Once again proving that ads are an unacceptable security threat. All those sites now deploying ad-blocker blockers should assume liability for whatever ad software they force their readers to run.
I just switched to AVIF after several years of using WebP. Main reason for me is HDR support, but the smaller encoding is nice. Just beware of lossless AVIF, that's a trap.
In GIMP, when you try to save as a "lossless" AVIF, it will add a lossy colorspace conversion step (to 8 bit YCbCr) unless you specifically specify otherwise. And lossless AVIF always loses to lossless WEBP.
I had Claude Opus disassemble the CDC 6600 dead start panel. The hard part was finding a better image of the switches so the vision could read the bits.¹
The content isn't very interesting, and Claude's comments aren't very detailed. Not bad for 2 minutes of work about a 62 year old computer though. Look out Ken Shirriff, AI is coming for you.²
Addr Octal Instruction Meaning
0001 7512 DCN 12 Disconnect channel 12 (put it in a known idle state)
0002 7712 FNC 12, 4000? Send function code to channel 12's device
0003 4000? └ function code (last bit unclear: 4000 or 4001)
0004 7712 FNC 12, 0001 Send another function code
0005 0001 └ function code
0006 7712 FNC 12, 1500? Send a third function code
0007 1500? └ function code (least certain row)
0010 2000 LDC 0160? Load A with a word count
0011 0160? └ the count
0012 7412 ACN 12 Activate channel 12
0013 7112 IAM 12, 0015 Read A words from channel 12 into memory starting at 0015
0014 0015 └ destination address
You can make it consume more VRAM if you want. There's a 13GB texture modpack that I use so it looks nice on my high DPI screen. Totally optional but it sure looks good.
I'm not certain but my guess is Factorio doesn't have the elaborate systems for streaming and unloading textures 3d games has.
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.
Factorio is in that top-tier. I just tried Core Keeper and had the same feeling, gushing with QoL and thoughtful design. Refreshing to play sandbox-y games where mods don't feel mandatory.
I'm surprised they didn't find a way to further improve the belt system. I thought they had it solved pretty well but e.g. Shapez is leagues better (talking about belt placement only here).
Is it possible Factorio is handicapped because of the perspective? I saw a post by the team that said the visual perspective was a mistake that caused endless headaches to accommodate. Things don’t perfectly align which bubbles up everywhere.
No, this is just about the UX of drawing a long belt in a 2D grid. I think part of the problem is that they can't easily change the existing UX without breaking muscle memory for all existing players, and maybe they might not want to make it "too easy" to avoid throwing off timing or encouraging certain mechanics like blueprints or trains?
Although now that I'm looking at some tutorials, it's also possible that I just missed that they introduced a very similar feature.
For “I want A connected to B and I don’t particularly care how” where A and B are long distances apart, Shapez belt mechanics are nicer than Factorio belt mechanics, but Factorio train mechanics are nicer than Shapez belt mechanics.
For “I want to lay down a lot of belt in this area and I want each piece placed in a certain way” I think Factorio belt mechanics are nicer.
I think the C (?) mechanic in Shapez to manually fix a corner is really neat. I haven't tried the Factorio R-while-dragging mechanic, it might be the same or close enough.
Yes but they have fallen into a success trap. I have seen the same trend with Mincraft, KSP and Subnautica. An indi developer starts with a great concept and a true open world game. The player can progress through the tech tree how they choose but doing so requires exploration. All is good. Then the developer starts to tighten the reigns. The tech tree become more rigid. Exploration must happen in a more specific order. And then the graphics department takes over, adding more and more objects until a previously huge and open world is a tightly cluttered mess.
Think of how subnautica moved. The second game was very literally denser to the point that they slowed down movement to preserve any sense of space. And each step inthe tech tree required specific tools from a specific place. No more free explorations. No more alternatives. The player lost control over the story. Subnautica 3 is now so dense and linear I gave up after a week. It is more a decorated fishtank than open world.
