They have sideloading and the ability to run their own store with their own payment processor outside of Google Play on Android, so what exactly are they trying to accomplish here?
The only thing I can see is that Epic simultaneously wants the ability to run their own store and participate in the platformâs default store while being exempt from needing to participate in that storeâs in-app purchase infrastructure⌠which would defeat the entire reason they would need their own store in the first place?
I guess they (Epic) still benefit from the audience they reach via iOS or Android. I have no idea if Epic have their own independent store/launcher for Fortnite available via mobile. I assume they have to go through the Google/Apple duopoly.
News seems to just be leaks now.
Itâs possible it could just mean the Xbox version will launch the same day the Xbox launches, even after the XBOX version is already out.
You could only sideload on Android for the longest time; they only jumped to the Play store 4 months ago:
I think allowing sideloading gives Google a huge out here. Epic complained about the warnings Android puts up when trying to download and run software outside the Play store but I think Google has a solid claim in trying to protect users from malicious apps.
Gimme that Christian sideload.
Factorio is out of early access after almost 9 years! Now finally I can put it on my âgames of the yearâ list without worrying about technicalities
Iâve very briefly given high praise to Factorio multiple times but Iâve had difficulty articulating why the game is more than the sum of its parts. For the occasion of 1.0 let me try to collect some coherent critical thoughts.
Weâve been talking lately about how game designers make spaces, then players play in those spaces, and how the magic of the medium is the tensions between the formal and the organic, the map-of-meaning in the designerâs mind and the one the playerâs mind. Whatâs special about Factorio is how deeply it scrambles those traditional roles.
In base-mod Factorio, the devs have provided a set of rules for creating a map â a real-time level designer where you need to gather resources to increase the variety and number of âMario Maker blocksâ at your disposal. (Think of those Mario Maker maps that win themselves automatically if no button is pressed: to make one of those is the goal.) You carefully learn and master how they interact and placing them in the right configurations out on the open map is the most fundamental part of Factorio. When you reach enough success with conveyor belts, you get access to trains; enough success with coal and solar, you get access to nuclear plants, and each technological stage requires more and more intricate factories to make it function.
Having done that, you have created a âidle RPGâ style flywheel for yourself which automatically grinds you forward in the game simply by waiting and which you can passively watch run with satisfaction. And just as in Dragon Quest, you reach a point where the âearly-game grinding spotâ becomes a waste of time and you must find the next higher-level grinding spot: the impetus to go to the next stage of technology or scale in Factorio feels exactly like this.
However, there are sudden discontinuities that emerge as gradual imbalances accumulate until a disequilibrium is reached, and your beautiful machine can crash to a halt, requiring you to pause scaling it up further and to dive in to correct existing parts of it. It can be that you ran out of a coal patch so there is a power outage, it can be that there was a hole in your defensive wall against aliens and a straggler broke one critical tile, or there can be a deeper imbalance where overproduction somewhere stole resources from another part of the factory leading to underproduction there, and you need to rethink and redistribute, making major patchups to an existing part of your factory. These emergent puzzles can look like as simple as adventure game/Zelda puzzles, or they can look more like Zachtronics puzzles of refactoring cleverly inside a contained space (and you curse yourself because it was your own decision to build out in a space this small 5 hours ago!)
Factorio is many games in one, and you are constantly switching the type of game you are playing and want to play, because you must play all of them in turn if you aspire to supreme factory scale and efficiency. It was you who designed and placed everything, you already have a map of the entire situation in your mind, but your factory becomes so complex you lose track, and therefore these things are real puzzles anyway. So the designer-meaning-map and the player-meaning-map are one and the same when these disequilibriums arise. Therefore Factorio at once appeals to players aspiring for true freedom and those who simply aspire for âshortest-pathâ efficiency. Each must wear both hats, because in Factorio the âlaziestâ path to success is also mind-expandingly complex. Indeed, Factorioâs most difficult achievement is entitled âLazy Bastardâ.
Maybe most importantly, there is a thriving community: up to 8 players can build up the same factory, like programmers next to each other in an office usually splitting up to work on different parts of code in a project while staying present on a team chat, and sometimes joining together for teaching and pair programming. And there is a flexible mod system so players can play the role not only of Mario Maker level creators, but also the devs of Mario Maker itself.
As a counter point, Iâm not sure Googleâs (mostly automated) review process makes you much safer, and there have been a bunch of news articles about malicious apps in the Play Store itself.
They should have the same warnings in front of all apps, regardless of where they come from. Itâs disingenuous for Google to claim they are doing much to protect you.
