Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

Post by jztemple2 »

Infinifactory released in Early Access on Steam today. It's from the folks who brought you SpaceChem
Infinifactory is a sandbox puzzle game by Zachtronics, the creators of SpaceChem and Infiniminer. Build factories that assemble products for your alien overlords, and try not to die in the process.

LIKE SPACECHEM… IN 3D! Design and run factories in a first-person, fully 3D environment.
HISTOGRAMS ARE BACK! Optimize your solutions, and then optimize them more when you see how much better your friends did.
VISIT EXOTIC ALIEN LOCALES! Explore a story-driven campaign with 30+ puzzles, audio logs, and more.
BLOCKS THAT MOVE! Go beyond the campaign and push the limits of Infinifactory’s next-generation block engine in the sandbox.
STEAM WORKSHOP INTEGRATION! Create, share, and play custom puzzles on Steam Workshop.
"...assemble products for your alien overlords, and try not to die in the process". I worked in a pizza place in college like that.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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A good gameplay video.

And another one.

User reviews on Steam have been very positive. I might have to break down and get this sooner than later.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I bought it and played it all evening. It's polished and fun, the learning curve ramps up nicely, and I haven't run into any bugs (except a crash on exit after many hours playing). The controls could use some tweaks, but it's already lots better than SpaceChem's UI. I'm loving it, and if you love SpaceChem i think it's safe to say you'll love this too. I think the opposite is true too, though. I doubt anyone who didn't like SpaceChem is going to like this either, unless it was only the interface putting you off of SpaceChem.

The online histograms aren't there yet, you only get your own scores, but I'm sure he'll add them soon. I do expect some levels will be tweaked, part of the early access is that every level has a three question survey about difficulty and fun after you beat it. For the most part I think he's already got it tuned nicely, but I really like that it's taking "early access" seriously. But if he's still planning on tweaking levels, the histograms would have to get wiped anyway.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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The development roadmap, as published on Reddit.

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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I'm definitely in on this. Deciding if I am going to be patient though.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I found this article from the dev. Wheather it proves to be true or not, I dont know.
Why Early Access? This is the first time you're doing an Early Access release, so I'm just wondering why you're going down this route now.

Barth: So I've actually never been a fan of Early Access. I think it's a bunch of developers prematurely releasing stuff that should not be released. A lot of the stuff I released a long time ago was not very good in the scheme of things, but I still only released them after I thought they were ready to go. You do a little bit of prep and testing, and you put a lot of work into it, and then you release it so that people can enjoy it...

...So what our plan is, our Early Access is going to be what we would have released if we weren't doing Early Access. Then we're going to take a much longer, more deliberate and visible period of responding to player feedback, improving the game, adding more content, and then when everything's totally locked down, releasing. That's the plan.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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tiny ogre wrote: The online histograms aren't there yet, you only get your own scores, but I'm sure he'll add them soon.
Correction, they actually seem to be working now. I guess he just needed a day to actually collect some data before there was anything to show :)
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I just picked this up as well, couldn't resist the self-induced OO effect :D
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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OK, this is just fun :D. My first score was, well, average?
Image
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And my next one...
Image
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And my next thought is, how did some people do it in just over 40 cycles? Challenge accepted! :D

If you liked SpaceChem, you will definitely get that same feeling here. However, hopefully they will put out a demo for Infinifactory, because I think there will be folks who didn't enjoy the SpaceChem demo who will find Infinifactory more to their liking. The use of 3D and the familiarity of Minecraft-like block handing would IMHO makes this game more approachable than SpaceChem.

By the way, there is already Steam Workshop support for fan made puzzles.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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jztemple2 wrote:And my next thought is, how did some people do it in just over 40 cycles? Challenge accepted! :D
Figured it out. There's a setting called "Input Rate" down in the lower right corner when you are setting blocks. You can ramp that up.

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Still lots of fun :wink:
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I don't know if I should be proud or disappointed by this result!

