Friday Facts #265 - Nomenclature & Steam networking

[DRY411S]

Something to consider with nomenclature is web content that's built up on the internet over the last few years. If you radically change what everything is called, there will be good stuff on the web, which cannot be changed, but that looks like gobbledegook!

[Ormek]

However, I would put your (developers) own judgment first - us players like keeping things the same and won't have thought through all the exact inconsistencies between terms as much as you obviously have.

Yes, developers will have the last word in this. Yes, developers will have to think through all possible inconsistencies.

But, developers are not the best to come up with terminology, because they know too much

• The implementation may leak through: Different thing use the same internal concepts and get the same name (or vice-versa).
• The history may leak through: Two concepts/behaviors were eventually unified, but both still have their specific historic name.
• The implementation instead of the application is named: Developers may name things according to how you do things, while the user thinks in terms of what he achieves with it. “Create new adress form” vs. “Adding a contact”.

I believe it takes a person with some distance to the project to identify the concepts that need naming.

[DuoMog]

Steam networking - no thankyou.
I play other games which use the steam network, and they can be a pain. I find that games with their own built-in network code are much more reliable.

Factorio multiplayer works great for me as it is. I can host MP games without any portforwarding or firewall editing - it just works. It's good that you've found (and hopefully) fixed some issues with the existing network code.

Please keep Factorio-Networking - maybe allow users to choose between Steam Network and Factorio Network. Log the choices to see what people use.

[eradicator]

Name the action a player performs when they add a ghost entity to the world?

• Honestly? "Plan". The whole "ghost" concept is a silly internal-name leak. Ask anyone who never played factorio what a ghost is and they most definetly won't start talking about construction plans. Besides the deconstruction planner already has it in the name.

It may not be what immediately comes to mind but nonetheless it's a completely intuitive term to use for them which people will understand quite easily. Ghosts are incorporeal entities and that's exactly what you lay down with a blueprint.

Seems i forgot to write some additional thoughts on that down. I actually consider "ghost" a decent compromise for keeping terms consistent between modders and users. As for "intuitivity" i can hardly judge that having modded for far too many hours. But i find the fantasy term "ghost" unfitting for factorios steam-punk sci-fi setting. It also suggestes that what your placing actually exists in some way, but as planned structures are only visible to the team that placed them i'd feel it would me more consistent to consider them some kind of hud element that the suit displays.
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Also i noticed that while english has nice pairs like de-/construct (ignoring if that's a good term or not for now) that kind of pairs simply don't exist in all languages. While German still has a similar pair auf-/ab-bauen, Japanese does not have a "pair" of words that describes this. So whatever changes are made, it'll put a major headache on all translators to come up with good terms in other languages.
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@Inserter:
To me "inserter" is the iconic factorio word. It's unique enough that most people know it only from the game, yet easy to understand. But: It only works in English. In the German locale they're simply called "grabbing-arm" because not all languages work the same for producing words. In the Japanese locale the English term is used as-is as a loadword, which probably makes little intuitive sense to the average Japanese player.
I generally agree that nominalization is a very useful and powerful tool that should not be ignored. A miner intuitively "mines", a pump jack intuitively "pumps". There's no need to unify both of them into a single term like "gather". Fluids are not solids, and most languages will treat them differently.
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@Underneathies:
Reminds me that i haven't eaten any "Smarties" for a long time. I doubt cuteifications like that will make it into the official game. Otherwise we'd have inserties, splitties and belties. Do bities have babies? Speaking of which..."small/medium/large" are rather boring descriptions for out best friends. Maybe those deserve some further thought too.
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Also the more i think about it the more i see the difficulties of trying to have the same terms for machines and the player. A machine "contains" ingredients, but a player "holds" them, because if the player "contained" some iron plates they'd be in his stomach. An assembler could "hold" some items, but it's a less intuitive useage of the word. And as with the other examples you'll be lucky if 50% of that consistency make it through the translation process.

[gyorokpeter]

I really hate the word "mine" being used in any meaning other than turning minerals on the map into mineral items. When I saw the tooltip "Can be used to mine any kind of path" I couldn't figure out what it means. I saw some youtube videos using that feature but even then it didn't click together until much later that the tooltip actually referred to that. Maybe "Can be used to pick up artificial path tiles" would be better?

