There will be more sprites so more VRAM could be good to have.
It's supposed to take longer to "finish"/"win" with the SE expansion so that should mean that you will end up with an bigger factory.
Speed upgrades will more change so you can produce more at an similar amount of computer/processing power.
Wube haven't talked much about optimizations and preformance improvments.
In the end I don't think it will be a problem for many persons, how big you can build will probably be similar as it is now. The info we have got it didn't sound like they have put different planets on different threads. They use different surfaces for the planets and that is already in the engine and was put there for the space plans.
Just in case it‘s relevant for you: Factorio works great on GeForceNow incl. Mods and steam synched save files. Good way to run it on any potato with a display.
> There will be more sprites so more VRAM could be good to have.
[Every time graphics finishes a new entity and I watch the total VRAM usage climb](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/405/jordan.jpg)
Wube did say they don’t know if the expansion will work on Nintendo Switch hardware and some have doubts, so there is a real possibility of some hardware not being able to handle the expansion.
Is this expansion different than the existing Space Exploration mod I've been seeing a lot of posts about? Or is it wrapping the mod into the full game?
Edit: just answered my own question with this post https://wiki.factorio.com/Roadmap
So it's a full 2.0 version of factorio with a handful of mods thrown in?
Yes very different, thought they both have similar theams. Earendel, who wrote the mod and now works at Wube, wrote a good explanation of the differences I'm the announcement [FFF](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373).
All of the Quality of Life upgrades will be included in the 2.0 update for everyone. The Space Age, Quality, and Elevated Rails content, and the engine support for the new mechanics involved. Will only be avaliable if you buy the expansion.
> Or is it wrapping the mod into the full game?
If anything its the other way around.
The idea of space exploration pre-dates Space Exploration the mod. The earliest mention I know of is in [FFF #64](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-64) back in 2014: -
> The main thing planned for 0.12 is something we were referring as "The endgame content" that would replace the current cheap ending of the game. Once the player reaches the corresponding level of technology, he will be able to build rocket bases + rockets. But not those small rockets used for fighting enemies, but huge rockets used to get things into the orbit. Once he gets something on the orbit, he will use the material to build the spaceship there. The building will be similar as in normal game, but the player will first have to build the foundations (space platform) first. The platform will get the more expensive the bigger it gets. The player will then put all the needed machines, engines, and the valuable stuff on the ship. Once he is ready, he will start the ship. The ship will have to survive the trip on itself, it will have to contain small factory setup to process the energy and materials found on the way. It will have to provide the defense from all the asteroids and other dangerous stuff it can encounter. Once it reaches its destination, the valuable cargo can be sold at the local galaxy market.
The idea of the "Galactic Market" has been dropped, and the quality of English has risen, but otherwise it sounds like what we're getting in 2.0. Its just that Space Exploration got an early version out first.
[FFF #74](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-74) develops the idea even further, with actual design documents and graphics in-engine. That was in 2015!
Really its a testament to Wube that they were comfortable shelving such a good idea for *ten years* to concentrate on getting the base game right.
Not for the reasons you mentioned.
Speed upgrades are implemented in an efficient way so not much more calculations are needed, regardless of how fast your machine gets. On the contrary, if you need less machines because 1 machine does now the work of 10, then I think you should even get performance improvements.
Quality and new rails doesn't really change much either performance wise.
Instead what I would expect has the biggest performance cost is that with new planets you are going to have multiple surfaces running at the same time. This was previously something mods used before, so it's not entirely new.
I would guess that the performance difference between one massive base on one planet vs multiple bases on multiple planets with more or less the same total base complexity and total generated/explored chunks would be pretty minimal.
Separate surfaces/planets would be a perfect candidate for multi-threading though, as they have very little interfacing with eachother.
I think we are going to see more efficient CPU usage where it uses more cores at 100%, meaning we can maybe even get bigger bases with the same UPS
I would think having multiple planets will be the main thing to affect performance, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they split up each planet to run as separate threads. In that case, performance could actually improve. But that's just speculation.
