Hey all. I'm aware of your requests, but I have a hard time redesigning Factorissimo conceptually to be functional, useful and enjoyable but not broken in Space Age. While mechanical compatibility has increased, gameplay design compatibility has not. I've played Space Age during the beta with Factorissimo in mind, and there are a bunch of major and minor design challenges I'm facing (new and old):
- Remote control, map features and production graphs are poorly compatible with the concept of factory buildings.
- Robots can't enter or leave factory buildings. Construction robots (and remote view in general) are terrible at moving factory buildings sensibly. Spidertrons should be able to enter factory buildings, but I don't see a way to implement that in a manner that is not extremely finicky. Construction requests could be forwarded outside the factory building, but that leaves tons of edge cases and the potential to break with other mods.
- Factory buildings have to be locked to individual planets to support planet-specific recipes and machines, they cannot be transported via rockets because that would break both rocket balance and surface restrictions.
- Factory buildings destroy area balance on Fulgora unless locked behind Aquilo tech (foundation).
- New mobility improvements have made the scale of your factory a complete non-issue. Space is less of a constraint than ever before. There's no more reason to build compact except personal preference.
- Powerful robots and roboport equipment make moving an entire outdoors factory from A to B easier than moving a factory building.
- New orders of magnitude of machine speed and productivity make it even harder to funnel a whole factory building's worth of ingredients and products through its limited connection slots.
- Space Age introduces many space-constraint gameplay challenges that are similar to the ones introduced by Factorissimo but more interesting.
My own Factorio playstyle has evolved to use lots of trains and big sprawling tiling assembly lines. I haven't played a proper game with Factorissimo installed since somewhere around Factorio 0.14. Before I played through the beta, I had hopes that Space Age would make Factorissimo more interesting to use for me, but I must admit that the opposite is the case. My heart is just not in this mod anymore, and that makes it really really tough to develop for it, especially with the mental health issues I continue to face.
I'm very thankful to everyone who loves this mod concept, and I've been very glad I could make so many people happy over the years, but I'm gonna have to call this the end of my involvement. I encourage everyone who loves this mod to attempt to write a better factory buildings mod than this one, and I especially encourage you to start from scratch instead of copy-pasting my old hacky code made back when the Factorio API wasn't that good yet. There are so many places that have obvious technical improvements (see notnotmelon's fork for example), and there are so many design adjustments that could make for a better user experience. I hope everyone will still be able to play this game in the way they find most enjoyable.
Thanks for playing,
Magma
