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Comment by jader201 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, they cover performance too, but sounds like we will definitely see impact with mega bases:

One of the first questions you might ask is how does the game perform. We worked on many optimizations to make sure the game performs as well as possible. You should expect 30-60 FPS (both in TV mode and handheld mode). As for UPS, the average player should be able to go through all of the content and launch a rocket, while staying at 60 UPS. But don't expect to be able to build mega-bases without UPS starting to drop, sometimes significantly.

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I see potential for playing with your Switch on a beefy community server, where the server is responsible for UPS.

Edit: I guess the client also has to run the simulation, never mind. It seems like overall, Factorio is well under-optimized though. For a game that has been out forever, it still has a huge ceiling.

Do base your believe that Factorio is under-optimised on anything specific?

The Factorio devs regularly put out blog posts on the optimisations they have done, like [1][2][3] (and many others), and they have done so for a long time. This gives me the opposite impression.

[1] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-322 [2] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281 [3] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209

I think specifically for multiplayer, you could handle non-visible chunks on the server and figure out a better way to update the client with what it needs, rather than requiring the client to handle the full simulation.

I know it’s a well optimized piece of software, but when you get into something like the space mod with multiple worlds, where chunks you might not deal with for a long time still tax you, you can see how there’s conceivably a lot that could be done.

So, yeah, wrong to say “under optimized”.

I’m also aware that they haven’t been optimizing for a massive multi-world server with tons of clients. I definitely don’t mean it as a dig or that they aren’t top class.

I'm curious if any of these improvements have/will trickle over into the PC space as well. Some of those I'm sure might be switch-only, though.

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