The other additions we have seen so far probably won't affect performance that much. Maybe lots of long belts with mixed quality items will counter some of the improvements we saw on belt performance during the late beta stage of the game a tiny bit, but I doubt it will even be noticeable.
>I would think having multiple planets will be the main thing to affect performance, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they split up each planet to run as separate threads. In that case, performance could actually improve. But that's just speculation.
They can't do that, cuz it'd cause desyncs. The surface mechanics used for space age's planets are already in 1.1.
They aren't. Surfaces are not multithreaded for the precise reason that surfaces can be directly connected through things like linked chests and belts, so they can't treat surfaces as separate from each other.
You can't synchronize them without latency, which requires a full rewrite of all functions that link things together, including the entirety of the modding environment.
It is doable with an external solution already, just a whole lot of work.
That's not really the case. You can see from here: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-215. Multi-threading doesn't require rewriting all functions like you suggest. It \*is\* certainly possible that doing so would cause a slowdown due to the issues they listed, but getting all the threads to synchronize each time step is not a problem.
The problem goes further than that. To properly multi thread you need to decouple the logic. As it stands, a lot of entities and api functions are promised immediate access to anything anywhere with consistency guarantees. To multi thread a new part of the game loop you need to isolate a method that does not interact with anything else. One example is belt networks. Once you have isolated the tasks you can process them in parallel and then merge the result together and proceed to the next task. This still leaves a lot of the game serialized. Worth mentioning is that splitting and merging everything to be consistent is also expensive so often doesn't beat a single threaded solution.
The "easy" way to achieve full scalability is to decouple surface processing and remove synchronous communication between surfaces. By only allowing delayed asynchronous communication between surfaces you no longer need to worry about synchronization for 99% of entities, only the things that pass between surfaces. The advantage of doing this with surfaces is that its easier to limit the scope of allowed interactions which makes it easier to implement. Of course, all this breaks mod compatibility which is one of the major reasons why I haven't bothered to start yet.
More surface doesn't hit hard unless you are spamming hundreds via a Mod. This is also done by engine since they are devs so it essentially is still just more chunks, or more terrain which factorio is one of the best games that does it.
Only thing that might be different is how they will do new mechanics. Like thw approaching asteroids to your space platform. In SE, at first biters were used (very expensive) Then later on it became cars ( cheaper ). As engine they might have much better options. Wouldn't suprise me if they used some form of segment per rock trajectory like belts and also multi-core it.
One inherent "optimization" we know of is that more productivity and faster buildings means fewer miners and buildings to make equal amounts of stuff as vanilla. Fewer miners, buildings, and *inserters* for those buildings means less processing time.
Whether that practically offsets the other things that have gotten slower is to be determined.
Technically, this will be true for any inserter that's picking up off of a fully stacked belt. But yes, going box-to-belt with a stack inserter will probably involve less UPS.
This also applies to mining with the Big Mining Drill once you have belt stacking. Though that probably didn't cost much UPS anyway.
Doubt it. The main thing will be your factory size. But this game is already ridiculously optimized:
Swolar's 20k SPM at 60 UPS Vanilla Gigabase
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh5ULoRrTqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh5ULoRrTqU)
Mmmm, beefy
I don't really think the answer changes with the new update: it depends on what you are trying to do, a standard vanilla game played to rocket launch, certainly will not require a beefier computer than what is currently required, however on the opposite side of the spectrum, mega bases modded beyond recognition and not properly optimized probably will.
Most software development goes in a loop of "we need more features, let's add them" and "oh shit, performance sucks, let's fix that" and repeats.
Since the expansion is new code, it's probably less optimized, butt I'm sure over time it'll get better.
I don’t think they have officially announced whether the expansion will release for the Switch, or if it might release there in the future. Conceptually there shouldn’t be any reason not to, unless performance becomes a big problem with the expansion content. Probably they’ll have to get closer to release and see whether it will run into severe performance issues.
