Whimsical naming is ok, but can also be confusing and annoying.
On the other hand, Factorio arguably has some Kafka-esque aspects!
Now: My disappointment is immeassurable and my day is ruined.
This is in practice not true at all. Vertical scaling is typically a sublinear cost increase (up to a point, but that point is a ridiculous beast of a machine), since you're (typically) upgrading just the CPU and/or just the RAM or just the storage; not all of them at once.
There are instances where you can get nearly 10x the machine for 2x the cost.
There is a point where the exponential pricing starts, but that point is way out there than most people expect. Probably ~100CPU, ~1TB RAM, >50Gbps network etc.
In the case of cloud instances, doubling cores is frequently less than 100% more expensive.
Given what engineers at this level cost, their costs per hour dealing with all of the nonsense clouds handle for you (networking, storage, elastic scaling, instant replacement of faulty servers, load balancing, yadda yadda) end up being higher than whatever tax you're paying for using the cloud.
Economies of scale are real.
As opposed to so many takes on "flow based" programming, which present some imperfect nodal representation of the program, but rarely can the user make sense of what's going on by seeing stuff moving around as the thing executes.
And by the way, be sure you're ready to sink some time in if you're curious about this game...it's just too good, and I've had to consciously reduce the time I'm spending, because I could just keep optimizing...building...expanding...optimizing...it's built in the shape of the reward center of my brain.
Yes, it's like a distillation of the feeling I get from the most enjoyable parts of my job, risking productivity loss from real world responsibilities until the complexity rises high enough to require project organization and advanced planning of tasks that are the least enjoyable parts of my job, along the lines of:
"Crap, I have a sudden urgent need to deal with enemies creeping out from beyond my radar range that will push back operationalization of my proof-of-concept production pipeline. I'd estimate 3 man hours are required to perform a one-off fix on the enemies & radar expansion, maybe 5 to automate long-term... damnit I need a break, let me VPN into work to decompress from Factorio stress."
I feel the same. It scratches so many itches. I made the mistake of installing Space Exploration mod after the first run… so many hours invested now.
This is a very accurate description of how I feel about factorio. Thanks, I'm going to use this going forward.
I haven't played Factorio but this article GIFs helped me understand it, at least from a high level simplistic perspective!
I think most of programming is just logistics: moving data from one place to another, picking and choosing what fields to use for a given purpose and then calling a function with those selected parameters or talking to another system.
I am working on a number of experiments in this area. I'm working on a programming environment which is unlike programming languages where you specify instructions and the state is implied but you work directly with state and instructions are implied.
The problem with nodal editors is that they're not very information dense.
crash in planet (or new continent?) and proceed to expand while decimating native life?
in any case, good game.
In a typical game the player doesn't decimate them, if anything they make the native life flourish.
It's harder to think of factory-game analogies for logs, since they involve copying without altering the original sequence. It would have to involve some kind of moving non-destructive sensor or object-cloner mechanic.
Maybe Shakespeare or some famous philosophers would have seen this angle, were video games to exist in their era. Unfortunate timing I guess.
Understanding Kafka with Factorio (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29304414 - Nov 2021 (72 comments)
Understanding Kafka with Factorio - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362179 - July 2019 (84 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
I believe that's why OO is so popular, people who only know the object way of thinking, who have difficulties with the virtual and abstract like OO and condemn the pragmatic approach.
Wish I read this months ago. Factorio sucked my life in until I managed to launch that damn ship
That would be a much much better article.
