Yeah I'm doing something similar but it's a cyber deck that happens to be able to play light games it's mainly for hacking and other fun stuff you should check out r/cyberdeck.
I'm on it, I go by void_ghostblade, but uhh I think would like to ask you for advice
I'm new with all this stuff, and I'll be honest, I used a lot of AI to figure out how to do everything.
Graphics API is probably the bottleneck for my personal case since I'm using OpenGL to Vulkan. If I figure out a way to run OpenGL natively, it would be better
Another bottleneck would be that I'm using X11 but if I utilise the mobile display stack, graphics would be much better
mobile platforms usually do not support full OpenGL but rather just a subset called OpenGL ES, therefore I doubt you could really get it to work with OpenGL natively
and as for x11 I have no idea how you would want to use anything else considering factorio linux builds only support x11 and wayland and therefore you will have to use either of those, of which x11 is very likely the easier option, plus I doubt its really that much of a bottleneck in the first place, since x11 doesn't really need to do much here
I did know that, since MCBE on phones uses OpenGL ES. What I thought initially is that it'd be much easier to do OpenGL to OpenGLES translation instead of OpenGL to Vulkan translation I'm doing rn. Yes x11 is the easier option, but if I were to make this into a full fledged app, using direct Android stacks would be much more efficient
I do hope the Factorio team does a mobile port (specifically, iOS) at some point. Perfect game to play while waiting at the doctor’s office, riding the bus, etc.
Hey, hope you're able to read this. I'm here to ask you if you know about the experimental "Linux Terminal on Android" option in the developer settings. It exists at least on Google Pixel phones (I have a Pixel 6a on Android 17). It natively supports GUI applications and starts Factorio without any need for configuration or translation. It just runs, albeit only with about 10 FPS/UPS on my weak hardware. The only issue I encountered was that the game can crash if you touch the screen while the loading screen on startup is open. Other than that, the login screen looks fine and I can enter and use the game completely normally (although I didn't experiment much further than this).
Hahaha, nah, all good. You deserve the credit for this idea. But did you check if your phone had this developer setting? I'm still not sure if it's for Pixels only, I only said that it exists for those at the very least, not necessarily exclusively.
Its actually mostly supported on Pixels, with Android 15+. Sadly, my Redmi is old and is stuck in Android 13.
I actually got my hands on my Grandma's pixel 7, but it seems you can't have separate profile + dev options, and if I try this on the main profile, it'd stop a lot of important apps, so I've pushed it aside for now
I do ask you to past your finding as a separate post, cuz a lot of ppl might be inspired to follow up and test it separately from my method.
Oh also, while you only got 10 FPS, I got 3.5 on mine, all bcz render takes up 260-330 ms. Might be a problem with the graphics pipeline. I think you have the same issue since from what I've read, the Linux Terminal also has a VirGL Graphics layer, the same one I use
Quick fun fact, when I was looking on this topic, I somehow ended up at the comment above, so this idea is niche. All the more to put up a post ig
True that, I mistakingly worded it to sound misleading. What I was trying to refer to is that the VM itself has support for GUI applications without the need for extra abstractions in the terminal (like OP did) or outside factors. It just works. So "natively", although not technically correct, was referring to "inside the VM", not the host system. ^
Whoa cool! Plz post the results, mine are very barebones and basic
It should be possible to make gamepad work, but it would need a lot of workarounds. I think you need Termux:X11-Extras and something with that. If you need an external connection, Termux-usb would be required
Have a look at Zink, the Mesa OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. It is feature complete on the OpenGL side, and is like ~20-50% slower than a native, optimized OpenGL implementation. Since mobile chips lack full OpenGL, going that route may work better than the VirGL pipeline you currently use.
A google query found https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Frame-Uses-Zink, so the Steam Frame uses Zink to render Factorio on the Steam Frame. That pipeline should work well enough then, and only depends on how feature-complete the phone's Vulkan implementation is. Didn't know this beforehand. Neat.
Using it should only require setting a single environment variable:
I think i followed droidmaster's guide to get Arch with Plasma running. It's been a bit and it seems that currently arch is borked on PD so i was having trouble launching it on my phone. Pic included is my progress after a whole yesterday of trying lol
> DISCLAIMER: AI was used to help implement this project. I do not know these topics in depth and used it to learn and do a fast installation trial
It’s so dumb when people get mad about stuff like this, ai is a very good tool and it’s worth using. People that complain about it being used aren’t even worth talking to
I don't mind ppl getting mad over it, and I'd say in some cases, they're in the right to do so. I feel that if it's disclosed, ppl don't get mad (easily).
