kovarex, Klonan

Hello,
Is it me you're looking for?

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The UI searchkovarex

When it comes to UI, one of the things we are proud of is the standard search feature in every window where it's even remotely relevant. It all comes nicely together. You stop thinking about it, and press the CTRL + F shortcut to search whenever you look for something.

But once we got really used to it, we suddenly started to want to search even when not in some window, but just in the game itself. This combined with the fact, that the most frequented question in multiplayer games was, "Hey, where do we make X please?" (especially once planets were added).

Which lead us to the most obvious complementary feature:

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The map searchkovarex

Why not extend the searching to the whole map as well?

We were not sure about what exactly should be searchable, so we just started from the most obvious, the production search. ...

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Hello,
trains are one of our most favorite parts of the game. We already talked about the ways we improved rails (FFF-377), so its time to talk about how we improved the way you can control the trains that ride on them.

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Train Schedule Interrupts

The way you control the trains is very static at the moment. You have a list of stops to visit, and the train just goes through them one by one and thats it. The only dynamic part is the wait time at each of the stops.
There is no way to just go somewhere else dynamically based on what is going on.

T...

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Hello,
we are going to focus on the general improvements of the way circuit network is used in the game.

I wasn't using it often, because all the problems combined made it too big of a hassle most of the time, which was an indication of problems.
So we improved each part of the process of using it a little, from UI, to feedback of what is going on, to stronger/more accessible combinator functionality.
I can say that it worked, at least for me. Once these changes were available, I used the circuit network way more in my latest playthrough, and it felt good, so lets hope it won't be just me :)

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Circuit GUIs rework

We learned over the years that it is always better to use disabled/enabled state on control elements which can be turned on or off, compared to making them just disappear.
Circuit control GUI was one of the last places in the game where we didn't apply it properly:

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Hello, welcome, take a seat...

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Update from last time

The tile building animation showcased in the previous FFF is now integrated in the game, and this is how it looks:

Mp4 playback not supported on your device.

Of course being in the engine doesn't mean it's completely done. It is still quite WIP and we have things we would like to improve with it, but showing a bit of progress week-by-week is also part of the fun.

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Super force buildingkovarex

In the recent ...

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1.0 date kovarex

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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