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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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This is the latest one I've finished. It's a monster. It's called Small Excavator

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You really can't appreciate how complex these puzzles are without videos, and even then, you would have to experience all the trial and error it takes. At least unlike SpaceChem you don't really feel hemmed in, and having a 3D world really makes it easier to visualize the possible solutions. On the other hand, being 3D means placement of all the conveyer blocks, the welding blocks, etc have to take into account the places where you let objects fall to give yourself more room. There is a path visualization tool which helps, but sometimes it's just easier to put a plain block as a milestone locator.

Now it's odd because I'm someone who doesn't like puzzle games, but I like this. It really does stimulate the mind. I had to figure out how to break up a steam of incoming resource blocks into two groups of three and two. Now splitting an input in half was pretty straightforward, but three and two? It took me a few minutes and then I had an epiphany and it turned out to be elegantly simple. You can't imagine how rewarding that can be to someone in their sixties to be able to solve something like SMALL Excavator.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I think I am on the second one after the tutorials (Something wave detector?) and I feel like I have to really think for the first time. I decided it was a better idea to go to bed. I'll think later, I have work to do.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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jztemple2 wrote:It really does simulate the mind.
Your contraptions are way more complex than mine if you're already simulating minds! :P
I had to figure out how to break up a steam of incoming resource blocks into two groups of three and two. Now splitting an input in half was pretty straightforward, but three and two? It took me a few minutes and then I had an epiphany and it turned out to be elegantly simple. You can't imagine how rewarding that can be to someone in their sixties to be able to solve something like SMALL Excavator.
I finished that level and your solution looks smaller than mine. Though I can't see the beginning of your machine in that shot, I think you may have found a different method for splitting them up than I did. Although I didn't bump up the input rate either, which would also make an otherwise similar solution look much different.

On a later puzzle, you have to turn individual blocks into a structure made up of 12 blocks. You think splitting into 3 and 2 is interesting? You will apply whatever you learned from that one several times over :) I did finally bump up the input rate when I got to that one, it actually made it easier in that case.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I have a question that probably doesn’t matter to most people but, does this game do anything to move beyond just a puzzle game? (Story, characters, atmosphere)

I know Space Chem at least made an effort, even if it wasn’t the most thrilling.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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Lordnine wrote:I have a question that probably doesn’t matter to most people but, does this game do anything to move beyond just a puzzle game? (Story, characters, atmosphere)

I know Space Chem at least made an effort, even if it wasn’t the most thrilling.
The atmosphere of the game is very puzzling in a pretty amusing way, but it's really just barebones and the game is about solving puzzles.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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tiny ogre wrote:
jztemple2 wrote:It really does simulate the mind.
Your contraptions are way more complex than mine if you're already simulating minds! :P
Fixed it! That's what I get for trying to be creative at two in the morning. :roll:
tiny ogre wrote:
jztemple2 wrote:I had to figure out how to break up a steam of incoming resource blocks into two groups of three and two. Now splitting an input in half was pretty straightforward, but three and two? It took me a few minutes and then I had an epiphany and it turned out to be elegantly simple. You can't imagine how rewarding that can be to someone in their sixties to be able to solve something like SMALL Excavator.
I finished that level and your solution looks smaller than mine. Though I can't see the beginning of your machine in that shot, I think you may have found a different method for splitting them up than I did. Although I didn't bump up the input rate either, which would also make an otherwise similar solution look much different.
This is what I did (in spoiler quotes in case someone hasn't reached the final problem of the third level; if you haven't gotten the trucker's cap, you haven't reached it :wink: )
Spoiler:
As the input objects come in from the top left, they fill up the spaces above the plain blocks in front of the pushers. When the fifth block comes, it pushes the first block in front of the sensor. That fires all four pushers. The two right hand pushed blocks (in the pic) go more right and enters the milling machine behind the block that triggered the sensor. The two left blocks move forward on the conveyer on the left of the picture. The beauty of this is that it can be adjusted for any ratio. I may go back and tweak a few other puzzles where I ended up throwing away inputting resource blocks to be able to get my needed ratio.

