Questions for Developers

[Yunru]

3 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

The Mars colonization have learned for the mistakes on Earth. This time we are doing it without global warming.

Isn't part of the terraforming plans for Mars "heat it up"?

[Ketmol]

There are plenty of studios out there who will leave games unfinished, who will charge big money for DLC that fix the original game, or rather ship half a game, have in game pay to win store + sell rest of the game as DLC.

Not trying to be disrespectful here but to me it sounds like OP is complaining about KLEI not behaving like EA... 

Most people would say thank god they r not....

Also I think Kleis business model seem to be working pretty well... How long was don't starve in development and Early access?? I'm quite sure that DS and DST still sells very well especially if you count all the expansions, don t starve together etc...

[Artorias36]

26 minutes ago, OxCD said:

Please keep it respectful. You don't know his coding skills, no one does except him. By the way not everyone is native english speaker, trust me I know what I'm talking about.

I'm looking forward to ear your skills in French 

I haven't given any comment on his programming skills. But from the way he wrote, including not knowing how coding is written and judging by the silly idea of dropping a project a week before its release, that he is not into professional programming at all. Last but not least, any programmer from the best to the worst know that creating a single player game is much much easier than creating a multi player one.

[thewreckedangle]

multiplayer codding.

Spoiler

 

[OxCD]

4 minutes ago, Artorias36 said:

I haven't given any comment on his programming skills. But from the way he wrote, including not knowing how coding is written and judging by the silly idea of dropping a project a week before its release, that he is not into professional programming at all. Last but not least, any programmer from the best to the worst know that creating a single player game is much much easier than creating a multi player one.

This comment is far more elaborated than your first 

[LeftyRighty]

1 hour ago, Xentios said:

You are working on this game over 4 years with major addtions and deletions so i quess source code is a mess right now.

The difference between a solid development team and those who don't really know what they are doing is in this statement. Good teams can make changes without making too much of a mess, clean up their technical debt along the way and don't work their code base into a fetid pile of spaghetti and then ship it moving onto the next thing without a care.

 

That said, the former started as the later at some point 

[Nightinggale]

13 minutes ago, Artorias36 said:

But from the way he wrote, including not knowing how coding is written and judging by the silly idea of dropping a project a week before its release, that he is not into professional programming at all.

Leaving programming issues/knowledge aside, OP states that Klei spent more than 4 years developing ONI meaning OP wants discontinuing 4+ years of paid work without reaping the resulting profit from a release doesn't seem like a financial sound idea. On top of that a bunch of people bought ONI with the expectation that bugs will be fixed. Abandoning fixing known bugs would create a reputation, which would hurt sales of any future games even if they are sold bugfree.

13 minutes ago, Artorias36 said:

Last but not least, any programmer from the best to the worst know that creating a single player game is much much easier than creating a multi player one.

Making a multiplayer game is more time consuming because development will have to spend quite a while dealing with network sync issues. In order to stay in sync, some sacrifices have to be made. For instance the game speed control would be really messy in multiplayer. One player wants pause while another wants full speed ahead. For a good multiplayer experience, game speed should be constant, meaning the game should be designed to make sense to only play with a single speed.

Personally I'm against a multiplayer version of ONI because it will reduce the single player experience and I don't think the multiplayer experience will be as awesome as some people think it will be.

[LeftyRighty]

1 minute ago, Nightinggale said:

I don't think the multiplayer experience will be as awesome as some people think it will be.

I can overload my dupes with orders quite nicely by myself thanks  don't need someone else adding to it!  

[Artorias36]

It can be done by having player A building a special Printing pod and player B selecting 3 dupes to be teleported on player A world. The speed can be set by the host side.

 

 

[Kangaax]

5 minutes ago, Artorias36 said:

It can be done by having player A building a special Printing pod and player B selecting 3 dupes to be teleported on player A world. The speed can be set by the host side.

None of the players can affect the speed, the world runs by itself and duplicants are auto generated, the only thing players can do is give dupes orders. Orders can be overridden by any player. The world is in ironman mode and only stops when all players log out.

Not going to lie, it would be a terrible but hilarious experience. Especially if players disagree on orders.

 

[Ambaire]

1 hour ago, Yunru said:

This thread has taught me that confused does not count towards a post's heat.

And nothing else.

That post may be the first time I've ever used the Thanks reaction.

