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.

Mp4 playback not supported on your device.

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.

Mp4 playback not supported on your device.

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