Image
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I just posted the following review on Steam. I thought I'd post it here since I'm sure it will get buried on the Infinifactory store page :wink:
I'll throw my review of the early access version of Infinifactory in here as well. If you've looked at the other reviews you'll see that pretty much everyone is very positive about the game. I agree with those folks. However, a lot of people have been saying that this is SpaceChem in 3D. I played a lot of SpaceChem and I have to say that Infinifactory is really a lot better than a 3D version of SpaceChem.

Primarily, the reason Infinifactory is better is because SpaceChem was always rather space limited in it's format. There was only a set amount of 2D space to work in and once you got past the early SpaceChem puzzles I would be conscious that I was having to compromise my creativity to keep my designs in that rather small space. While there are limitations in the 3D space available on some Infinifactory puzzles, I've felt that I'm really being able to be creative (and perhaps a little sloppy in my designs) without that constricted feeling I would get in SpaceChem. Certainly, you can tweak and tune a solution in Infinifactory to get it as near perfect in Cycles and Footprint, but it's not required. And that makes it fun.

Another reason Infinifactory is very good is how the 3D environment is structured. Except for a few folks in North Korea, pretty much everyone has at least tinkered a bit with Minecraft. Infinifactory uses the same presentation so you can start solving puzzles right away without having to understand how all those nodes worked like you did in SpaceChem. Blocks stack together, right click removes, left click adds, it's all very straightforward. Most folks will be able to grasp the concepts pretty quickly.

The final reason Infinifactory is so good is another fallout of the 3D environment, specifically that your avatar is actually inside of the game. Want to know why your conveyor belt doesn't seem to be doing what you want? Walk or fly over to it and look. Want to be sure that there's clearance when your swinging around a large assembly through a gap? Move your viewpoint into position and fire up the process, then observe. You can start and pause at will, so you can actually look at what's going on at any point at any time during the process. It's amazing helpful when you're trying to troubleshoot.

OK, there's another reason I can really recommend this game as more than just a 3D version of SpaceChem. Infinifactory is fun. There's so much satisfaction and enjoyment when you can build your own assembly line and watch it work. And, really, there is just as much satisfaction and enjoyment trying to figure something out, being stymied, scratching your... head, looking at it from all different angles, starting, pausing and restarting... then suddenly getting a true epiphany on how to make it all work. It's a great feeling.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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jztemple2 wrote:
Spoiler:
As the input objects come in from the top left, they fill up the spaces above the plain blocks in front of the pushers. When the fifth block comes, it pushes the first block in front of the sensor. That fires all four pushers. The two right hand pushed blocks (in the pic) go more right and enters the milling machine behind the block that triggered the sensor. The two left blocks move forward on the conveyer on the left of the picture. The beauty of this is that it can be adjusted for any ratio. I may go back and tweak a few other puzzles where I ended up throwing away inputting resource blocks to be able to get my needed ratio.

Image
Spoiler:
Ok, it's similar to mine, just I hadn't figured out the letting the blocks bunch up and push forward as a group until the sensor at the end is triggered part. I had one long conveyor with pushers spaced every 3 or 4 cells, whatever the timing was, and a sensor where the last one was, then they all pushed at once. I've done ones more like yours on later puzzles. Yours is better because it's not so sensitive to input rate, works pretty much the same however fast they come in as long as they don't get backed up by some later part of the machine.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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OK, this game has some weird levels. Like the one named Meat Product Type 57. Basically, the output of your assembly line is this:

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You collect these gophers as they pop up out of their holds and run them through a machine. It's a simpler level than a lot of them, but very weird. Of course, you're playing a human who has been abducted by aliens and put to work as a slave, so it's already kind of out there. But the humans are giving some of the aliens grief:

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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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New update release:
We launched a pretty big update tonight, with the following changes:

There is now a sandbox (the "test zone") that is unlocked after beating Skydock 19 (the second set of puzzles). It includes a new block, the toggle switch, which allows you to directly interact with your factory.