I still play factorio (1000x) but I do not play the new planets. That whole rocket process is so locked down that there is little for me to enjoy. I get bored whenever there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.
This is a weird perspective. The middle planets can be approached in any order. And mods allow near-infinite variety - especially those that build on the platform of custom planets.
> there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.
Sounds to me like you are caught up in trying to chase optimization and bemoaning the fact that there's only one optimal strategy. Do a no trains run! Or a no bots run. Or a 1000x science modifier run, or Lazy Bastard, or Death World, or... there are plenty of constraints, both programmed-in or self-imposed, that can push you out of the "standard" optimal strategy.
The system for moving between planets is locked down. It is rockets or nothing. And that system is deliberately designed to defeat scaling. What really killed me was the message saying I was only allowed one of a specific key building on each planet. That was very anti-factorio imho. As I said above, as an indi developer moves forwards they add constraints to focus and guide progression. I simply do not want that. So I disabled all the planet stuff and play like it never existed.
I promise you the rockets and the landing pads do not limit scaling.
And while yes you have to use rockets, each planet has a different way of making rocket ingredients and it's reasonably cost-effective to have one planet send a rocket ingredient it's good at to other planets.
The base game is also rockets or nothing at the same point in the tech tree. Launching a rocket is how you win, how you get access to space science packs. But after that in space age it opens back up again. You have three planets to work on in any order and the science on each of those planets is reasonably nonlinear too. It's less constrained at that point than at almost any other point in the game. And while the final planet requires you to make some science packs on each of those three, it lets you skip almost all the research on them. You only have to research 4 techs total between the first three planet unlocks and the final planet unlock.
That restriction is needed in some way to prevent that building being a way of teleporting stuff across the planet. They did relax this in 2.1 and allow you to build extensions to that building where you can add inserters and use belts/trains.
I think this conversation is confusing two things. There are two kinds of exploits that would be possible via the landing pad if certain restrictions didn't exist:
* If the landing pad allowed insertion as well as withdrawal, an arbitrarily large landing pad could allow item teleportation by inserting at one point and withdrawing at another
* If multiple landing pads were permitted on the same surface, items could be teleported (in O(1) time, not 0-time) by launching a rocket from one side of the factory to an intermediate surface (planet), then launching from there to a landing pad on the other side of factory on the first surface (this exploit is explicitly _allowed_ in Space Exploration, the mod which inspired Space Age)
I'm going to restrict my commentary to the base game, both because you're deliberately ignoring the stuff in the Space Age expansion, and because I've not yet gotten to the new stuff in the expansion. While the following might sound like a "gotcha!", it isn't:
> I get bored whenever there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.
There is only one way to process iron ore: put it in a furnace. There is no way for the player to invent alternatives. There are only three ways to make electricity, and two of them require you to boil water. There's no way for the player to invent alternatives. There are so many examples of places where stock Factorio permits you only one way to do a thing and prevents you from inventing alternatives.
> The system for moving between planets is locked down. ... And that system is deliberately designed to defeat scaling.
All of the systems for transporting materials are locked down... it's hand-transport, belts, bots, trains, or nothing. Hand-transport's godawful scaling is why you build everything else. Bots are deliberately designed to scale incredibly poorly and belts to scale pretty badly, which is why you're -as it seems like you'd say- forced to use trains to transport materials over very long distances.
> The tech tree become more rigid. Exploration must happen in a more specific order. And then the graphics department takes over, adding more and more objects until a previously huge and open world is a tightly cluttered mess.
That hasn't happened to Factorio in the thirteen years that Wubi has been working on it.
yes, one landing pad per planet a really obnoxious restriction I really hoped they'd remove in 2.1, but they did a half-measure instead. their rationale is uncharacteristically misguided, intended to prevent using rockets for on-planet logistics. first of all, it would be a cool option. second of all, that option would be impractical and very expensive both in terms of resources and UPS, so people would only use it in very niche scenarios. it's an overwhelmingly unpopular design decision.
