It always amazes me when people make things like this. It feels like there's something special about games that can be programmed within the game, because some of the best games all have that feature: Minecraft, Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, etc. Though it's hard to even specify that because there are some where it's not really part of the game per se (e.g. arbitrary code execution in Super Mario World) though that was a great game too, it's not quite the same feeling.<p>I think my favorite is still the Dwarven Calculator, just because overflow errors caused actual magma to overflow, which is just so very Dwarven: <a href="http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54046.0" rel="nofollow">http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54046.0</a><p>It's too bad Notch never finished that space-themed game he was once planning. I remember when HN went crazy with implementations of his spec for a simple, memory-mapped 8-bit computer that was going to be central to that game.
I started playing Factorio and fell in love. Then I started to watch tutorials on how to make better iron smelters and the guy said he has 1000 hours of Factorio gameplay. I quit Factorio right there. I decided to spend my time learning something IRL and started learning how to make DAPPs.
I just started another playthrough of Factorio and I'm impressed just how well it manages to incorporate so many fundamental concepts in CS/CE. It's an incredibly useful tool for refreshing your memory of all that stuff you learned in college, but never applied in the real-world.<p>I built an S-R Latch for turning on steam power to my base iff battery capacity falls below 10% and remain on until capacity is above 50%. That, and figuring out how to distribute goods evenly across <i>n</i> belts when you can only divide in half is pretty fun to figure out.
I often wonder if these types of games are sapping away the intellectual potential of humanity. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games.<p>What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris.
Reminds me of the computer that they build in the three body problem: hundreds of horsemen act as the bus, and infinite amount of aliens either holding a flag up or down act as a massive computer to calculate the three body problem.
Factorio is interesting because the circuit system is pretty much designed for doing computation in. For a while I wondered whether it would be possible to build a computer in Factorio <i>without</i> using the facilities intended for it and instead Heath-Robinsoning it together out of other things. Trains, for example; an empty train is a set of "holes" that could be used to make a trainsistor?<p>Unfortunately there aren't a lot of reversible transformations in Factorio, or mechanisms for one thing to influence another without being consumed.
Neat!<p>Reminds me of:<p><pre><code> - Pacman in Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VR_b9YwqH8
- Raycasting 3D engine in Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28UzqVz1r24
</code></pre>
My main questions are:<p><pre><code> - how long does it take?
- how does Factorio compare to VS Code as an IDE?</code></pre>
Funny that it's 8-bit when every Factorio 'wire' can transmit dozens of 32-bit signed ints simultaneously. Presumably it's just emulating a binary style computer rather than some novel architecture tailored to the capabilities of the Factorio circuit network.