We changed the way that rotators work so that it's much easier to rotate single blocks. To reflect this new behavior, we also changed the first puzzle, which you may need to re-solve in order to pick up where you left off.

Cycle scores for puzzles should now be consistent between the first and subsequent runs of solutions.

There are now instructions for the "juicer".

The sensor is now silent. Our gracious hosts may be insensitive, but they're not that malicious.

Lots of other bug fixes and updates to sound and art assets.
"We changed the way that rotators work so that it's much easier to rotate single blocks". Great, now that I've figured out how to work around this... :roll:
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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My son started playing this last night and showed me that you can place/remove rows of blocks with one click and hold. This game is suddenly much less tedious.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I've posted a video on YouTube showing my solution to the Infinifactory puzzle Terrestrial Drone, which is found at Level 6, Resource Site 902.42. It's a bit rough but does show off the game pretty well.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I decided to post another Infinifactory video to give an in-game example of how you actually construct part of an assembly line. Part of the assembly is already complete, this video shows how to sort input blocks and weld them together. It's a pretty basic task, so this is intended for folks who might not know how the puzzles are actually assembled.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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Apparently I just beat the game. Yay.. but too short! Though it's got Steam Workshop already, so there are more puzzles if I want them, and plenty of room to go back and improve my solutions. The ending seems like it might not be the ending forever too. Hopefully there'll be more puzzles in the main game soon.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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jztemple2 wrote:I've posted a video on YouTube showing my solution to the Infinifactory puzzle Terrestrial Drone, which is found at Level 6, Resource Site 902.42. It's a bit rough but does show off the game pretty well.
Thanks for that. I learned something from it. I didn't know you could weld around corners with a gap the way you did for attaching the second tread. I had to do awful things to get around that on that and a couple of other puzzles. I built my treads 4 long, welded them to the body, then welded one more tread piece on the end of each afterwards.

That one was one of my favorite puzzles too.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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tiny ogre wrote:I built my treads 4 long, welded them to the body, then welded one more tread piece on the end of each afterwards.
I just headsmacked myself. It never even occurred to me to do it the way you did. I'll have to keep that in mind.

I just finished the Aerial Combat Shuttle puzzle. I shot a video of me completing the last half which took about 45 minutes. I edited it down to about 36 minutes, I amazingly couldn't seem to get the completed shuttle into the goal correctly :roll:. Still, it's a lot of trial and error, and I mean a lot. I'll probably post it since I have it, but with a warning about it being for insomniacs :D
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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Holy crap, turns out using MS Movie Maker really is a CPU hog. I'm converting the format and it's got my i7-4770K processor running at 70-80% usage with a temp of... 59C right now. It was as high as 69C, and it's liquid cooled :shock:.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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Hey, I just finished the game too! 23 hours of gameplay, so just about a dollar an hour for entertainment. And I haven't touched the Steam Workshop stuff yet.

And the ending (spoiler alert!)....
Spoiler:
The ending? It was weird, there in the barracks. I thought there was some great master puzzle after it, but that's ok.
It's a bit of a shame that the custom workshop is kind of small. I really like those wide open spaces.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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jztemple2 wrote:
tiny ogre wrote:I built my treads 4 long, welded them to the body, then welded one more tread piece on the end of each afterwards.
I just headsmacked myself. It never even occurred to me to do it the way you did. I'll have to keep that in mind.