One of Factorioâs biggest successes is how your means of creation scale up as your means of production do so the complexity is never too overwhelming. Once youâve got the necessary infrastructure you can build or dismantle whole chunks of base at once. Satisfactory, in contrast, doesnât get it at all and so above a certain scale everything is a pain to build.
I would disagree slightly â I do find Factorio gives you the tools to make it not tedious at a large scale, but I still find it overwhelming.
On a personal note: I am a programmer and was roped into playing Factorio (I didnât want to at first) by one of my friends in Silicon Valley (a childhood friend who moved here, like me, to advance his career and work on the big, exciting software projects). Factorio is indeed very popular in Silicon Valley and not by coincidence.
Software engineers intuitively understand and appreciate the dynamic I described because as we maintain software projects over time, we too are constantly wearing different hats: building features then maintaining, fixing bugs or refactoring an entire system so that the category of bug becomes obsolete. We challenge ourselves to become experts in one technology stack, then just as we have achieved that goal, we move on to become beginners in another technology stack. And our software systems, like our Factorio factories, are always deeply imperfect, holding a tenuous balance against the tensions from within themselves and from the unpredictable outside world. Every software system is an artifact that serves capitalism but in so doing expresses our own humanity: they are all at once ugly and beautiful, having a long and strange history of missteps and corrections, as they constantly improve through our striving and our learning from mistakes.
The beauty of a software project over time and the fulfillment a software engineer feels in their career arises as the dynamics between design and implementation and users and handoffs to other programmers and revisiting old projects play out over a period of months or years. In Factorio, an engineer who is in a dark place in their real-life job (in real-world software serving business needs, the rosy feelings of fulfillment I have described are few and far between, and frustrations are the rule) can vividly experience once again what they have forgotten in the daily grind: the joyful dynamics that attracted them to their career in the first place. Or a person who chose a different path in life, but temporarily wishes to explore a different hobby, can experience my chosen careerâs very specific enrichments in the course of a few weekends, playing deep into the night, always excited to learn and build the next thing every two or three hours.
Thatâs a great write up although I will say with the utmost respect and jealousy that when I hear a game is beloved by programmers I canât get away from it fast enough!
Protip: If you love Factorio and want more, but just starting another new map just isnât cutting it, the creator has openly stated the point of the game was to recreate the experience of playing Minecraft tech mods, so consider giving those a shot, since theyâre constantly changing and evolving.
Myself being a programmer, I felt the last thing I needed was a programming-adjacent game to fill my weekends too! Thatâs why I havenât touched any of the Zachtronics games. Nowadays, I make a point of never programming during my off hours, and I try hard to build up completely separate hobbies even if it is hard to find the time. So that to be a programmer is a side of myself I can turn on and off, not something that controls me because I have nothing else.
There is a category of engineers who allow software to fill their entire life and identity and to me this is to make the fundamental mistake of Stevens in Remains of the Day. These are partial joys that cannot complete our life on their own, and like Stevens, we do not work entirely for ourselves: most of us serve a greater power that we are not sure in the end whether we will be able to say, âI am proud to have served this powerâ or âI am ashamed to have served itâ. Indeed, Factorio itself is so in tune with the software engineerâs world that it itself contains an expression of that same ethical queasiness that lies under the surface of the cultureâs apparent cheer and confidence. I am not sure, as I cut down the forest, cover the rivers with landfill and clear out alien settlements to make my factory bigger and bigger, whether I truly believe in the value system I am acting to advance.
Ultimately though, Factorio is connected to the humanity of software engineering and not to its inhumanity. When our real software engineering has become inhuman, then Factorio is a refuge. Thatâs why I changed my mind about it after my friend finally convinced me to play it with him.
I find the huge difference between real software engineering and programming games (Zachtronics and Factorio included) is that the games present you with very interesting problems that can be solved in a hour or so and it feels incredibly satisfying, while real problems with software can take months to fix and thereâs politics and information gathering and often there arenât nice clean solutions and you just feel beat up and worn out afterwards.
please please please please change mongo footed next. im so sick of my skateboard stance being the âretardâ stance
Nothing like finding a problem and having an epiphany about a neat way to solve it and then running into the person who wants to make it a meeting. And add 8 more people. Who can all be afraid that fixing this might possibly impact their schedule, possibly more than the hour you just spent in a room together.
Itâs funny that their trailer, playing up the gorgeous aesthetics of the game, lies about plant life â once itâs gone, itâs gone, baby, and it was your fault. You wonât be building these belching machines without creating a blasted heath in a twenty-kilometer radius.
i learned to skate pushing with my front foot too
iâm trying to learn pushing with my back foot just because iâm trying to get my left leg better at balancing and stuff but iâll tell you right now i was better than like 90% of the kids that skated in college so who cares what foot you push on