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Looks very polished, also glad to see a launch with a mac build.

I'd love a write up from the devs on how these type of games are built. I understand arcade style games, but not how you write structs to support these types of games.

It looks very challenging to design and program by the sheer amount of stuff happening in real time, and the careful balance of gameplay. Then again I could be completely outdated and it's not a technological feat in today's standards.




The Factorio team has kept up a very good devlog for over a decade now.

https://www.factorio.com/blog


Here's a complementary link on the optimization of the Factorio. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35869671


> Looks very polished, also glad to see a launch with a mac build.

And it's definitely great! I just hope they get a universal build soon, as if you are on Apple Silicon (M1+), the game runs under Rosetta. There's a bit of a performance hit because of this, although you can still run really high resolution (5K) on low fairly effortlessly! And it looks absolutely beautiful.

Side note, I was a tiny bit confused about the "tutorial" when you get the two checkboxes, one of them saying something like "Don't destroy buildings".

I thought it meant you should reuse your structures and not destroy them, which after a few milestones is just not possible at all.



You can play the demo version in a browser too: https://shapez.io/


> also glad to see a launch with a mac build

Performance on my M2 Max is pretty poor, even just in the tutorial levels. I wonder if it's a Rosetta build...? Playable on Medium-High or so but laggy on higher settings right off the bat.

(On the other hand, it also launched on GeForce Now, and is silky-smooth there.)


> I wonder if it's a Rosetta build.

It is, I tried to raise it up on Steam support forum, hopefully they'll address this. Especially since they showed the game a few times running on M1+ macs, I definitely was surprised.

> Performance on my M2 Max is pretty poor

On my M1 Ultra I found reducing to the "Low" preset worked great and lets me play at 60 FPS/5K resolution. It still looks fine. Just avoid Minimal which is visually jarring (no shaders and extreme contrasts/bad readability).


Makes sense. Too bad :(

I'm just grateful the devs also put it on GFN on launch day, where it's playable at 120 fps at ultra settings.

Think I still prefer the simpler 2D graphics of the first game, though... it was charming :)




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