

You did not lie about that one

And no 0.15 progress news at all?...commoooon, you can do better than that its the 17th of March guys

[Ubertwink]

Maybe put up unstable 0.15 releases? Just make them non-obtainable with the "latest experimental" option, only by explicit version selection.

[Nathadir]

I really liked this FFF: It goes to show that they continue to care greatly about optimization, even in fringe situations. That combined with multi-platform support is something I really like - I play Factorio on Windows on my desktop computer and on Linux on my laptop, which is wildly underpowered for everything I run on it, except for Factorio
Besides that, just getting these details is really fun for me as a programmer!

[Sigma1]

Maybe put up unstable 0.15 releases? Just make them non-obtainable with the "latest experimental" option, only by explicit version selection.

I support this. Also I like unstable dev versions of all software.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Ahh, when you refresh the screen and the number of topics in the News forum increments...

And no 0.15 progress news at all?...commoooon, you can do better than that its the 17th of March guys

End of last year we released a patch summary for our "January update". It was released to ~10% of our customers in January. Four patches later (three of which were redone several times), the other 90% got it this week, and there's a fifth patch due out to fix some remaining huge issues, but we needed to get them updated because there was a serious issue in the last version too. There's just no putting a time scale on software releases =P

Anyway, speaking of GUI performance is there nothing that can be done about the "live" map view in the train's menu? It can drop the game to some pretty terrible framerates. Even if all we get is a zoomed-in map view (which should be better if we get a higher res map as suggested in FFF180) that would be great.

[Jesperhk]

you can look forward to some less interesting FFF posts

You did not lie about that one

And no 0.15 progress news at all?...commoooon, you can do better than that its the 17th of March guys

Hope that was a joke...

I think it was an very! interesting FFF post, alot of programming is going into Factorio every week, and its done by a small team thats working very hard.
i can't wait for 0.15 release, and reading how much effort your guys put into it, it can only be successful!.

Keep it going, love your game!.

[Loewchen]

Maybe put up unstable 0.15 releases?

That will be the type of release anyway, but bugs reported by the community take significantly more time to deal with than finding the same bugs internally, so releasing after a certain stability has been accomplished saves time in the long run.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Yeah, there's no point getting their dev version they've got now as it would crash every five minutes and have a new version before you could download it.

EDIT: And damn that is a specific bug. You would like to think nobody has ever encountered it (why would you ever do those things) but then we are a nigh infinite number of monkeys at keyboards xP

[exi2163]

Nice, i always love reading technical posts
Btw does 0.15 already contain a solution for the train scheduler ruining UPS on rail placement/destruction on big rail networks with many trains? I doubt that it is neccessary do update each train immediatly on the entity creation/destruction. The update could then be staggered by tick (like 20 per tick) or just in time (when a train hits a signal / junction).

[gacekssj4]

After about a hour of debugging

Should be "an hour"

[cpy]

They should've made minecraft. You'd have nearly infinite worlds with high UPS even with demanding mods.

[kinnom]

Yeah, there's no point getting their dev version they've got now as it would crash every five minutes and have a new version before you could download it.

EDIT: And damn that is a specific bug. You would like to think nobody has ever encountered it (why would you ever do those things) but then we are a nigh infinite number of monkeys at keyboards xP

I do remember a case of a rail connection becoming partially corrupt

[torham]

They should've made minecraft. You'd have nearly infinite worlds with high UPS even with demanding mods.

This.

I think Factorio is the best optimized game on my HDD right now. Its a whole different category compared to some garbage that gets published these days.One example would be Rise to ruin. Its pixel retro style that in the 1994 would easily run on my 486 with 512 KB RAM, and it runs around 30 FPS on my current gaming rig.

[Deadly-Bagel]

I remember there being a bunch of cases but it was for a different reason I think.

[safan]

Maybe put up unstable 0.15 releases? Just make them non-obtainable with the "latest experimental" option, only by explicit version selection.

As long as they find bugs by just loading their test games there is realy no need to do this.

[silver_26]

1.Build 2 locomotives directly next to each other
2.Disconnect the 2 locomotives so they're not one train anymore
3.Drive the front locomotive into the rear one such that it can't move backwards any more
4.Drive the rear locomotive into the front one such that it can't move forward any more
5.Build a cargo wagon attached to the rear locomotive (making sure the cursor was more towards the rear locomotive so the cargo wagon snaps behind the back locomotive)
6.Try to drive the rear locomotive (with the now attached cargo wagon) forward into the front locomotive


why in the world would you do such a thing ?

[Jarin]

I love reading these little behind the scenes details. Friday Facts is honestly one of the highlights of my week.

[ChoMar]

I love all that Optimization and Bug-Fixing. I wish more Games would be developed on that level.