But Factorio is like a pinball machine with MILLIONS of balls in play at the same time, and it perfectly and efficiently tracks each and every one of them.
There is one sad aspect to Factorio: There is only one character: you. Alone. On a planet. All by yourself. Destroying the environment. But once you get over that depressing aspect, it's great fun! ;)
I think this is maybe true, but it's not a fair comparison. The real comparison is how much effort would go into making factorio with all of its polish in a 3d world rather than a 2d world.
Factorio's technical impressiveness (?) Comes from how well it's designed and implemented. The limitations that it imposes are part of the reason it runs so well, and also what make it such a great game.
> The physics system is a complex bit of math but is fairly isolated from the rest of the engine and has relatively few entities to process. If it gets things "wrong" in minor ways, the player is unlikely to tell.
The difference between doing the above for physics and graphics is orders of magnitude in how expensive they are, and how complicated they are to implement. You're right that most people don't notice when they go slightly wrong, but they often go catastrophicly wrong. (Much more often in 3d than in 2d). Factorio skirts around this by not running a general purpose physics sim for the game logic, and constraining the problem space (which to me is even more impressive than getting a 3d physics engine right)
It's a great game, but quite different than Factorio in many ways, and much simpler along certain dimensions, with less abstraction and meta-programming: no drones, no blueprints, etc.
The fact that Factorio is based on a two-dimensional grid vastly simplifies it and makes it more like a precise programming language or spreadsheet, than a free-form 3d graphics editor. I do love them both, though.
Don't get me wrong: 3D adds a lot of cool stuff, like the ability to make layers and build vertically way up into the sky. And you have much more freedom about where you place objects. But that makes it practically impossible to implement the kind of precise grid-based blueprints and drone construction and logistics system that Factorio has.
To its credit, Satisfactory would be practically unusable if it weren't for the wonderfully easy-to-use well designed construction tools, that make it a snap to route and connect conveyer belts and pipes in 3D. But that's a much messier user interface problem that the precise grid of tightly constrained tiles that Factorio uses. But it does live up to its name: building and connecting 3D conveyor belts and especially pipes is quite satisfying!
Here's a great example of how you can abuse the fantastic degree of freedom that Satisfactory provides -- but that freedom comes at a cost of user interface complexity and the lack of higher level automation and abstraction -- the features that make Factorio such addictive "programmer crack".
I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8&ab_channel=Let%2...
The Satisfactory developers must have been equally horrified and gratified to see how people abused their beautiful game in unintended ways, but they responded by optimizing it a lot so it still runs smoothly. But the scale of Factorio's world is still much larger than Satisfactory, even though it's more constrained.
And another thing about Satisfactory is that the world is hand designed and breathtakingly rich and beautiful, unlike Factorio's procedurally generated world (which has beautiful 2D graphics, but no human touch). But that makes it even more tragic that the goal is to cut down all the trees, peel up all the glowing slugs, and ruin the bucolic countryside with mega-factories belching out pollution and waste.
More about Satisfactory:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156912
>Satisfactory is like a 3D version of Factorio, which lets you build huge multi-layer mega factories up into the sky. But it's not as deep and sophisticated as Factorio, and doesn't have drones or blueprints. (That would be a lot more difficult to accomplish in free-form 3D, than with Factorio's 2D tile grid.) It's kind of like the giant simple Legos for younger kids, as opposed to Factorio that's more like Lego Technic.
>Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D version of Factorio, but I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and sophistication. Satisfactory's world is breathtakingly beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of procedurally generated, which makes it all the more satisfying to despoil and ruin with huge mega-factories belching out smoke and radiation.
In Factorio, you have a very large number of active objects with very dense, complex, time-critical and deterministic interactions. In most other games, you have relatively few active entities. The game gives you the illusion of a rich living world, but a lot of the graphical bits floating around can't actually be interacted with. The physics system is a complex bit of math but is fairly isolated from the rest of the engine and has relatively few entities to process. If it gets things "wrong" in minor ways, the player is unlikely to tell.
Also, many AAA game physics and graphics engines work the same enough that engines can even be reused. There's a relatively small amount of bespoke system design. It's just following the same well-tread paths. Factorio's gameplay has enough novelty that the engine has to solve challenging somewhat unique problems.
Source: Senior software engineer at EA for eight years and wrote a best-selling book on software architecture for games.