Early this week we pushed the deploy button on 0.18.0 (patch notes). This was quite a surprise to many of our players, as more typically the time between major releases and the scope of the release is greater. However this isn't like the old days, we are trying to keep the size of releases as small as possible (...
Read moreUp until I looked at the source code, I was always confused about the differences between "Start campaign", "New game" and "Scenarios". New game seems like the same thing as "Scenarios"->"Freeplay", but are there any differences? We then later added a few more bonus scenarios, but they are hidden in the scenarios menu, with no explanation about what each is, what to expect or if it works in multiplayer. I believe it's very important to communicate to new players information about the game's content. It's also important to show that freeplay is the intended way to play. So all this prompted me to rework the main menu a bit.
I started with the structure. The structure always seemed odd to me, compared to what I'm used to from other games. Important options like "Load game" are lost among options that are never used (like "Replay game").
So I came up with a new structure. It looks like this:
Our e-shop is now open again after taking a break over the holidays and new year.
We have also restocked our new Factorio sew-on patches, so if you didn't manage to pick one up over the last weeks, now is your chance to order one.
After deciding to cancel the Introduction/NPE (Tutorial/Demo) we took some time to assess what we learnt. Here are just a few of the points that we took away from the experience:
Hello,
The office here in Prague is still 'closed' until next week, so not much is happening (so our team can rightfully rest). Things will get cracking again on Monday, and our first task is to get 0.18 done!
For that reason, the FFF today is a little on the short side.
2019 was quite a 'typical' year for us. We released 0.17 early in the year, did some bug-fixing for about 6 months, and then we went back to development work. Saying that, we hit some major milestones this year:
You can see some correlations between this timeline and the commit frequency graph below.
Please note, the number of commi...
2020 is going to be quite an exciting year for us. We have our 1.0 date set to the 25th of September, and there is a lot of preparation to do.
It is no doubt to any of us that we would not be able to have any success without the great community that has developed for the game over the last years, and the support of all our players and fans.
As is almost tradition, Albert has prepared a commemorative postcard/wallpaper to celebrate the last FFF of the year.
Here's to a great year to come!
I h...
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Hello,
The year is wrapping up, and we have been hard at work finishing off some topics before we take our Christmas break. As you can imagine, releasing any new version of the game without a few weeks to do bugfixing wouldn't be wise, so you can rest easy this holiday period without the worry of a surprise 0.18 release.
One of the motivations behind the new optimized particle system (...
Read moreWe would like to introduce our new fabric Factorio logo patches, which are now available at our e-shop. These sew-on embroidered patches are ideal for clothing, hats, backpacks, etc. The dimensions are 2.5 x 12 cm.
As we are uncertain how large the demand for these patches is going to be, we have only limited stock available at the moment.
Please note that our online store ships only once a week every Wednesday, and it is highly possible that the orders placed now will not be delivered before the 25th or December, this applies especially for orders shipped outside of Europe.
I have been brought on to Factorio to finish the sound f...
Read moreSince the very beginning of the project, we have focused a lot in the side of the factory, providing better designs for the machines, and expressive animations that give a sense of life and credibility in this area. We put a lot of effort also in the environmental side, adding different tile sizes, improving textures, adding doodads, cliffs, trees, decals, and constantly improving the map generation for a better feeling.
But apart from biters and the factory, nothing else moves in this Factorio planet. So the environment is nice looking but it feels somehow unreal due this lack of motion.
Today we proudly present the first experiment in this area: Animated water. This animation doesn't try to grab your attention, it's just there. Slowly moving. I personally bet that this animation, with the proper sound design, will provide the natural feeling that the planet needs.
Webm/Mp4 playback not supported on y...
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Hello,
we feel that the Factorio development is taking way too long. The approach "It is done when it is done" was serving us well to deliver a high quality product, but if we continued this way, we would be doing it basically forever. A lot of us don't have any problem working on Factorio for some more time, but the main problem is, that we would like to introduce new features and content instead of just polishing parts that are already present in the game. We also considered, that the game is quite polished now, and if we just pushed the button to release 1.0, it wouldn't be a catastrophe. From our perspective, a lot of things wouldn't be finished, but from the perspective of a new player, the things we are working on now are mainly nitpicks.
With this in mind, we decided to just specify a 1.0 release date publicly, so we have to stick with it. We will just focus on the most important aspects as we approach the date, and we just do whatev...
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Factorio is in a state that even though is not yet finished, it is very close to its 1.0 version. That means that most of the work is done and we are polishing the game in order to make it bright. That's what we've been doing for the past 2 weeks. Literally making it bright.
Since years I wanted to do this post-production work. But I didn't dare to do it until most of the graphics were finished. I was afraid of breaking the consistency of the look and our production pipeline.