For science packs I answered "potions". I played some RPGs before so that's what comes to my mind when I see the icons. Obviously it doesn't make sense because a potion is something you would drink, but the idea of science packs in the first place is strange as it looks like it was just shoehorned in as an abstraction for "you need to produce lots of stuff to do research".

For normal/fast/express belts, I prefer the current names to the game calling them yellow/red/blue. People can call them yellow/red/blue when discussing them but the game looks more professional if it uses more descriptive terms. Calling them belt 1/2/3 would be another option (to follow the example of assembling machines).

[xng]

I'm happy to hear that they've managed to have steam and non steam players on the same servers, that's huge if comparing to other games!

That said, it's a tiny bit weird that the makers of Factorio doesn't know that science packs are part of every single science recipe and therefore are intermediate components.

This explains why they have pipes and inserters (and many other items) as intermediates in recipes without them being in the intermediate tab too, which in turn leads to so many annoying disappearances of items in the inventory when handcrafting something.

I made a few mods that fixes the worst parts of it (by making most recipes only take actual intermediates) that I run on every server. I've been hoping for a native fix for years as a solution from professionals is so much better than my own fiddling.

[RamiTech]

Steam Networking, finally!

In Syria, port forwarding used to work before 2015, but after that, the ISP made something and port forwarding no longer works , since then I was not able to play mp with my friends until I discovered hamatchi, But even with hamatchi, we had lots of problems, like the internet looping in the tunnel due to problems with windows network adapter matrix...

It was a bad deal, later we started to buy games from Steam, and then discovered that we can host a gmod or terraria server in one click , it was a huge improvement.

I knew factorio since 2017, and wasn't able to host a server to play with friends.
Thankfully steam networking is going to work in 0.17

[xng]

Name the action a player performs when they add an entity to the world?
- Placing
Name the action a player performs when they remove an entity from the world?
- Picking up
Name the action a player performs when they add a ghost entity to the world?
- Marking for placement / Planning to place
Name the action a robot performs when they add an entity to the world?
- Placing
Name the action a robot performs when they remove an entity from the world?
- Picking up

* You're definately not building an assembler when you are placing it on the ground.
* You're definately not mining an assembler when you are picking it up.

That it ever got called to build and to mine machines must be because of language barriers, and most people I've played with and that I've tried to teach this game have had problems understanding why they build something they've already constructed, and why they mine (essentially break into pieces) something they're just picking up.

[H8UL]

Steam networking - no thankyou.
I play other games which use the steam network, and they can be a pain. I find that games with their own built-in network code are much more reliable.

Factorio multiplayer works great for me as it is. I can host MP games without any portforwarding or firewall editing - it just works. It's good that you've found (and hopefully) fixed some issues with the existing network code.

Please keep Factorio-Networking - maybe allow users to choose between Steam Network and Factorio Network. Log the choices to see what people use.

The FFF said:

You can mix non-steam and steam players on the same server and it "just works".

So they already said they were keeping the non-steam networking.

[abregado]

However, I would put your (developers) own judgment first - us players like keeping things the same and won't have thought through all the exact inconsistencies between terms as much as you obviously have.

Yes, developers will have the last word in this. Yes, developers will have to think through all possible inconsistencies.

But, developers are not the best to come up with terminology, because they know too much

• The implementation may leak through: Different thing use the same internal concepts and get the same name (or vice-versa).
• The history may leak through: Two concepts/behaviors were eventually unified, but both still have their specific historic name.
• The implementation instead of the application is named: Developers may name things according to how you do things, while the user thinks in terms of what he achieves with it. “Create new adress form” vs. “Adding a contact”.

I believe it takes a person with some distance to the project to identify the concepts that need naming.

One solution is to bring in a developer who is not a veteran of the game, who does not know the internal name/processes and does not know the history (That's me). I deliberately did not learn the late game concepts so that I can come up with suitable tutorials for them. It has been great fun for me (and probably frustrating for the other developers) when I ask "So how does Factorio electricity ACTUALLY work?" and continue to ask annoying pointed questions about every little detail.

Quite a lot of our internal testing is simply seeing which questions the participants ask. I will write/do/put/place a FFF on this eventually.

