Enthusiast Launches Factorio from a Thousand Floppy Disks - Game Took a Week to Load

Новости 0 Источник: Wube Software LTD.

21:15

Now fans know how to make an impressive game backup.

Recently, a large-scale experiment was conducted with the factory construction simulator Factorio. DocJade decided to launch the game from a thousand floppy disks.

By modern standards, Factorio weighs very little — the game client requires less than 2 GB on the drive. However, one floppy disk holds only about 1.5 MB of data, so a lot of disks were required for recording.

DocJade was able to purchase 1250 pieces, but did not specify their cost.

DocJade admitted that he could simply make virtual files the size of a floppy disk in a virtual machine, but this would exclude the use of physical floppy disks, i.e. it would be cheating.

Another option would be to create a RAID array with a separate drive for each floppy disk, but such a project would cost around $10,000.

Since only one floppy disk can be inserted into the drive, DocJade created a technical solution: he wrote a custom file system called "Fluster" in the Rust programming language.

This worked because of a technical feature of Factorio: unlike most games, it loads almost all content before the main menu, and does not work in the "streaming loading" mode of textures.

The "Fluster" system divides the disk into blocks of 512 bytes (2880 blocks per disk). Several bytes of each block are allocated for a checksum to detect disk damage, and several 16-bit numbers serve as pointers to the disk, tracking all blocks.

As a result, the enthusiast was able to load Factorio from a thousand floppy disks, but it took more than a week to work "from dawn to dusk."

The game is not fully functional, as not all files are supported in the "Fluster" system he created. However, it is possible to run saved games and even successfully complete Factorio.