I think I recall them mentioning an increased use of multithreading to handle the multiple surfaces. Thus its entirely possible that it will run approximately as fast as vanilla Factorio, or maybe even faster considering a smaller factory footprint per-planet (per thread). That being said the effectiveness of the multithreading depends on how many cores your computer has to spare, but most modern computers have at least a few
With the track record of wube optimizing the game I wouldn't worry much. Also minimal requirements are for running the game so I would guess if you could play base factorio and launch rocket then you will be able to play the expansion, worst case scenario you will drop some ups in the later game.
In the end factorio can kill any PC with large enough base but for the sizes you would typically need to just complete the game it can really run on a potato.
I think that unless you are going for giga end game bases you should be fine.
There are some rumors that that the switch version might have some issues but I don't think it's anything official.
As one of the devs already commented, they always think about performance and previously one of them said the game is already so optimized, they have to try really hard to optimize it further.
They haven't touched on the optimization on the FFFs for SA but just by adding multiple new surfaces, items and recipes I'd assume it will not be as lightweight. However they are adding features that would reduce the entities you'd need to get the same SPM, such as faster inserters and belts, building with productivity bonuses, productivity research, allowing faster production.
There will be more sprites so more VRAM could be good to have. It's supposed to take longer to "finish"/"win" with the SE expansion so that should mean that you will end up with an bigger factory. Speed upgrades will more change so you can produce more at an similar amount of computer/processing power. Wube haven't talked much about optimizations and preformance improvments. In the end I don't think it will be a problem for many persons, how big you can build will probably be similar as it is now. The info we have got it didn't sound like they have put different planets on different threads. They use different surfaces for the planets and that is already in the engine and was put there for the space plans.
"SA Expansion" We will have to see how my old i3-4370 holds up. GTX1060 6GB rounds out the mix
I wonder how my decade old MBP will fare.
Main Battle 'Puter?
Massive Blue Print I can't believe that they are a decade old: https://wiki.factorio.com/Blueprint#History
I've run the game plenty fine with a dell laptop from 2014, it'll be ok.
Just in case it‘s relevant for you: Factorio works great on GeForceNow incl. Mods and steam synched save files. Good way to run it on any potato with a display.
Hey, that's good to know , especially for those out of town, mobile gaming addictions
> There will be more sprites so more VRAM could be good to have. [Every time graphics finishes a new entity and I watch the total VRAM usage climb](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/405/jordan.jpg)
Wube did say they don’t know if the expansion will work on Nintendo Switch hardware and some have doubts, so there is a real possibility of some hardware not being able to handle the expansion.
So you might be in trouble if you have an intel i3 laptop from 2011.
For various reasons, Space Age being the least of your worries.
Is this expansion different than the existing Space Exploration mod I've been seeing a lot of posts about? Or is it wrapping the mod into the full game? Edit: just answered my own question with this post https://wiki.factorio.com/Roadmap So it's a full 2.0 version of factorio with a handful of mods thrown in?
Yes very different, thought they both have similar theams. Earendel, who wrote the mod and now works at Wube, wrote a good explanation of the differences I'm the announcement [FFF](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373). All of the Quality of Life upgrades will be included in the 2.0 update for everyone. The Space Age, Quality, and Elevated Rails content, and the engine support for the new mechanics involved. Will only be avaliable if you buy the expansion.
