Factorio Dev Tracker

Menu simulation V453000

In the last FFF, we presented that we now have the capability to show real game simulations in the Tips and tricks. Naturally we asked ourselves what else could we use this new technology for...

We've dreamed about this multiple times in the past, but the technical roadblocks didn't make us think too seriously. We'd like the main menu background to be a real animated simulation of the game, similar to what Transport Tycoon or Rollercoaster Tycoon games have.

Instead of things like cinematic trailers, we always present the game in its true form, and the menu background does not follow this logic. Also, any time we improve any graphics, a static image immediately gets older while a real game simulation is updated automatically.

We've created a variety of scenes that each demonstrate some feature(s) of the game, from first miners all the way to the artillery and Spidertron. The screen is quite zoomed in and the factories ...

Hello,
we finished with the regular Friday Facts series, and yet, there is still so much we want to talk about. I want to clarify, that we are not going to release FFF every week, but there are a few of them coming in the near future.

1.1 - The real 1.0

The point of 1.1 isn't to add some new content, the main motivation is to finalise all the existing features so that they work together in a proper way. This may sound a little bit abstract and boring, but it will be explained more clearly in the upcoming FFFs. Believe me, the sentence "I didn't know I needed this until now" will come to your mind more than once.

The work on the 1.1 update started basically right after the 1.0 release, so there is already lots to show.

Right now we aren't going to make any promises as to when it is coming, but we will keep you updated on our progress with these blog posts, and give some notice before it is deployed. Though I'm quite certain th...

Hello,
the atmosphere in the last week was kind of special. We experienced the feeling of the final release being on the horizon many times. And we were shown that it isn't the case time and time again. So it feels very special when it is actually becoming reality. We were trying to be especially careful with any last minute changes to make sure that we don't introduce major bugs into our precious 1.0 release. The image of all the players having the game crash on some simple stupid bug is horrifying.

Thank you

People thanked us on many occasions for the hard work we do. It helped lift our mood in many of the desperate moments, when bugs and problems were piling up and we didn't see the end of the tunnel. We don't say it often enough, but the support from your side has been incredibly helpful throughout the years.

• We thank all who helped us to save the game before it could even start by supporting the IndieGoGo campaign back in 2013.
• We ...

0.18 mods will be loadable in 1.0 Klonan

With 1.0 approaching, we want to ensure that the day of the launch goes as smoothly as possible, and shows the game in the best light. Something that would really work against that would be if the update broke a bunch of mods and disgruntled all of our most dedicated players. So we are making efforts to ensure that mods that work in 0.18, will work without any update needed in 1.0.

Theoretically this isn't so difficult, as the 0.18 release structure has meant that mods have maintained compatibility with all the latest changes, and in essence 1.0 will just be a small update of 0.18. However it does take a bit of special handling:

• 1.0 will allow mods marked for 0.18 to load.
• The mod portal will show 0.18 mods when browsing in 1.0.

Avoiding breaking mods also means we need to be very careful with changing anything, even something as simple as renaming a sprite can break dozens of...

Launch party cancelled Jitka

The COVID pandemic around the globe is making it really hard to plan any event these days, and we were pretty optimistic just a few weeks back. However the situation here is now changing for the worse it seems.

The number of positively tested cases of COVID here in Czech has been increasing in relatively high numbers every day for the past two weeks, and the restrictions are again taking place. In Prague, face masks are required to be worn again where more than 100 people gather indoors, no events over 500 people are permitted as of last week, etc.

The current uncertainty together with the fact that at least half of the invited guests will not be able to attend the party (including some members of our own team), have led us into making a tough decision: we have decided to cancel the Factorio 1.0 release party we were intending to throw on 4th September 2020.

For those of you who already purchased a ticket(s) - the...

Blueprint library finishing touches kovarex

At the time of writing the Friday Facts last week, not all of the planned changes were finished, here is the finalisation, so here we go.

Persistent library contents

The problem is old. You play a modded game and have your blueprints in the library. Then, you decide to put the mods aside for a reason (to join a MP game, or just try a different modset). At that moment, if we didn't handle it in a special way, all your mod-related content in your blueprint library would be removed.

We solved the main part of the problem already ...

kovarex - the story of motivation

This wall of text is about my personal struggle with Factorio and life, feel free to skip to the next subject if you wish to see the actual Factorio content.

Beginning about two years ago, I started to have these problems, it was harder and harder to force myself to work on the game and I didn't enjoy it that much. So I was looking for a way to have a break.

I know exactly when I disappeared from the Factorio development, it was August 26, 2019, the release date of World of Warcraft classic. The planned 3 weeks of playing kind of extended to be more like 3 months. One of the big reasons was, that I already had 60 level priest when I realized that tanks are so hard to come by, so I re-rolled a tank learned how to play it and levelled it to 60. It was a great fun to finish all the dungeon content and acquire the pre-bis (pre raid best in slot). This all just to find out tanks are far from a hot commodity when it comes t...

We've been updating, reworking and redesigning many graphics, and the majority of entities have had high resolution for a while now. With 1.0 we're trying to be as "complete" as feasible.

Slowdown effect

As one of the less used items in the game, the slowdown capsule got kind of forgotten.

The slowdown capsule has multiple parts - the item icon, the effect, and the animated sticker that shows on slowed enemies.

We've already updated the item icon which sets some expectation for the effect and sticker, like what color should it have. The poison capsule has already taken blue, and green or brown would be very similar to rocket or nuclear fuel in the icon, so we chose orange.

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It makes a lot of sense to also use the same graphics with different tints for the acid sticker from spitters/worms.

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In a way the slowdown cap...

The launch party Klonan

To celebrate the launch of the game later this summer (only 6 more FFFs to go!), we have decided to throw a party! It is going to be at the same venue as our 1 million sale party (...

Locale plan update Klonan

Earlier this week I received the English proofreadings from Altagram, and overall I integrated over 500 suggestions into the game. Most were small, such as replacing "can't" with "cannot", things like that. It was the exact sort of external scrutiny we really needed, as it showed some areas where we were quite inconsistent. It feels like things are in a better place now, even if the majority of changes are relatively unnoticeable.

However it was very noticeable to our great community translators on Crowdin. When we update the English strings, the translations have to be updated on Crowdin. For the last few days I've been working through the issues raised on Crowdin, and there was a lot of good input on that last 1% of the changes.

So this concludes the 'English proofreading' phase. Starting on Monday, Altagram will start proofreading the target languages, and filling in any missing strings where needed. This should take about ...

New website Sanqui

Over the course of the past year, you have seen the team put a lot of effort into polishing the game to get it ready for a full release. There's no doubt this is the most important effort here: we're all here to play the game. At the same time, the website is often the first thing people encounter—and in for many, return to every week! Unfortunately, until this point the looks of our websites have been neglected. The current set of websites are a complete mishmash of styles that are not coherent and do not fit with the look of the game.

Which website am I looking at again?

We set out to rework the looks of our websites last year to make them harmonize with the final game.

Albert and Aleš worked together to design the new website and make mockups in a process not too dissimilar to the GUI work in the game. Of course, web technology is a di...

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 (...