Factorio Dev Tracker

The Beacon Redesign V453000

The Beacon is one of the last entities that don’t have high resolution graphics yet. In the rather recent ...

Electric mining drill redesign Ernestas & V453000

The electric mining drill is one of the older designs still in the game, and we have had our eye on it for a long time as a candidate for redesign.

We would have loved to rework the mining drill in 0.15 when we added high resolution graphics and the pipe patch for it, but we had many nuclear related graphics to do for 0.15, so we just did the necessary minimum and postponed the full redesign. Now was finally the time we could unleash Ernestas onto it.

The old design

The most problematic aspect we see is the weak radial animation that’s more like gently harvesting a field, rather than aggressively mining and destroying the planet.

The original mining drill is also very flat like a top-down square. In general we try to avoid square entities like the plague, as they tend to look disintegrat...

Hello, today we have some big news.

The 1.0 plan Klonan

In ...

It's been over 4 years since we planned the infamous GUI update. If all goes well, next week the game will get the last big GUI update for 1.0. While the state of the GUI is not close to our crazy plans we recently had for the GUI, it's above what we initially planned 4 years ago.

The update you will see next week includes:

• A visual update to over 100 game GUIs
• New high resolution icons for all game items (visible both in GUI and in the world)
• New GUI sounds for most interactions

High resolution icons V453000

The plans

A bit more than a year ago Albert had posted twice (...

New hope demo levels Klonan

A few weeks ago we discussed the changes to the demo and tutorial in the game (...

He who does nothing, breaks nothing posila

In the recent patch notes, there was a line "Fixed landfill spawning under player when building landfill elsewhere. More" and some people on Reddit were wondering how did this bug happen in the first place, and asked for the long version and even suggested we could even use it for Friday Facts, and I thought: "Yeah, if I am going to spend time writing this, we should consider using it in FFF so someone else doesn't have to spend time writing something else." ... but I am going to stretch it out.

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The landfill bug reported after the release of 0.18.21.

Disclaimer: I have not been around during the a...

Unit group collision mask

Last weekend, a bug report came in on our forum. The issue was that the groups of biters were trying to path over the water, but the bugs can't swim.

It seemed like something quite typical of a mod being funky. I looked into it, and it seems the ...

Tile transition collisions Klonan

We first mentioned a change to our tile transition logic back in ...

Environmental particle effects Dom

Since the particle optimization we did for 0.18 (...

As stated in previous FFF's we will be making some changes to the demo and tutorial content in the game. I wanted to clarify exactly what is being removed and what it is being replaced with, as this content is almost ready for release. If you would like to catch up on the topic, you can read Kovarex's piece in ...

Sound design update Ian

One advantage of switching to home working during the COVID-19 crisis is the ability to listen to the game using speakers rather than headphones, and this has proved useful in balancing the relative levels of the game. Val has also been getting to grips with Lua, and this has led him to working on attenuations, which have been proving problematic. For instance, we noticed that sounds such as the radar were getting cut off when you walked away from them, rather than fading out cleanly.

I investigated and discovered we had a maximum environment sound limit of 15, by raising this to 50 we have eliminated many of these problems. But then the downside is that there are now more sounds playing and therefore more clutter to mix and balance.

Pink squares indicat...

Not mentioning it would be weird

I really think everybody has heard all about this and nothing else over the last few weeks, but yes, the Coronavirus.

For now, with Factorio, everything seems okay. We are all working from home, the team is still going, and so far we are following our plan quite well. We released the Character GUI and Statistics GUI last week, and some improvements such as new water splashes and leaf animations this week. Things are still moving along.

However it is still early days, we haven't really had any experience having the whole team work remotely, so there may be some challenges we need to tackle as time goes on. At the moment we don't know whether this will affect our 1.0 release date, I guess it will one way or the other, but for now we aren't announcing any changes.

Business as usual

Apart from the development side still running, our e-shop is also remaining operational, and we have just restocked on all ...

The beacon is one of the last entities left to convert to HR. As always, before 'just re-rendering' we take the chance to re-think the concept and modernize it. This post will try to go a bit deeper in the process of redesigning such an entity.

