Show HN: Get started modding Factorio in TypeScript | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Get started modding Factorio in TypeScript

cdaringe.github.io

69 pointscdaringe12 comments

I did not know that a TypeScript to Lua transpiler existed!

I'm also pleasantly surprised by this transpiler discovery.

4 years ago I was managing a Feed The Beast (A heavily modded and themed Java Minecraft version) server and in that mod packages was OpenComputers (https://ocdoc.cil.li/) which exposed a lua api and in game computers to the players. The OpenComputers Package Manager (https://github.com/MightyPirates/OpenComputers/blob/master-M...) became a limiting factor to my players as they wanted some ability to load from other sources so I converted the program to MoonScript (https://moonscript.org/) and maintained a fork with modifications for them.

MoonScript was certainly more pleasant to write and maintain (compared to Lua), but type safety would've definitely helped squash some of the weirder side effect driven bugs. That said, I still think MoonScript is a great middle ground for things that are written in Lua but need some extra organizational tools.

I understand the appeal of type safety, but will we ever see the end of this trend of overstating its value?

At what point is the value of type safety offset by the complexity of transpiling scripting languages? TS is a superset of JS, so that is at least a pretty simple conversion... but TS to Lua?

I'm low vision / blind and the other day I sat down to try to make Factorio self-speaking. I wanted to be able to hover over items in the inventory and have the game speak what they were, as a start. Though I like the docs pretty well and I got as far as having the game read chat messages aloud (you can dump to a file and I wrote a little speech server to check the file for updates and read its contents if it changed on disc), the names and descriptions of items aren't available to the API, which seems like a pretty basic oversight. I could likely have implemented a reading of structures clicked on in the game world, but not of items in the inventory.

It's not an oversight (there has been much discussion about this limitation on the forums), more a consequence of some of the design decisions of how mods work: factorio runs a lockstep simulation model, so all the clients need to operate deterministically and consistently across for all players. This includes the mods, so the modding API is deliberately restricted to only information which is in common between all players. Due to internationalisation, the names and descriptions can be different between players, and this could easily introduce desyncs between players.

Now, there's a bunch of possible solutions to this problem (I think the best approach is to have the concept of a UI mod which can affect the interface but not the game world. As an added benefit you could allow users to have different sets of UI mods installed and not depend on the server using it), but the engineering effort involved is not so simple as just adding another part to the API (and factorio developers are generally going to try to do something well if they do it).

the descriptions is no surprise, but the names is. player.get_inventory Id think would have enough to get going. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/LuaControl.html#LuaContr... did you hit a dead end there?

Getting the inventory doesn't really do anything. What I need is the inventory item under the cursor.

Some more context:

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=93690

This couldn't have come a at a more convenient time. I was looking this weekend to write my first mod but was struggling to learn both Lua nd the Factorio API at the same time.

But just curious, does anyone thing a regex train renamer sounds like a good idea? I'm thinking you can select an area then change all stop, stations and schedules according to a regular expression.

This sounds cool for sure.

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