18 minutes ago, LeftyRighty said:

The difference between a solid development team and those who don't really know what they are doing is in this statement. Good teams can make changes without making too much of a mess, clean up their technical debt along the way and don't work their code base into a fetid pile of spaghetti and then ship it moving onto the next thing without a care.

 

That said, the former started as the later at some point 

The Factorio dev team are gods of programming. Not sure who else qualifies for that.

[Nightinggale]

1 minute ago, Ambaire said:

The Factorio dev team are gods of programming. Not sure who else qualifies for that.

Not just programming, but also system design and management. It also looks like they have a great team spirit. I have encountered a few "gods of programming", but they were not compatible with team planning. In order to make a great game, programming just isn't enough.

Before I praise Factorio too much, I have to say I hate their approach to mod support. They got everything right, except for the fact that all mods are written in lua (slow) and you can only use the functions they have exposed to the modders.

ONI on the other hand might have a more primitive approach, particularly when it comes to mods depending on load order etc (Factorio spent years perfecting mod support, it's new in ONI), but the managed code in ONI supports Harmony to mod more or less whatever aspect of the game you like if you have the skills. While it's common that modders can't mod in something due to "I don't know how to do it", the failure to make a mod is rarely "I know the game doesn't allow us to mod this part". The fact that ONI doesn't lock out modders from the really interesting stuff makes a huge difference. Sure there are modding issues, which could be better (like easy way to add graphics), but all those issues are fixable with tweaks. Factorio locked themselves to their approach and will never be able to provide anywhere near the ONI modding freedom.

[Ambaire]

47 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

Factorio locked themselves to their approach and will never be able to provide anywhere near the ONI modding freedom.

Serious question: what sort of modding freedom do you wish Factorio offered that it currently does not? Factorio and ONI are quite different games and can't really be viewed the same way with regard to modding.

[Vampyre_by]

"Stop making all these multiplayer games, I have no friends."

As a software developer for 13+ years I can suggest that OP is a huge green troll or he is not very smart coDDer.

[Nightinggale]

19 minutes ago, Ambaire said:

Serious question: what sort of modding freedom do you wish Factorio offered that it currently does not? Factorio and ONI are quite different games and can't really be viewed the same way with regard to modding.

I once tried expanding Burner Leech to allow burner inserters to fuel themselves from the dropoff cell. The only way to really do it is to move the pickup cell to the dropoff cell and then move it back once it had refueled itself. I also wanted electric inserters to move fuel from one furnace to the next.

I ended up not doing either because the first one ended up being really messy and both would be far from acceptable performance.

Another issue is modded logic wire outputs. They are essentially constant combinators, meaning they have X slots. If X is too high, performance suffers. If X is too low, you can't fit all the signals. Reading signals is an issue too as you read red or green signals and then you have to merge. The issue is that you have to merge in lua. Modders complain that it's too slow and ask for a faster way and the reply was at the time "you are doing it wrong". Maybe that's right, but then tell how it should be done because none of the modders knew at the time. That might have been fixed since because I haven't looked at Factorio modding for a while. I kind of lost interest because the lua interface kept working against me and preventing me from getting anything working, except some very simple stuff.

Yes there are some impressive mods, but it really depends on how well the modding API supports your idea. They also add lua commands from time to time, apparently mainly by request of a group of modders with a long track record of big mod creations. Today you can do more than back when I looked at it, but it's still not much compared to what you can do with ONI.

[Glassyfo]

Why is this thread still open? It devolved like IMMEDIATELY lol.

[Qubit]

2 hours ago, bleeter6 said:

Why is this thread still open? It devolved like IMMEDIATELY lol.

But devolving suggests it started at a higher level and got worse over time.  I’d argue the opposite has occurred. 

[Molay]

3 hours ago, Ambaire said:

Serious question: what sort of modding freedom do you wish Factorio offered that it currently does not? Factorio and ONI are quite different games and can't really be viewed the same way with regard to modding.

Roughly speaking, Harmony gives modders the option to add, remove and modify game code. Rimworld for example can be modified in such a way, resulting in things that couldn't by done (or at huge performance cost) via scripting. There's some crazy rimworld mods that add things that were never meant to exist. Like magicians. And skilltrees. And vampires sucking blood. Combat extended which adds ammo and morale in fights (enemy suppression, forcing them into cover), fog of war, all kinds of stuff. With just lua scripting those things would at best be clunky or slow, and at worst impossible.

