[bluelightning2k]

Great write up. Thank you. Really great!

I was reminded of the factorio blog. That game's such a huge optimization challenge even by today's standards and I believe works with the design.

One interesting thing I remember is if you have a long conveyor belt of 10,000 copper coils, you can basically simplify it to just be only the entry and exit tile are actually active. All the others don't actually have to move because nothing changes... As long as the belts are fully or uniformly saturated. So you avoid mechanics which would stop that.

[plopz]

I was pretty disappointed with how Factorio reworked how fluids worked in the expansion. The old system had its quirks and the new system is obviously more performant, but it throws realism out the window which is a bummer.

[Cpoll]

I don't miss it. I also found Satisfactory's old fluid system (with concepts like sloshing) wildly unintuitive. I'll go so far as to say that accurate fluid dynamics is detrimental to any game that's not about beavers and water table management.

[rkagerer]

That's the second time I heard the beaver game come up here... Guess I really ought to try it!

[Linosaurus]

It’s rather neat, and recently hit 1.0.

That game, Timberborn, shares some design elements with roller coaster tycoon.

A block based 3d world they can be modified by the player.

Units walking around on player defined paths, with their mood influenced by pretty bushes.

But there are no obvious performance considerations like in the article.

[Starlevel004]

The old system was nonfunctional and any base that used lots of fluids (like modded ones, or new space age ones) were constantly running up against nonsensical mechanics.