Fred and Loathing on The Internet

The Debris In The Remains of The Cheese Factory Was Delicious

2024-Mar-04

The clamor mentioned in the prior blog post has been met with a response from the development team! Well, not that particular line of clamoring. I just meant that the clamor in general, i.e. requests from the audience have become a steady source of ideas for updates here at fredlambuth.com. We’re starting to get a whole gosh darn feedback driven software ecosystem beginning! Enough bloviating about the clamoring. First update to report is the tracks displayed with each blog post now show a random assortment of 3 from the top10 songs of that day. The way the daily top ten is aggregated each day produces a top three that appears static at the rate blog posts are made. Now each time you will see a random pick of three from the top ten of that post date.

User section updates deserve their own paragraph break. AJAX! What we have there is starting to look like a whole blown late 2000s web app. Woah. The update reports getting ahead of me, but there is unprecedented stuff going on all over the place. Thanks to the help of the friends of the team here at fredlambuth.com we have found the very obvious flaws in the routes I use to handle user actions. Some have been addressed already. Many are post-it notes on our board yet to be completed. The new user registration process should now be much more contained in possible scope and with more error messages delivered by my app rather than the server processes used to run my app.

That exclamation about AJAX, which is I guess some sort of Javascript module? I just know it as something that lets a web page refresh without making a whole new page request. All my other pages are Web 1.0 stuff that requires a whole page refresh for subsequent requests to be added to the initial page. Not anymore! This means I’m using Javascript adroitly. Well… not adroitly, but this is a first here for using any Javascript outside of the Bootstrap libraries used to shape HTML with HTML language. The 8 or so lines of Javascript I got from the internet were rather easy to digest. They behave remarkably like the ‘callbacks’ to refresh Dash apps that are pointed to divs that are named with a ‘div id’.

An endless scroll feature is going on over at /spotify/right_now. If you click the load button the page will grow with HTML results until my data runs out. It would only take 10,000 clicks! It took some back and forth with even greater discoveries in the development process that will greatly speed up web dev testing. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to read a book about actual web development now that I’m hitting very well-traveled material that probably has well-traveled rookie mistakes.

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I might start bifurcating my blog posts with a hard line rule so that the folks at home who don’t care much for the tech-talk first half can jump right to the more broader material in the second. What we have is a third entry about Satisfactory! Oh I hope I interpreted the sounds of the clamor correctly by deciding to go on about a video game that simulates the thrills of finding ways to make processes more efficient! That’s what the video game market wants! This is only mildly sarcastic. There are other sim-automation games out there.

A complaint I had heard from a Factorio player made about Satisfactory was the lack of being unable to deploy blueprinted factories as rapidly as liked. That is going too efficient with a recreational pursuit for me. My job and my personal application development follows thoughtfully developed execution paths. I find amusement by dabbling with automated systems. I do not want to go full spreadsheet. This game offers some wide margins for error. Were it not so forgiving I would think about doing more preplanning. Then again, if preplanning was required to enjoy the game I would avoid it all together. I get zen rock garden calmness from making adjustments in this game that are handled extemporaneously.

The game has a very expanding difficulty curve as the game progresses. There are ‘phases’ of production that are shifted whenever a certain amount of resources are fed to the space elevator. The numbers go up by a factor of 10 each phase, and the requested items become increasingly complex. Phase 1 has you sending a few dozen basic fabricated parts like screws, metal sheets, or copper wire. The last phase requires several hundred items that require four distinct parts that themselves require four different types of parts. Items such as jet engines, treated plutonium, or radar components. The big curveball to this exponentially increasing scale of complexity and size is the distances between resources. Distance becomes a new dimension about how to construct your production facilities.

The first and fastest manner are the magical conveyor belts. They move non stop despite a lack of electrical power. Every other item in the game will require a measured wattage of electrical power. Belts instead are powered by exploitative mojo, running even when a blackout has silenced all your other moving parts. Liquids are affected by gravity, so handling elevation becomes a concern. The belts treat horizontal and vertical motion all the same. The design fro the parts made to rapidly redirect conveyor direction look pretty darn cool when snuggled in to their production lines.

Trucks of small and large sizes are in my production lines at the moment. They move large distances between my manufacturing nodes that are too large for one of those perpetual motion belts. It would be possible to build a moving conveyor belt moving resources between an aluminum deposit high up in the mountains down to an oil well. The default POV style building tools would become highly burdensome for such a project. The trucks are bare in their options for fitting themselves into production lines. Those one-track minded trucks I find to be a better option than making conveyor belt segments for kilometers.

This interface could become less burdensome if I were to use those blueprints I had spoken about earlier. Perhap I might make some very default structures I build whenever I start up a new resources processing/manufacturing node. Like walls to hold my electrical switching instead of power poles. The scale of production my phase requires would become a tedious time sink if I don’t put some effort into building time-saving tools into repeat building patterns. I will not go full spreadsheet on this game, but I will institute DRY principles.

In what I call my own Phase 3 of playing this game, I had begun refactoring the facilities around where I started playing the game on the map. Phase 2 to 3 marks when I rebuilt my power facilities into a stable supply so that I would avoid having to deal with a total area wide blackout. Coming up with a plan to re energize my facilities took my first filtration with spreadsheet style planning. To make sure that never happens again I made sure I build redundant systems that would keep the machinery necessary for electrical production and made some signs to point where the circuit breaker points are in my electrical grid.

Cities Skyline had been the previous game that scratched my zen garden itch. It was kind of the first game to do so. I enjoyed the SimCity series that pioneered the simulation city management genre. Those games had a delayed, but still inevitable endgame. You could keep the city going if you did not mind a much less dynamic pace after meeting all the challenges that come with building a city as far the available map space would let you. Cities Skyline moved away from meeting objectives and into a ‘city painter’. The extremely forgiving difficulty put me off from keeping on with that game. It was remarkably hard to make a city ‘fail’. Ultimately the game is supposed to be a puzzle about city or traffic management that should be able to be solved by the graphics and tools built into the game. I felt Cities Skyline often has rules that are opaque to learn and toothless in their execution unless you made some very narrow choices in your city layout.

Satisfactory has shown me the rules of the game very early on and continues to present novelty in how to mess with those rules well into the ‘late’ phase of the game. The late game itself is almost a whole new type of game that makes everything before it an education in theories on how to set up production lines. Revisiting the manufacturing nodes I had built in earlier phases of the game have proven to be immensely (as the game’s title would suggest) satisfying. Every little building project becomes a brief excursion into Frank Lloyd Wright ideas. The wall and floor construction features are magically forgiving as well, so making aluminum casing production plants resemble Falling Water is a serene building process.

As much as I could go on about how much I enjoy this digital bucket of legos, I believe I have scouted the edges of the game's physical map and the facilities need to be built for the last phase. I do not imagine going past the last official phase of production. I really have no desire to make fake factories that are visually breathtaking. I don’t want to live in this damn game, just have a meditation break for a few months.