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