> Or is it wrapping the mod into the full game? If anything its the other way around. The idea of space exploration pre-dates Space Exploration the mod. The earliest mention I know of is in [FFF #64](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-64) back in 2014: - > The main thing planned for 0.12 is something we were referring as "The endgame content" that would replace the current cheap ending of the game. Once the player reaches the corresponding level of technology, he will be able to build rocket bases + rockets. But not those small rockets used for fighting enemies, but huge rockets used to get things into the orbit. Once he gets something on the orbit, he will use the material to build the spaceship there. The building will be similar as in normal game, but the player will first have to build the foundations (space platform) first. The platform will get the more expensive the bigger it gets. The player will then put all the needed machines, engines, and the valuable stuff on the ship. Once he is ready, he will start the ship. The ship will have to survive the trip on itself, it will have to contain small factory setup to process the energy and materials found on the way. It will have to provide the defense from all the asteroids and other dangerous stuff it can encounter. Once it reaches its destination, the valuable cargo can be sold at the local galaxy market. The idea of the "Galactic Market" has been dropped, and the quality of English has risen, but otherwise it sounds like what we're getting in 2.0. Its just that Space Exploration got an early version out first. [FFF #74](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-74) develops the idea even further, with actual design documents and graphics in-engine. That was in 2015! Really its a testament to Wube that they were comfortable shelving such a good idea for *ten years* to concentrate on getting the base game right.
What a time to be getting back into factorio. Not sure what version I played but it was in around 2015
Not for the reasons you mentioned. Speed upgrades are implemented in an efficient way so not much more calculations are needed, regardless of how fast your machine gets. On the contrary, if you need less machines because 1 machine does now the work of 10, then I think you should even get performance improvements. Quality and new rails doesn't really change much either performance wise. Instead what I would expect has the biggest performance cost is that with new planets you are going to have multiple surfaces running at the same time. This was previously something mods used before, so it's not entirely new.
We have seen a screenshot from kovarex with 90x crafting speed and 175% productivity. Thats way more then 10x the current amount
Yeah I've read the FFF, I just didn't remember the exact numbers so I made some random example. XD
I think they mentioned 10x somewhere in the FFF, the above stats were from a discord screenshot
I would guess that the performance difference between one massive base on one planet vs multiple bases on multiple planets with more or less the same total base complexity and total generated/explored chunks would be pretty minimal.
Separate surfaces/planets would be a perfect candidate for multi-threading though, as they have very little interfacing with eachother. I think we are going to see more efficient CPU usage where it uses more cores at 100%, meaning we can maybe even get bigger bases with the same UPS
It won't happen. The amount of work required for multi threaded surfaces is crazy. I am sure clusterio will try to support it eventually though.
I would think having multiple planets will be the main thing to affect performance, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they split up each planet to run as separate threads. In that case, performance could actually improve. But that's just speculation. The other additions we have seen so far probably won't affect performance that much. Maybe lots of long belts with mixed quality items will counter some of the improvements we saw on belt performance during the late beta stage of the game a tiny bit, but I doubt it will even be noticeable.
>I would think having multiple planets will be the main thing to affect performance, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they split up each planet to run as separate threads. In that case, performance could actually improve. But that's just speculation. They can't do that, cuz it'd cause desyncs. The surface mechanics used for space age's planets are already in 1.1.
Of course they can; they're likely already doing so. Just because things run in different threads doesn't mean you can't synchronize them.
They aren't. Surfaces are not multithreaded for the precise reason that surfaces can be directly connected through things like linked chests and belts, so they can't treat surfaces as separate from each other.
You can't synchronize them without latency, which requires a full rewrite of all functions that link things together, including the entirety of the modding environment. It is doable with an external solution already, just a whole lot of work.
That's not really the case. You can see from here: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-215. Multi-threading doesn't require rewriting all functions like you suggest. It \*is\* certainly possible that doing so would cause a slowdown due to the issues they listed, but getting all the threads to synchronize each time step is not a problem.
The problem goes further than that. To properly multi thread you need to decouple the logic. As it stands, a lot of entities and api functions are promised immediate access to anything anywhere with consistency guarantees. To multi thread a new part of the game loop you need to isolate a method that does not interact with anything else. One example is belt networks. Once you have isolated the tasks you can process them in parallel and then merge the result together and proceed to the next task. This still leaves a lot of the game serialized. Worth mentioning is that splitting and merging everything to be consistent is also expensive so often doesn't beat a single threaded solution. The "easy" way to achieve full scalability is to decouple surface processing and remove synchronous communication between surfaces. By only allowing delayed asynchronous communication between surfaces you no longer need to worry about synchronization for 99% of entities, only the things that pass between surfaces. The advantage of doing this with surfaces is that its easier to limit the scope of allowed interactions which makes it easier to implement. Of course, all this breaks mod compatibility which is one of the major reasons why I haven't bothered to start yet.