I just finished the Aerial Combat Shuttle puzzle. I shot a video of me completing the last half which took about 45 minutes. I edited it down to about 36 minutes, I amazingly couldn't seem to get the completed shuttle into the goal correctly :roll:. Still, it's a lot of trial and error, and I mean a lot. I'll probably post it since I have it, but with a warning about it being for insomniacs :D
The first time I got one into the goal, it turned out I had the engines on backwards. Didn't even know there was a backwards until it buzzed at me! That caused some panic, but luckily I was able to reverse them at their source without disrupting the rest of the solution. Sometimes those late realizations you've done something wrong early in the process are disastrous.

I went back to 338.11: Terrestrial Surveyor and got a solution working with the max input rate. I had spent hours trying to tweak mine to work at that rate the other night, but never did get it. I rebuilt it from scratch and made it work. The best new trick I found was this:
Image

The issue here is that the input rate on the treads is full blast. No matter what you do, something is going to cause a two(*) cycle delay on how fast they come in as you push pieces out of line. My usual solutions were causing two cycles per two blocks or two cycles per three blocks, and then were still leaving sets of three bunched up which introduced similar delays going around corners before they got welded. By interleaving the direction I push them, I've got it down to two cycles per six blocks, and then have gaps between every block on both sides after I push it, so no more delays.

(*)There might be a way to get that down to one cycle per N cubes using gravity, have to play with some other ideas.

This is still too slow for this puzzle... the body pieces come out slightly faster than the treads, and my machine actually gets clogged up and would fail if it required 12 instead of 10 complete outputs :) It leaves a couple of body sections lying around the ground without treads too. Only made it work by the skin of my teeth in other words.

I also made something else I'd thought about for some other puzzles, but wound up not using it after all. I made a timing circuit by having a detached gray block make laps around a short conveyor belt, and triggering a sensor at one point along the lap. Coupled with a blocker on the circuit path, it acts as a relatively easy to make delay timer. Need something to happen some fixed number of cycles after something else without relying on other resource blocks? You can do it!
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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I experienced a crash on the shuttle refurb puzzle... and all of my game progress is gone. When I restarted the game I was back in the car. :o :cry:
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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coopasonic wrote:I experienced a crash on the shuttle refurb puzzle... and all of my game progress is gone. When I restarted the game I was back in the car. :o :cry:
Bummer :( ...

It's too late for you this time, but the Infinifactory saves are located in My Docs and you can back them up.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

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coopasonic wrote:I experienced a crash on the shuttle refurb puzzle... and all of my game progress is gone. When I restarted the game I was back in the car. :o :cry:
Make sure you email Zach. I did after the patch that made me have to repeat the puzzle that unlocked rotators, and got a response in half an hour. That issue was in the patch notes... But the patch arrived via Steam before the patch notes appeared and thus I hadn't read them when I emailed him.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

Post by tiny ogre »

tiny ogre wrote: The issue here is that the input rate on the treads is full blast. No matter what you do, something is going to cause a two(*) cycle delay on how fast they come in as you push pieces out of line. My usual solutions were causing two cycles per two blocks or two cycles per three blocks, and then were still leaving sets of three bunched up which introduced similar delays going around corners before they got welded. By interleaving the direction I push them, I've got it down to two cycles per six blocks, and then have gaps between every block on both sides after I push it, so no more delays.

(*)There might be a way to get that down to one cycle per N cubes using gravity, have to play with some other ideas.
So I played with this on the Terrestrial Drone level, the one jztemple posted a video of, and yes it's possible to get the delay on a full speed input, one where a new block appears every single cycle that it's not blocked, down to just one missed input due to blockage every N cubes. The maximum on N is determined by how long a straight line you can make from the input to a wall where there are at least two empty cells below each block (maybe one, but you'd need another drop next to it.) On Terrestrial Drone, I was able to get 10 tread blocks (could have gotten 11 or 12, but those numbers don't help particularly, have to make two 5 long treads) before delaying it by one cycle. At that point, the issue becomes that none of the other inputs have a delay, so now they're all going one cycle too fast to match the tread inputs. So, for the body pieces, I wound up introducing an artificial one cycle blockage, and for the cannon and command block (or whatever the white block is called) I synced them up to other pieces of the puzzle so they'll stack up safely. Eventually their inputs would get blocked if the machine ran long enough, but it finishes first.