I also dislike that they moved some base game tech to space and other planets to discourage extended stay on Nauvis. which again makes no sense because an extended stay on Nauvis itself makes no sense when each inner planet offers overwhelmingly powerful tech that renders every single assembly line you can make without leaving Nauvis utterly obsolete. not having cliff explosives before Vulcanus, which may not be the first planet you visit, is a minor but obnoxious inconvenience even if you do decide, deliberately or due to inexperience, to stay on Nauvis for a while. artillery being moved there is equally pointless -- the best defense in the game are landmines, and they can be still unlocked in less than an hour. I don't remember what else had got moved, but I do know that if I wanted to build a 10K SPM kilobase without ever going to space, I still could. and even if there weren't these hamfisted disincentives, the #1 advice for noobs would still be "go to space ASAP", because the incentives alone are more than enough.
that all being said, these are my very only gripes with Wube and I played the game for >1000 hours, 200 or so after the DLC came out. except for maybe not being able to choose the output lane for inserters, but that limitation is as old as the game itself, and I don't know whether it's a misguided design decision or simply a limitation of their extremely optimized belt system.
I don't think there's ever been a game I've been more satisfied with. for every game I ever played that seriously, my list of complaints had much more entries than <10 with Factorio. it exceeds even the old Blizzard's level of polish.
oh, neither of those two complaints apply to the base game. vanilla gameplay is still largely what it's been since pre-1.0. 2.0 changes like the simplified fluid mechanics imo had only positive impact on it.
> except for maybe not being able to choose the output lane for inserters, but that limitation is as old as the game itself, and I don't know whether it's a misguided design decision or simply a limitation of their extremely optimized belt system.
I think I might have some good news for you, this was added this summer with the extension of the “flip” mechanic
sadly, that only applies if the belt is perpendicular to the inserter, not parallel (i.e. you can pick left-right, not near-far), so it's only half-great. it addresses the major inconsistency with non-trivial belt configurations breaking when flipped rather than rotated. the minor inconvenience of assembly lines requiring a small lane-switching segment on their output belts once one lane is full still remains.
Output lane switching is possible - some mods (e.g. [1]) add it, as well as even wilder options. Not offering it in the base game is a deliberate choice.
As far as belt lane management goes, another interesting option - which is also present in the engine, but not used by default! - is lane splitters [2].
It's a deeply philosophical question in many ways - if you don't enjoy the direction a studio takes its game, is that their problem? Earendel who designed Space Age has a rigid take on game design that was absent from the original Factorio. In the base game if there was some aspect that you didn't like it was totally fine to disengage with it. In Space Age there is a lot of mandatory requirements down to the bizarre approach to prescribing weapons for particular maps (in hindsight it is actually a bit weird that they didn't make the use of flamethrowers mandatory at some point; they may change that eventually).
Space Age doesn't respect the people who played Factorio as a light a-la-carte design sandbox experience. But it isn't obvious that is worse as opposed to just different. Wube doesn't have to build games for those people, they have many players who clearly wanted different things.
I agree. I played Space Age once, and don't plan to ever play it again. The devs approached things from the angle of wanting to generate new logistical puzzles, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted the expansion to play much like the base game, but with more stuff added. I did like Vulcanus (the most vanilla-like of the new planets), but otherwise the expansion was a big whiff for me.
Space Age is intentionally a different game. They did not discontinue the original game. Space Age is a mod. You can play it or not, just like you can play Bob's/Angel's or Pyanodon's or not.
I loved my first 100h (maybe 200h?) of Factorio and thought it was like crack, reached a point where I started designing city blocks as monads because I wanted to solve the game - or well, tried, because the blueprinting system becomes unwieldy once you try to do some advanced blueprinting and things that should have been easy to became just deep time sinks to iterate on.
One can't really point the finger at an hugely successful game - on the other hand I think it's another example of how bad architectural decisions in the underlying systems creep up and cripple future development.