A favorite quote of mine:

You do not know what you do not know

should have added to it:

It is common to forget what you did not know

Next time I do a survey I should write a disclaimer that it is purely asking for data on what people use now. The team will certainly have the final say on what goes in and of course, "Underneathies" will not become an officially utilized term. Colloquialisms by definition (used in ordinary or familiar conversation; not formal or literary.) cannot be used as formal terms but it is interesting to see which words are not colloquialized (surprised that is a word).

Inserter is a good example of a word that is confusing as hell but is core Factorio terminology. I'm always sad when I see that it gets translated away in other languages (German = Greifarm = Grab arm) and it becomes more literal and less lore specific.

Thanks for all the feedback so far.

[rldml]

I've never thought about that language stuff, but it could possibly explain, why some complex games feel better than others...

Great job of you guys!

Greetings, Ronny

[RobertTerwilliger]

Can't say vocabulary inconsistency is too little issue. No, really. Perfection is made of tiny things. If you have desire and possibility to make the game even better - go on.

[Oktokolo]

Inserter is a good example of a word that is confusing as hell but is core Factorio terminology.

The inserter looks like a simple generic industry robot arm and is used for pick and place work. The general public knows no established name for such a thing.
Calling them inserter is therefore fine.
Calling them placer or mover would probably be more accurate but would also sound a bit odd to me (might be because i have a thousand hours in the game though).

[rantingrodent]

Is this a good time to talk about how the technologies that unlock red and blue circuits should be named the same as the items they unlock and also have icons depicting those items? No matter how many hours I've put into this game, it never seems to click that "Advanced Electronics 2" with some weird gold-plated computer chip on it unlocks blue circuits rather than being related to the circuit network.

Every other tech that unlocks key intermediate products names and depicts those products, I think.

[eradicator]

Is this a good time to talk about how the technologies that unlock red and blue circuits should be named the same as the items they unlock and also have icons depicting those items? No matter how many hours I've put into this game, it never seems to click that "Advanced Electronics 2" with some weird gold-plated computer chip on it unlocks blue circuits rather than being related to the circuit network.

Every other tech that unlocks key intermediate products names and depicts those products, I think.

Advanced material processing 2 depicts a steel furnace, despite unlocking the electric furnace (and purple science). I have to use ctrl+f because i can never find it by the symbol.

[Rebmes]

I guess this is another very important step toward a completed game

Well done, again!

[keldor]

I definitely think the "Poison Capsules" should be renamed "Gas Grenades". "Poison Capsule" sounds a bit like a cyanide pill (there's a specific type of pill called a capsule IRL), but "Gas Grenade" invokes thoughts of chemical warfare in World War I, which suits Factorio very well.

...Speaking of chemical warfare, we totally need gas shells for the artillery wagon.

[Lubricus]

I definitely think the "Poison Capsules" should be renamed "Gas Grenades". "Poison Capsule" sounds a bit like a cyanide pill (there's a specific type of pill called a capsule IRL), but "Gas Grenade" invokes thoughts of chemical warfare in World War I, which suits Factorio very well.

...Speaking of chemical warfare, we totally need gas shells for the artillery wagon.

I like the use of the word capsule. It's a factorio quirky thing. Don't forget the terminology also gives flavor to the game and shouldn't just be as formal and correct as possible.

[KatherineOfSky]

One terminology item we thought about as we were playing our multiplayer game today was circuits, and the confusion that could arise.

We have the research for Circuit Network, which allows us to make circuits from combinator to combinator (with red & green wire), but we also have intermediate products called Electronic Circuits ("green chips"), and Advanced Circuits. This struck us that it could be quite confusing for newcomers: having a concept named the same as a product.

[Oktokolo]

We have the research for Circuit Network, which allows us to make circuits from combinator to combinator (with red & green wire), but we also have intermediate products called Electronic Circuits ("green chips"), and Advanced Circuits.

Electronic Circuit, Advanced Circuit and Processing Unit should be called Logic Board 1/2/3.
Even the green ones are the only electronics boards used in some stuff like inserters wich obviously does pretty advanced sensor data processing - of the sort that will change the world as soon as we get it in real life. Yellow inserters can reliably pick up any item from a moving sushi belt - no way to do that without a processor of some (highly advanced) sort...