Now it's different. There's only a couple of entities to re-design and some other stuff to do, but in general this missing details are not affecting the possibility of working in the post-production.
Factorio is a dark game. I mean conceptually. All these things about industrializing a planet, polluting an entire world just for the sake of the factory, and killing all its inhabitants are not precisely happy concepts full of lig...
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Hello,
There is a bit of a cold/flu going around the office, but it isn't severe enough to dampen our spirits (I don't like the daylight savings though).
Ever since we launched the classic Grey T-shirt back in November 2017, we've been asked when we're going to have more designs. Over the last few months Jitka, Albert, and Aleš, have been working on our new collection, which is now available.
Check out our store page for full product details.
We chose the Inserter and the Electronic circuit, as we feel that they are some of the i...
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Hello,
we just released 0.17.73, with 0.17.74 coming very soon. This is just some bug fixes and further pathfinding improvements, and we hope to be able to mark the release as Stable next week.
As part of our big GUI update, I've been working on one particular part: the tooltips. We worked not only on updating the style, but also how the information is structured and sorted, added missing information, removed irrelevant information. This concerns entity, item and recipe tooltips, but almost all tooltips were touched one way or another. Many things were changed. I will go through some of the more important changes.
First thing to see is the new style Albert has worked on. They now have the same general style as the technology tooltips. We tried to keep them as compact as possible, as sometimes there is quite a lot of...
Read moreLast week we mentioned the change to make biters not collide with each other, but that wasn’t the only biter-related update we released this past week. Somewhat coincidentally, this week’s updates have included something I’d been working on for a few weeks before – an upgrade to the enemy pathfinding system.
When a unit wants to go somewhere, it first needs to figure out how to get there. That could be as simple as going straight to its goal, but there can be obstacles – such as cliffs, trees, spawners, player entities – in the way. To do that, it will tell the pathfinder its current position and the goal position, and the pathfinder will – possibly after many ticks – reply with a path, which is simply a series of waypoints for the unit to follow in order to get to its destination.
To do its job, the pathfinder uses an algorithm called A* (pronounced 'A star'). A simple example of A* pa...
Read moreIn the last few weeks, we've really accelerated our work on the campaign. We've been pushing ahead a lot with both the scripting and blocking out the physical level design. One of the problems we've come up against a lot, is that we often need to perform custom edits to the map, which are quite tedious, but not common enough to add a new tool to the map editor for them. For example, something like "disable all the spawners in this region".
This kind of problem is easily solved with a little bit of custom Lua code, but getting the specification of the area we want to edit into Lua is a painful process of noting down and typing out location coordinates. It is also easy to lose track of these Lua snippets, as there is no good place to save them.
To solve this problem, we decided to add a Lua snippet tool to the map editor. This tool will let you drag your cursor over an area, and it will then run your custom Lua code on th...
Read moreWe recently bought and assembled some high-end PCs, with the hope to gauge performance, speed up running tests, and potentially consolidate the number of servers we are maintaining internally. The two lucky CPUs were a i9-9980XE 18-core and a Ryzen 3900X 12-core.
We are using the time to complete our test suite in 'heavy mode' as a benchmark. Heavy mode basically saves and reloads the game each tick, and compares a CRC of the map from before and after. It is super slow to run, but the heavy test is critical to help find any possible determinism issues. There is some more info on 'heavy mode' in ...
Read moreHello,
technically this post is the Pi Friday Facts, but unfortunately we can't think of anything special to do... maybe someone can make a Combinator cake... that can calculate Pi?
We released 0.17.69 as stable this Tuesday. It seems it all went very smoothly, no avalanche of crashes, and only a handful of technical support emails about updating video drivers.
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Apart from stable, essentially no development work has happened this week; nearly everyone is on vacation (I am even writing this as I sit in the airport waiting to fly to London for a wedding). We're hoping that at the start of next week, with all the relaxation over, and the pressure of stable off our shoulders, w...
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It has been 6 months and nearly 70 releases since we first launched 0.17 to the world. Now is the time to let it be enjoyed by all the players of the game. We are going to be continuing our work on 0.17 over the next few months, with small experimental releases of new features, and finishing all the GUI reworks.
The new map editor can be accessed directly in-game with the /editor command. Packed with new features and improvements, such as cloning tools, multiple surface support, and time control. The new editor also allows collaborative map e...
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Hello,
We have had quite a peaceful week here in the office.
Last night we went out for a burger and a beer as a last meal with Ernestas before he flies back home for another few months. It was also quite nostalgic, as we went to a place that we used to go to frequently near our old office, and the staff still remembered us.
It seems our 'news' of some programmers taking a break made headlines this last week: Work slows on Factorio while a dev “levels his priest” in WoW Classic.
Even though he is still not level 60, Kovarex found some time to f...
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