The following is from the point of view of the "end-game" stage, of when you're doing things because you're trying the limits of the system - not your first runs, those were fun and I guess it's reasonable to expect a game to have a finite life.
With blue-prints you can't really customise them beyond parameters - which in turn are limited in the number of them that you can use, don't have any way of ordering, don't have any way of copying/applying them, don't have any way of relating them to other aspects of the blueprint itself (besides very basic stuff, that sometimes was broken too).
You can't apply "sub" blueprints inside a blue-print, making the whole idea of "blueprinting" quite limited. Like if you want to make a city block with train stations that can either take liquids or solids, you end up having to create 2 (almost identical blueprints), or 3 (a general layout city block and 2 "internal" for the stations).
To work around the parameters limitations you need to create monstrous circuitry abominations, that can be fun the first time you're implementing them, but are just horrendous in interface afterwards - doing a simple circuit change can take an hour and endless clicking, keeping memory of it all, double checking it and so on... The same to updating them if you have plastered N city blocks on your way to factorio greatness and realised later it needs a "slight" change in the circuitry control/flow.
The train system was also severely hampered by (although better in v2) their underlying choices - even the "wildcard" improvements of v2 still show those design issues popping up all over their interfaces and makes you reach for awful designs due to the way wildcards work with the stations naming, connections and many other details. Part of it is due to - from what I read - the way they implemented IDing the train/wagons - and other is just the inexistent connection between the seemingly connected aspects of trains, stops, and stations, resources, and units.
The network/automation (bots) was also pretty limited in functionality, yeah, it felt like a great advancement once you get to it, and then you have a learning curve until you master it but it just ends on a cliff - you can't really program the network in ways that seems obvious you should.
Some of this might be to keep the game "flow" mostly manual, but to me, that I don't like doing click & run endlessly and like games that progress further, it all got old at some point and reaching those hours of game-play others consistently talk about looked like subjecting yourself to endless punishment rather than enjoyment. I tried and in part succeeded to create city blocks that you just had to paste and pick your inputs, choose your outputs, place some trains and choose the type of input and output, and it all worked - no stuck trains, not the highest throughput by space area, but just endlessly expandable without bottlenecks - at that point I considered the game solved and moved on but would have spent (probably quite many) more hours on it optimising and testing designs if it didn't end on that functionality/UI/flow cliff once you reach a certain stage (and blueprint bugs too, like them disappearing after being saved and so on). And I had to use the map editor mods to be able to design the blueprints and iterate on them otherwise impossible...
In the end, I feel like the game provided me enjoyment worth its cost (and that's what matters) but at the same time, paradoxically, was a bit of a let down because the more "engineering", "architecture" like aspects of the game were not really fleshed out or deep at all. Like all the ingredients are there, but... It's mostly aimed at spreadsheet min-maxing and I prefer other sorts of puzzles.
It helps they don’t have a publisher to confuse them with quantitative and qualitative pattern matching. Just make the game you play and judge it honestly. Of course, the second part is a rare ability.
Clarion Alley is totally worth a visit when you're in San Francisco. It's right in the middle of the Mission near a bunch of great places to eat and drink. Balmy Alley is a 10 minute walk away and another great street art gallery.
Clarion Alley Mural Project does great work maintaining Clarion Alley. (Including relations with property owners - this problem is an anomaly, there's been art there successfully for over 30 years.) Also worth knowing about Precita Eyes, a local community organization that manages murals in a lot of the city.
Looked it up on Google. I don't like people claiming public space to push their personal agenda. Those alleys are for everyone, stop using it for your personal agenda. Please make a-political art.
Migration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies.
In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
In the early days of the internet it was a standard that people had different accounts on different sites and there wasn't any federation. We're doing it right now - my hacker news account doesn't work on mastodon or on reddit.
Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.
Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.
And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.
I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.
I'm sure Verisign would be thrilled to have a bidding war between the legitimate owners of fraser.name and a bunch of third parties they suddenly enabled.
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