Dana: crafting tree/graph explorer

by Credne

Dana provides ways to explore and display the recipe graph of Factorio (vanilla or modded). This mod is still in alpha stages: it is recommended to use it on a dedicated (sandbox) save, or at minimum to backup your save. While the mod should work in multiplayer, be careful about griefing (rendering huge graphs can freeze the game for several minutes).

Utilities

2 years ago

0.18 - 1.1

3.67K

source code

Download

g Is this still being worked on?

King_of_Blades

3 years ago

Just checking in on this mod, mostly, since it has such potential for modded games.

Credne

3 years ago

TL;DR

You can consider this mod in maintenance mode. No new features anytime soon.

Long version

That's a good question... I've been asking myself "Should I continue working on this mod ?" for a few months now. And sadly, the reasonable (& probable) answer will have to be "no".

From a user perspective, I can agree that this Mod is extremely barebone. And to get "only" this far, it took 36,000+ lines of Lua, and quite a few headaches iterating/improving upon algorithms from research articles. Only this far took pretty much a year of work full time. Technically, I'm sure Dana is already in the top 10 most complex mod on this portal. This was quite a hard ride, but certainly a ride I'm proud of :-)

These last few months I did work on an experimental branch, which have a couple minor new features. It cost 4,000 lines of code... Too slow and demotivating. Part of it is because I set extremely high standards in quality (probably way too high just for a mod). But the main issue is that I have to use Lua for a Factorio mod. This language is inappropriate for large, complex, performance-critical projects, which is what Dana is. I'm not productive enough. I looked really hard into libraries/tools to become more productive with Lua, but it never payed back. Lua is quite a barren language where if you need a wheel, you have to invent it. Even if the wheel has been available on any other high level language for decades.

eradicator

3 years ago

(updated 3 years ago)

Sad but understandable. Factory Planner or Recipe Book style mods are kinda ill suited to explore the graph, the former because it's not designed for a one-time "quick look" and the latter because it doesn't show enough info at once. Was hoping Dana could fill the gap.

But I've tried writnig my own library which ended up eating all my time so in the end all the actual mods I made are kinda small, and the library doesn't even cover half of what I'd want it to cover even after several years of on-and-off work. So I understand the feeling of constantly ramming your head against the walls of factorio+lua's limits.