The old beacon

At the beginning of the project, the style of the game was less or more clear: nothing looks brand new. Everything looks dirty and DIY. The machines need to be full of details, if possible trying to explain its mechanics. The colors are provided by the raw materials. The bounding box is everything. And some other rules that I don't even remember now.

The main handicap at that time was that we didn't have the experience of how the average player is composing the factories. So we produce a nice looking model but once it is placed in the factory, it doesn't look that nice due to the lack of context.

The ...

The Character GUI Twinsen

It was 11 months ago when we first mentioned the new Character GUI, in ...

Statistics GUI Klonan, Oxyd

The statistics GUI (electric network stats, production stats, etc.) is one of the GUIs that has been in the game for a very long time, and has had its functionality fleshed out reasonably over the years. It was not long ago when Twinsen added hovering and highlighting to the graphs.

Given that, and the relatively short timeframe for 1.0 release, the update of the statistics GUI has really just been a style update, no new features or heavy logic rewriting. Oxyd has most of the work done, so we are happy to show some real in-game screenshots of how it looks:

A notable change with the electric stats is that the Satisfaction/Production/Accumulator charge are next to each other in a single row, as opposed to each in a separate row. The label for the exact amount has also been moved to inside of the progress bar, which itself is much...

Offshore pump redesign V453000, Albert

As one of the last entities which do not have high resolution graphics, the time has come for the offshore pump.

The offshore pump is practically a 1-tile entity, but they must have a 1 tile gap between each other. It is also the only entity placed on a water tile at the moment.

When we changed the way how terrain to water transitions work, we moved the offshore pump to be placed on the water tile. This can result in the pump drawing over terrain in ugly ways.

With the redesign, we took the oppourtunity to move the offshore back onto land, and additionally the pump checks a 2x3 tile water area in order to be buildable.

Team production changes

Improving the Team production challenge was prompted by this Reddit post. Team production was made back in 2016 to test the multiplayer networking of the 0.14 update with a larger number of players without the overhead of having a large factory. Since then it has not really had much love.

So after 4 years of accruing wisdom, I started making some general improvements.

Choose your teams

I think this is one of the main suggestions people had for team production. The scenario just shuffled the players and assigned people randomly, and you could end up all alone playing against your two best friends.

Poison cloud Ernestas, posila

The poison cloud animation is a placeholder spritesheet (that kovarex found somewhere on the internet), we have wanted to improve it for a long time, but since it was always such a small detail other things took priority. Well now is the time to finish everything, big and small.

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Some of the problems we see with the old placeholder animation:

• The edge (where damage will apply) is not clearly defined
• The center strongly obstructs vision underneath the animation
• It breaks the perspective/height illusion with its very circular shape

The new animation was done quickly and without the need of any large changes to the Factorio engine. This is the mindset we are in these days, use the engine features we already have to finish things quickly and without trouble, and we try to stop ourselves going crazy with more detail.

...

Hello,
We released 0.18.4 this week, same old same old, more bugfixes, more bugs, more changes. At this stage of development, not many interesting things are happening, we are just polishing what we have.

Minor terrain render optimization posila

Just a couple days before the release of 0.18.0 I had an epiphany about a terrain rendering problem that was bugging me for a really long time. When rendering terrain, we reuse the texture from the previous frame. How this was always done, is that we would render the texture shifted to the new position, fill up the gap, and then copy the final result back into the texture for reuse in next frame. So what was bugging me about this? This simple operation would result in rasterizing 2 screens worth of pixels. While that is not a problem for at least half decent GPUs from the past decade, it's a significant work load for integrated GPUs, which in general have an order of magnitude lower memory bandwidth than dedicated ...

Hello,
We released 0.18.2 and 0.18.3 this week. In terms of major releases, this one has very few bugs, so we haven't had a lot of pressure to crank out the releases at lightning speed.

New Sounds Ian

In the sound design department we have been hard at work to bring you a better gaming experience with the help of some new and improved sound effects. It struck me that the whole sound track used to have a lo-fi, almost 'dirty' feel, by which I mean the sounds were unclear, had a low resolution and possibly used recordings made with the wrong microphone positioning. So with Val's help we have set about improving some of these sounds. For example, there are new sounds for all the transport belts, they don't sound very different but they are smoother sounding and less annoying.

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Similar to the transport belts, we also have sounds for the combat robots that are designed to harmonise with one anoth...