Hello Factorians,
Today I would like to talk to you about my favourite subject - fluid mixing and its prevention. It is a new mechanic introduced in 0.17 that seemed quite simple at first, but has been giving me nightmares ever since.
A while ago I took on the task of updating the fluid system (...
Read moreWoW classic has been released, which means several of our top men have taken time off to spend hours raiding and having fun in Azeroth.
This isn't great timing, as a few new bugs related to train signals appeared. We want to get these bugs solved before we do another release (another stable candidate). As it turns out, the only person with the skillset to fix these specific train signal bugs is also deep into levelling his Priest... (Kov on Pyrewood Village)
We are still making the rest of the preparations for the stable release. We have started writing up the stable annoucement blog post, and have produced a 0.17 postcard image. Other than the few more critical rail bugs, there doesn't look like there is much else to block the stable release, on the forum we are down to 27 bugs.
Since there are so few bugs left to deal with, some of the team has starting working on 'post-stable' features. Wheybags is working on the new cam...
Read moreThe boring phase of bug-fixing is still going, slowly but surely. Stable should be released next week, but with some people on vacation (Ben, Jitka, kovarex, Klonan, Sanqui) and with the release of WoW Classic, it might get slowed down a bit. (By the way, some of us will be playing on Pyrewood Village, Alliance, so if you want to have the chance of meeting Twinsen, kovarex or dominik while leveling, you can join that server).
So since there's not much happening, this week we decided to explore some unpopular or controversial opinions about the game from within the team.
In Wube we don't have a very strict management structure, everyone is free to have ideas and opinions about almost all aspects of the game. This means that with almost every change we argue and discuss a lot before making a final decision. Sometimes we argue about everything, from the smallest GUI change, to how a major feature should work. This is probably not a bad thing since this means change...
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Hello,
we had a party last night in the office to celebrate the work we have done over the last 6 months on 0.17 stablisation. It was nice to have most of the team together to share some beers and pizza.
Unfortunately a couple of nasty bugs appeared this week, in no small part due to forum member boskid and his crusade to find bugs. In the last month alone boskid has reported over 20 bugs, so very special thanks are due. Saying that, we have been efficient in our fixing, and are now down to 32 open bug reports on the forum.
While there are issues being reported, the number of crashes is at an all time low. Below is a comparison between 0.16 and 0.17.
We compared the current number of 0.17 crashes to the number of crashes in 0.16 before we released 0.17. From what we can tell, comparing the number of crashes against average player count...
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Hello,
We had a lovely surprise waiting us this Monday, one of our fans had sent us a delicious cake:
It didn't last very long...
Thank you very much Conn! It certainly helped with the bug fixing push this week.
This last week we have made a big push to fix as many remain...
Read moreMod GUIs have been an interesting part of Factorio modding since I started working at Wube. They allow scenarios and mods to add GUIs that look and feel like the base game.
When someone new to Factorio modding is introduced to how they function, they almost always have the same questions:
And then comes the explanation:
Hello,
We are down to 28 bugs on the forum. The last bugs are often the ones we have been putting off for a reason, they generally require some more meaningful changes and decisions. That is why this week we have a lot to discuss.
G2A got back to us this Monday, nothing much has happened so I will keep it short. They asked if we would agree to an audit to verify the money lost to chargebacks, we said yes, and they said they will start contacting some audit companies, and that it will 'take some time'.
Kovarex was convinced by members of the forum to add someway to use the obstacle avoidance mode of the rail planner. Now when planning a rail path, holding CTRL will make it use the obstacle avoidance ghost planning.
Dear server owners: the server description field is being enlarged from 120 to 5000 characters, and it now loads immediately. As soon ...
Read moreWe have a record low in our bug report forum, of only 55 active bug reports. I don't think in the history of Factorio the bug forum has been so clean. No doubt once we mark 0.17 as stable the count will shoot up again.
For this weeks graph I added the count of players on Steam as the left axis. We thought it would be somewhat interesting to see if there is any correlation between the two.
Note: The axis have different scales.
I a...
Read moreLast month I joined KatherineOfSky's MMO event as a player. I noticed that after we reached a certain number of players, every few minutes a bunch of them got dropped. Luckily for you (but unluckily for me), I was one of the players who got disconnected every, single. time, even though I had a decent connection. So I took the matter personally and started looking into the problem. After 3 weeks of debugging, testing and fixing, the issue is finally fixed, but the journey there was not that easy.
