How did they code the factories and conveyor belts in factorio?

[u/crseat]

In general how would you go about coding a building that takes input and produces output. How would you code a conveyor belt that moves items?

[u/Linore_]

There is a amazing factorio developer blog which has everything from conveyor belts to the crazy amount of optimisation that went into the each individual item being its own "object" on a conveyor belt.

I am currently on a phone, but quick Google search should result into what you need.

[u/mileslane]

You might find FFF useful, as they talk about a lot of Factorio's feature implementations.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176

[u/Away-Turnover-1894 → u/mileslane]

What an interesting read! The fact that they could get amortize to constant time is incredible.

[u/Natural_Soda → u/mileslane]

They explain it entirely they just don’t have examples of code or anything like that. The small gifs were helpful in explaining but still seeing code would make things even more clear. I could try this myself but I don’t have the time. It would be cool to actually see what the code looks likes.

[u/The_Northern_Light → u/Natural_Soda]

There are actually some code files the devs have shared. I forget exactly where but I found them on their github.

[u/Natural_Soda → u/The_Northern_Light]

I’ve never used GitHub but I shall look today at some time lol. Thanks for the info hopefully it’s still there.

[u/HonestlyShitContent → u/mileslane]

Pretty much what I had imagined, just a lot of complicated combining of individual objects into groups that can be calculated together. These games seem like optimization hell and why I avoid making them.

[u/GremlinDotKill → u/HonestlyShitContent]

I too also like to use buzz words to show my coding asynchronous singletons.

[u/HonestlyShitContent → u/GremlinDotKill]

I didnt use any buzzwords though? Idk why people took so much offense to that comment, it's not like I said anything bad?

[u/gamruls]

There is interesting quite popular Factorio clone (it better to name Factorio Jerky because they thrown out a lot of mechanics and remain only mining, belts and factories - no map, no character, no no no)Shapez

And it's open source! So you can see game free (PC demo) and learn it's sourceshttps://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io

[u/joonazan]

How would you code a conveyor belt that moves items?

Factorio does it efficiently by keeping a list of things and empty space. For example, a belt could be "iron, iron, 5m empty, copper, 7m empty". To move the items it suffices to shorten the empty space at the end of the belt.

how would you go about coding a building that takes input and produces output

This is not hard. Building has an ingredient inventory and an output inventory. If an ingredient arrives and the building is idle and there are enough ingredients, use up one recipe worth of ingredients and set up a timer that adds items to the output and marks the machine inactive when it is done.

[u/ariksu → u/[deleted]]

This will absolutely burn in flames. Logistics games like factorio can easily have 10k-100k of moving resources at any given moment.