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posted by martyb on Saturday August 15 2020, @06:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-are-stuck-at-home-you-may-as-well-enjoy-it dept.

After 8.5 years and countless delays for "refinement" Factorio has finally released today.

Factorio is a very successful indie game. (A few months back, it hit 2 million sales.) It is a base builder. The premise is that your spaceship crash lands on an alien planet, you are left with next to nothing and from there you build a gigantic factory so that you can build a new spaceship and get off the planet. You start off gathering basic materials and researching the basics until you rise to the level of advanced materials and spaceship construction. Your factory will continue to grow as you advance and as it grows it will create pollution. The pollution will cause the local alien life to stir and eventually attack your base; so you will need to set up defenses while advancing.

It is very addictive. Probably the most addictive thing for me is that often you need to do multiple things, and must prioritize. As your base grows, you will need to expand your power production, at the same time you need to explore and find a source of oil so that you can unlock the next level of research, at the same time, aliens are attacking the other side of the base and need to be killed... then you need to rebuild... add defenses... clear alien hives that are too close... add more ammo production... add even more power... expand your resource harvesting before the current iron patch is completely mined... and so on. and so on...

I personally have played Factorio for 1500 hours over the last 4 years... Over that time it has gone through some major changes such as the addition of Nuclear Power, Massive Network games (over 100 people have played coop in a single game,) high definition graphic overhaul, and regular performance tuning. While the 1.0 release is here, the devs have promised continued bug fixes and already annouced that 1.1 will be coming.

Factorio supports Linux, Mac, and that microsoft os.

Related Links:
Factorio Home Page
Factorio Steam Page (though you can buy directly from their home page to give the devs a few cents more.)
Submitter's Steam Review (shameless self-promotion that provides no actual value.)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 15 2020, @03:20PM (4 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday August 15 2020, @03:20PM (#1037104) Journal

    During my undergrad days, I took a class on computer graphics. First day of class, I waxed enthusiastic about all the cool graphics in video games. Little did I know that was a big mistake. The professor was one of those Very Serious Persons who thought games a waste of time. I couldn't believe it. How could someone who taught computer graphics, of all things, feel that way about the biggest use of graphics, video games?

    Nevertheless, he felt that everyone should spend their time on more productive things. I guess graphics were only to be used for CAD software or some such. He graded accordingly. Kept coming up with spurious reasons why I didn't deserve a decent grade, despite several times doing the best work in the class.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2020, @12:36AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2020, @12:36AM (#1037678)

    That reminds me of a grade review I was on in a different department.

    A student challenged what he had gotten in some software testing class, IIRC. He had the program he wrote to solve a problem given by the professor and it had "gone above and beyond" in the testing department. So much so that one of the department reviewers said "wow" out loud when looking at the test suite documentation and results. The student got a "C" on the whole thing. He was marked down on a bunch of things on the rubric and took a major hit on the "implementation" side of things.

    The top grade in the class had probably had minimal testing based on the function calls. I say probably because we couldn't actually get it to run during the review session. I honestly had no idea how it could score that high based on that and what the other reviewers were saying, until I spotted something in the supporting documentation. Turns out that student had used an algorithm for that problem written by the course instructor. Things made a lot more sense after that when we looked at the rest of the class results.

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday August 17 2020, @06:44PM (2 children)

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday August 17 2020, @06:44PM (#1038001) Journal

      Another professor in our department did that kind of stuff. Anyone who went above and beyond might well be given an F, for "not following the directions". I heard of it happening to others. As for me, the old boy decided that I was a B student, and that was that. Didn't matter how much I deserved an A, I got a B. Or worse.

      I had the misfortune to be enrolled at a school that made a huge mistake in staffing their CS department. At the time, CS was new, had just been elevated to department status from its previous status of merely being part of EE, and the school needed more professors in a hurry. Rather than hire, they asked related departments to transfer some professors. Big, big mistake. These departments all used this request as an opportunity to dump their worst. Many departments have one or two rotten professors. But thanks to that, the whole CS department was rotten. These professors were further embittered by the knowledge that they'd been kicked out of their chosen discipline. And, to add to the perceived insult, they did not see the value in CS. Thought it was a Mickey Mouse science, a fake science. Felt that they were being forced to teach garbage. Obviously, any student who couldn't see that and actually wanted to study CS had to be a moron, and deserved to flunk, you know. If you weren't a moron, they hated you even more. If you somehow got on the good side of one of them, you were in trouble with all the rest, because they hated each other too. And hoo, did they flunk students. Had a graduation rate of 5%, and they had to get a little creative with the numbers to get it that high! But, no problems with grade inflation there, no sir! I was one of the few who made it, with a 2.667 GPA, and it took me 5 years to get through their 4 year program. I had to explain over and over to prospective employers and grad schools that my GPA was actually pretty good, for that school. Like, there was a scholarship they were unable to give to anyone, because the recipient needed a minimum 3.0 GPA, and no one had grades that good. The Dean of Engineering was NOT happy with them. Threatened to kill the department. When the school contacts me to ask the alumni to remember all the good times they had in college and of course to donate money, I just laugh at them.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2020, @08:53PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2020, @08:53PM (#1038051)

        5% for over five years? At my last school, one of my colleagues got threatened for failing a student who didn't do any work in the class and never showed because his numbers went too low because the class was so small. I can't imagine how that could have been that bad for so long.

        I would be willing to bet that they called you more than average the first few years too. Donation rates are one of the metrics universities use to gauge the success of the program. A year or two of their graduates not donating probably was the real kick in the pants needed to change the program.

        • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday August 18 2020, @01:51AM

          by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday August 18 2020, @01:51AM (#1038164) Journal

          Interesting. Hadn't thought of that one, but yes, money talks. Yes, they haven't called me for years now, but they did call pretty often at first. The school was definitely money hungry. Did the all too typical extreme parking enforcement. I guess the exception is the school that doesn't rig the parking system to generate more violations. Also did the textbook racket, of course.

          However, they wouldn't have to be turned down by their grads to be hurting for money from that direction. A pathetic 5% graduation rate gives them such a small base they won't get much even if all their grads donate regularly. When I graduated, it was a record high: 15. First time that CS had managed double digits. Starting class size when I was a freshman was 400, after 1 semester it was 90, and by the end of the freshman year it was 50. And they never let up. Traditionally, once you've made it halfway through your sophomore year, or to your junior year, you shouldn't be facing any more attempts to weed you out. You can still flunk out or drop out, but they're no longer mining the classrooms with explosives, so to speak.

          But these CS profs were so consumed by their own hurt they didn't care at all about such niceties. It really disgusted me that anyone who made it to the coveted position of tenured professorship could be so unappreciative of their good fortune and behave so badly and treat everyone so unfairly. Calls into question the whole system of tenure.

          The rest of the college of engineering had a graduation rate of 20%. Not good, but much better than CS. Last time I inquired, that had changed dramatically, and is now 60%.