It was a giant pain in the ass, but I had fun doing it. The net result is a solution that runs in 163 cycles. It would take some major restructuring to shave any cycles off of that. I'd have to get the cannon to the body sooner than it can possibly get there with my current design, or else get it there much closer to the output, either of which needs major changes. The first cannon out never stops moving and I have a one cycle stop on the body piece to match them up. I'm nearly certain it's possible to solve it in 162 cycles because of that stop. It might be possible in 161. Somewhere right around there is the theoretical minimum where there just aren't enough parts coming out to do it any faster even if they all went full speed straight to the output.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

Post by jztemple2 »

I've started playing around with the Steam Workshop, picking the oldest uploaded puzzles to try to find some order.

I've also uploaded my first puzzle, JZT Simple Satellite. It's a pretty simple challenge, I just wanted to get my feet wet. I've already been uploading Workshop items for Door Kickers and it's actually even simpler here. The only requirement is that once you've created a puzzle, you have to build a solution for it before you can upload it.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

Post by jztemple2 »

I made another puzzle, JZT Launch Console in which in order to come up with a solution I had to use the "welder on a conveyor" method. Works nice! Details of the welder can be seen on this video while this other video gives an overview of the whole solution.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

Post by jztemple2 »

I just solved this puzzle, Return Trip, posted on the Steam Workshop. I confess to having to look at the spoiler image the author posted, because I would never have thought of that solution.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

Post by tiny ogre »

jztemple2 wrote:I just solved this puzzle, Return Trip, posted on the Steam Workshop. I confess to having to look at the spoiler image the author posted, because I would never have thought of that solution.
I like that one. I solved it without looking at the spoilers, and came up with something completely different. I never would have thought of the solution the author posted either, but now that I've looked I understand what it's doing. Here's a couple of shots of mine.
Spoiler:
Image
Image

What it does is drop two long lengths of conveyors down through the slot, with conveyors down below that slide them to the side (in hindsight, the dropping part is probably not necessary, it could've just been built down there. That came out of some other failed attempts). Then as a block enters the slot, I start another structural block down a long circuit at the same time. Half way through that circuit, it starts triggering sensors that push the other long conveyor into place, which sends the target block on the return trip. At the very end, it then gets pushed by one last sensor/pusher onto the final stretch of conveyor, and also triggers the next input block using a little flip-flop mechanism.

I had played with both timing circuits and flip flops like that before, but hadn't used either in a working solution for any puzzle, so this was fun!
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

Post by jztemple2 »

Another update:
Today's update includes a lot of changes!
Infinifactory now supports Mac OS X!
Production Zone 2 has new, better looking textures.
If you press the toggle type key (default: Alt) while looking at a block with an alternate type, like a welder or rotator, it will switch the block to the other type.
V-sync can now be enabled in the options menu.
You can now stop playback from within the product error UI by pressing the stop playback (default: R) key.
If you have an AZERTY keyboard, your controls will now default to something more AZERTY-friendly.
Fixes for assorted crashes and bugs.
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Re: Infinifactory, from the folks who brought you SpaceChem

Post by jztemple2 »

A new announcement: UPDATE: Animated GIF creation!
Today's update contains mostly bug fixes and art tweaks, but it also includes an exciting new feature: automatic animated GIF creation!

If you press the recording key (F10 by default) on a puzzle that you have solved, an animated GIF of your solution will be recorded and saved to your desktop. The GIF is automatically compressed and made to loop seamlessly, so all you need to do is upload it to the internet!
It works OK, but you have to pre-place your point of view for the gif for best effect.

Image

Image

Also it seems the update has broken the solution to at least one of my puzzles. I'll have to go back and tweak it.
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
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