 

For clarity, factorio only offers lua scripting. Rimworld offers Harmony, like ONI does.

[Siromatik]

11 hours ago, OxCD said:

Yes I'm sarcastic about my people, and so WHAT ?

Wait, do you still have a soccer team ?!

OMG what have I done here, rip me...

Il y a beaucoup de français ici l'air de rien !

[Nicz]

Constantly leaving projects and starting everything from a blank slate is a common practice in a IT world.

Its called development hell.

[xialeth]

3 minutes ago, Nicz said:

Constantly leaving projects and starting everything from a blank slate is a common practice in a IT world.

Its called development hell

ngl, I have done this, too, in an IT project, though there we a) weren't working on an outside-facing project, and b) none of us had any clue when we started working on it, so it was an actually viable approach to say "okay, approach 1) has the following issues/limitations", and in the end just reworking it from scratch was a whole lot faster than trying to fix/change the old system as it had limitations on the lowest of levels.

But then again, it was a two person project (me coding, my supervisor with the concept), it was a small project, and it had been in development for ~3 months when we scratched the initial version (which was still hugely important for the final version, and tbh we couldn't have done it without the rough build). This however, is a much much larger project that has probably passed the rough build stage at least once and while yes, there are some base bugs, they could probably (instead of scratching it) do something like LOL (I believe?) did and rework the base code "behind the scenes" and then deploy it into the live game, not changing anything but streamlining the spaghetti code. And yet again: I would hope that their source code isn't quite as much spaghetti as LOL's was.

Also, this is a game, not your standard (corporate) IT project xD Much more pressure, and often much more optimization *shudders as she thinks back on some of the software specifically developed for the old company she worked for*

[OxCD]

18 minutes ago, Siromatik said:

Wait, do you still have a soccer team ?!

OMG what have I done here, rip me...

Il y a beaucoup de français ici l'air de rien !

I'm unreachable.

[Nicz]

52 minutes ago, xialeth said:

ngl, I have done this, too, in an IT project, though there we a) weren't working on an outside-facing project, and b) none of us had any clue when we started working on it, so it was an actually viable approach to say "okay, approach 1) has the following issues/limitations", and in the end just reworking it from scratch was a whole lot faster than trying to fix/change the old system as it had limitations on the lowest of levels.

But then again, it was a two person project (me coding, my supervisor with the concept), it was a small project, and it had been in development for ~3 months when we scratched the initial version (which was still hugely important for the final version, and tbh we couldn't have done it without the rough build). This however, is a much much larger project that has probably passed the rough build stage at least once and while yes, there are some base bugs, they could probably (instead of scratching it) do something like LOL (I believe?) did and rework the base code "behind the scenes" and then deploy it into the live game, not changing anything but streamlining the spaghetti code. And yet again: I would hope that their source code isn't quite as much spaghetti as LOL's was.

Also, this is a game, not your standard (corporate) IT project xD Much more pressure, and often much more optimization *shudders as she thinks back on some of the software specifically developed for the old company she worked for*

It may be a bit different but my point still stands:

Leaving such advanced project completely scrapping all the work done (which i think OP suggests) is such a ridiculous notion, that only someone who have never worked professionally at software development would consider sane...

Also, reworking codebase days before launch seems like pretty good description of hell if you ask me.

[Ambaire]

7 hours ago, Molay said:

Roughly speaking, Harmony gives modders the option to add, remove and modify game code. Rimworld for example can be modified in such a way, resulting in things that couldn't by done (or at huge performance cost) via scripting. There's some crazy rimworld mods that add things that were never meant to exist. Like magicians. And skilltrees. And vampires sucking blood. Combat extended which adds ammo and morale in fights (enemy suppression, forcing them into cover), fog of war, all kinds of stuff. With just lua scripting those things would at best be clunky or slow, and at worst impossible.

 

For clarity, factorio only offers lua scripting. Rimworld offers Harmony, like ONI does.

I see. So with Harmony, one could create a magic conversion mod for Factorio and turn it into a pseudo Dungeons game.

[Qubit]

Whatever creativity limitations Factorio’s design choices impose on the mod side, it’s crazy what you can build within the vanilla game itself   So, for example, I don't think we’re going to see a graphics engine implemented inside ONI using just the Klei provided game.  (Although my notions of what’s possible in ONI have been greatly expanded by reading this forum, so maybe I’m wrong).