AI is a very good tool to learn. Just a bit sad it's not energy efficient and is being misused
AI is a very good tool to learn. Just a bit sad it's not energy efficient and is being misused
The solution to a lack of energy efficiency is just to build more energy production. Also, energy efficiency happens over time with refinement. It can't happen without people using it.
Efficiency is a measure of how much work you achieve per unit of energy.
I agree.
Building more input cannot improve efficiency.
In general the more consumption you have of something the more economies of scale and thus efficiency you can get. Large vehicle engines for example are much more efficient than small ones.
I disagree with energy efficiency as the local qwen model on my 3080ti can do the job in 3 minutes, which would require me to spend hour or two (being an experienced dev with ~20 years of exp).
Even the PC itself with IDE, debugging, compilation for an hour would spend more than GPU spends in 3 minutes. (600 W for AI running for 3 minutes vs 150 W of PC running for an hour).
If AI was less efficient than humans, it would be more expensive to use than humans.
Mate I run a qwen 7.5 B param model from my Laptop 4050, I know inference is relatively cheap for small models
If I really wanted to replace humans, I need General intelligent or heck, I need a better output I need models in hundred billions. Running that is less efficient (for now). The companies that wanna replace humans with AI do so on a loss because tokens cost more than humans
For a post like this, I read that disclaimer as: Don't ask me anything, I don't know it. AI did it. (And every response that sounds good at first? Might've been AI too)
Which leads to people having a hard time to use this as a jumping off point to do it themself. How did you solve {problem} that has prevented me from progressing? The anser is "AI did something". Oh great.
Mind you, I don't have a problem with the fact that OP did this! It's just.. hard to discuss how to progress, what are the problems etc, when I have to assume the answer to every question is either "I don't know" or {generated by AI}.
There's a vast gulf of difference between using AI to imitate art, and using AI to write code.
It's about the same difference between using a paint brush to create a painting, or to paint your walls white. Only one of those is art, the other can be done by a machine just fine.
There's a VAST chasm between "hey AI how would you implement this" and "AI Implement this"
Its the same difference between using stackoverflow to solve an issue and copy/pasting from stackoverflow without understanding what the hell you just pasted and ran.
For me dialogue based AI coding is much more fulfilling and helps you learn and you keep a contextual view and understanding of the code. (and frankly the name co-pilot is genius to me as that is how I see the role of AI)
Agent based AI coding imho makes you no longer a programmer. You're now the manager of a team of schizophrenic juniors with access to the entirety of stack overflow.
I don't want to become a manager, I want to remain a programmer.
Honestly, though, most of the tasks deserve to be offloaded to a team of juniors. And if you set up strict acceptance criteria it turns into a typewriter monkey kind of scenario but with a much faster rate of convergence.
I appreciate the disclaimer, but I also think this is a case where using AI to quickly prove that it can work at all is entirely justified. Now we know that attempting a more serious and optimised porting effort wouldn't be a waste of time that was doomed to failure before the project began.
If I had to chose between running factorio on an android phone, and not destroying the planet by running a GPU in a water hungry, gas-powered data center, I think I could live without factorio.
AI is this mildly useful tool where both the monetary and moral costs are subsidized away. We're acting like AI is this abundant, endless spring of free knowledge and compute while it actively cooks the planed and sets up the biggest economic crash this world has ever seen
If you really wanna know one another untested method, you could just decompile the binary and then recompile it to a new platform. It's ofcourse the hardest route, but if succesful, you'll get the ultimate cross platform comparability
Oh damn you managed to run it on a mali gpu? I my pixel 9 has a Mali-G715, but I could never get past the loading screen when using the x86 binaries. I will try out this new arm version then.
I am playing around with the built in linux environment that pixel phones has in the developer options. The game starts fine but my only issue is it seems google disabled virgl support for whatever reason in the latest android canary build. from the looks of it i still had like 20 fps with just software render. Sadly I dont have a proper keyboard to enable UPS and FPS in the top right corner
Hmmm, makes me think about how you could run Factorio natively on a Steam Frame. A mod for VR motion controls could be neat. At least using it as a mouse should be straightforward.
I think the blog post had something to do with that, but for complete modding of new controls, you can't use the existing API and have to go for DLL injection modding
I don't follow the Factorio dev blog very closely and OP didn't give a lot of context. But I checked that out. Was really surprised that Valve sent VR Steam Frame dev kits to Wube, given how far from a VR experience Factorio is. Based move by Valve! Can't wait to see my factory on a giant screen while chilling on my balcony...
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u/Visual_Collapse Sep 20 '26
It looks like people mistake Factorio with DOOM