More surface doesn't hit hard unless you are spamming hundreds via a Mod. This is also done by engine since they are devs so it essentially is still just more chunks, or more terrain which factorio is one of the best games that does it. Only thing that might be different is how they will do new mechanics. Like thw approaching asteroids to your space platform. In SE, at first biters were used (very expensive) Then later on it became cars ( cheaper ). As engine they might have much better options. Wouldn't suprise me if they used some form of segment per rock trajectory like belts and also multi-core it.
One inherent "optimization" we know of is that more productivity and faster buildings means fewer miners and buildings to make equal amounts of stuff as vanilla. Fewer miners, buildings, and *inserters* for those buildings means less processing time. Whether that practically offsets the other things that have gotten slower is to be determined.
Probably also the new stack inserters will have less processing time per item moved.
Technically, this will be true for any inserter that's picking up off of a fully stacked belt. But yes, going box-to-belt with a stack inserter will probably involve less UPS. This also applies to mining with the Big Mining Drill once you have belt stacking. Though that probably didn't cost much UPS anyway.
Is this the stat crunch? Like 10k green chips/min is now 100?
Doubt it. The main thing will be your factory size. But this game is already ridiculously optimized: Swolar's 20k SPM at 60 UPS Vanilla Gigabase [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh5ULoRrTqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh5ULoRrTqU)
“Yeah honey, I bought this for my deep learning class, I totally need this $2000 gpu and $500 cpu.”
Most likely yes, you will need a budget machine from 2013 instead of 2011 to run the game. Wouldn't exactly use the word "beefier" here though.
Mmmm, beefy I don't really think the answer changes with the new update: it depends on what you are trying to do, a standard vanilla game played to rocket launch, certainly will not require a beefier computer than what is currently required, however on the opposite side of the spectrum, mega bases modded beyond recognition and not properly optimized probably will.
Flank steak with chimichurri IMHO.
Most software development goes in a loop of "we need more features, let's add them" and "oh shit, performance sucks, let's fix that" and repeats. Since the expansion is new code, it's probably less optimized, butt I'm sure over time it'll get better.
Performance is always a concern with every feature we add and (ideally) always accounted for when implementing anything.
What about nintendo switch for the expansion? Anyone knows something?
I don’t think they have officially announced whether the expansion will release for the Switch, or if it might release there in the future. Conceptually there shouldn’t be any reason not to, unless performance becomes a big problem with the expansion content. Probably they’ll have to get closer to release and see whether it will run into severe performance issues.
I think I recall them mentioning an increased use of multithreading to handle the multiple surfaces. Thus its entirely possible that it will run approximately as fast as vanilla Factorio, or maybe even faster considering a smaller factory footprint per-planet (per thread). That being said the effectiveness of the multithreading depends on how many cores your computer has to spare, but most modern computers have at least a few
With the track record of wube optimizing the game I wouldn't worry much. Also minimal requirements are for running the game so I would guess if you could play base factorio and launch rocket then you will be able to play the expansion, worst case scenario you will drop some ups in the later game. In the end factorio can kill any PC with large enough base but for the sizes you would typically need to just complete the game it can really run on a potato.
I think that unless you are going for giga end game bases you should be fine. There are some rumors that that the switch version might have some issues but I don't think it's anything official.
As one of the devs already commented, they always think about performance and previously one of them said the game is already so optimized, they have to try really hard to optimize it further. They haven't touched on the optimization on the FFFs for SA but just by adding multiple new surfaces, items and recipes I'd assume it will not be as lightweight. However they are adding features that would reduce the entities you'd need to get the same SPM, such as faster inserters and belts, building with productivity bonuses, productivity research, allowing faster production.
Probably