Multiplayer issues a...
Read moreFor many weeks now the GFX department has been focused on preparing replacements for the placeholder graphics of the campaign crash site. The subject as usual is not that easy because we had to first solve the main concept of the crash site.
It happens that those new entities belong to the Factorio universe, but they come from a different reality than the usual DIY/diesel punk of the game. So we had to invent a new way to design machines that look like Factorio but that are not too familiar.
Here a proof of concept of the look:
The concept is that the big (medium) spaceship broke into pieces as it crash landed, and lost many components that the player, during the introduction, will repair and use for his own profit.
The look of the spaceship remnants are a little bit based on the d...
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Hello,
this is a special edition. We are celebrating that we managed to write something about the game development of Factorio every single Friday and reached the number 300. Since we hopefully won't get to another round number like this before finishing the game, we would like to make this one a little bit different. We will introduce people from the team.
Everyone was asked to answer the following questions:
Michal (kovarex) Kovařík
Founder, Game designer, Developer, "Approver"
My favorite games are: Baldur's gate, Starcraft, Civilisation, Xcom, They are billio...
Read moreYou might have noticed that a lot of rail related stuff was broken during these past releases, and now it is working more or less fine again. The story behind it is not so trivial.
As a train moves forward, it tries to reserve signals in front of it. If it can reserve a signal, the whole block guarded by the signal gets reserved for the train. If the train can't reserve the signal, as the block is reserved or occupied by different train(s), it stops in front of the signal and waits. Once the train passes a signal and enters a new block, it removes the reservation on the signal and block it had reserved. Once it exits the block, the block can be reserved and entered by other trains.
This looks nice and simple, nothing fundamentally wrong could happen with this logic right? Especially since we have it there for almost five years and it all just works right?...
Read moreTLDR; We have released a new version of the Introduction campaign to the Experimental branch. If you are following the campaign development please play it again and send us your feedback.
My previous post on tutorial design is most likely required reading for this post. Please see FFF-284.
In general, the Introduction scenario has been very well received. Feedback has been flooding in, and it has been very useful. Receiving screenshots from all of you has been great. We are mostly happy with the state of the gameplay, and it seems to be having the right effect on new players.
When 0.17 moves to stable, there will need to be a new version of the Demo. The Introduction scenario was always planned to be the Demo, but there are still some sticking points we want to address.
A few days ago I was investigating a rather minor bug report related to "Rotational Asymmetry in Belt/Inserter interactions" (aka Inserter was not behaving identically when rotated). This was a classic case of floating point equality comparison.
The Inserter would move it's arm and then it would pick up the item if the current arm orientation is equal to the desired arm orientation. Because of some chain of calculations related to rotation, some precision was lost and the equality check would fail for 1 tick, delaying the item pickup for 1 tick in some Inserter rotations. So I fixed that by...
Read moreThis really is a tiny feature, the car and tank will now save the color of the passengers when they exit the vehicle.
So now you won't forget which vehicle you were driving, and can warn everyone else on the server: "Pink tank is mine".
As uninteresting as it is; most bugs are boring and typically involve missing code. Someone forgot to implement part of a new feature, forgot that some situation could happen, forgot to check for null. Rarely interesting things show up where everything is working but not how we want it to.
Recently we had a bug report where a modded game would freeze for a minute for seemingly no reason and then continue like nothing went wrong. It being a heavily modded game my first reaction was to blame it on th...
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Hello,
the bugfixing period boringly continues, we got down to 159 active bug reports, so in few weeks we should be finally down with this burden. But at least the graphics department has something new to show:
After some time working on the redesign of the chemical plant, we can finally show the results:
In the old version, we had the problem of not being very clear when the chemical plant was working or not. So apart from the style modernisation and high resolution, this redesign was aimed for solving this readability issue. As an addition, we tried also to be very clear at the time of viewing what kind of chemical recipe the plant is processing.
Finally we came with the solution of adding a big window - pipe style - showing the moving liquids inside with the tinted color, and also adding a ch...
Read moreAs the time goes on, the nature of our weekly FFF post has changed. At the very beginning (FFF-1) it was to let people know that "we're still alive and working on the game", and over time we've grown into covering a range of different topics:
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