Hello, since 0.16 is stable we can assign more of our effort into the work on 0.17. One of those features planned for that release is the Rich & interactive text. Having more text formatting options was one of the things we wanted for quite some time, and it is finally starting to become reality in the 0.17 branch. The initial motivation was to have more possibilities in the tutorial related texts, but it proved to be useful having it available globally in the game. The current format for any text markup we use is [<type>=<value>], but it might change somehow before 0.17 hits the public. This feature is being developed by wheybags, and it is progressing forward quite steadily.
Dear all, Version 0.16 has become stable, and this means that there is one last step for us to reach the 0.17 which will probably become 1.0 version. Then Factorio will finally step out of the Early Access zone. This will take some months but the roadmap is clear for us. We feel that now is a good time to adjust the price of the game. The price of the game has been growing steadily together with the game becoming bigger, more stable and polished. After careful consideration, we have decided to set the new price of the game to 30 USD (or your regional equivalent). This change will become effective as of the 16th of April 2018. This is the final Factorio price update, unless something unforeseen happens, so it will also be the price for the game for 1.0 release. As you probably know we have a strict no sale policy. The game will not go on sale on Steam or any other platform. This basically means that purchasing before the 16th of April 2018 is the only way to buy the game cheaper than the increased release price.
As you are probably already aware, some of our team members are going to attend PAX East in Boston next week. We figured we need some representative prints for our booth, but what to put there? We could have just made a big mega high resolution render of the player character or some other entity, but that would not tell the viewer much about what the game is about. So we thought it would be much better to "just" take a giant screenshot of a working factory, print it, and done! Now of course it’s much more complicated than that… The first obvious hurdle is that you need a savegame to take this screenshot of. So you go and try to take a bunch of random saves on your disk, you open them and find that it’s not so easy to just find a factory which would look nice. Such a factory needs to show enough of the various things to represent the game, can fit the logo somewhere, and must be large enough to fill about 275x185 tiles (3x2 meters at 150dpi taken at game zoom 2)... one square in the following picture is a chunk (32x32 tiles) Luckily I just had a savegame which was easy to adapt to those requirements, but I would like to ask the question, how does one build such a factory in general? That’s what I have been trying to figure out for a long time now. As some of you may have already noticed, I enjoy constructing very organic factories, a part of which eventually turns into a crazy mess. A mess as crazy as Factorio itself, representing what your will brain look like after playing Factorio. I find this to be a good opportunity to be a bit more specific and see a few examples to put it into more context...
Since the release of 0.16 experimental in early December, we have had over 30 bugfix releases, and are confident that 0.16 is ready to be enjoyed by all players. The goal of 0.16 is to wrap up the addition of any major features, so we can begin to focus on the final steps towards a 1.0 release.
0.16 to be declared stable Rseding thinks that we have the least amount of bugs in the game we ever had. Mostly because of the automated reporting system and partly because of my pushing of everyone to fix everything before starting other tasks. The 0.16.35 (to be released soon) will be declared stable on Monday, if no critical problems are discovered. This naturally leads us to:
Hello, it is another Friday already, and one step closer to the double-digit temperatures of spring.
Hello, it has been extremely cold these last weeks. It's one of those weeks when we can't think of anything to write about. So we will try to write some small parts.
Belt compression (kovarex) The decision of how to approach the belt compression in 0.16 was not an easy one, we were basically facing two possibilities: Splitters are the only way to reliably compress a belt. Compression is automatic everywhere (inserters, sideloading, mining drills). Non-automatic belt compression is kind of an nice example of emergent gameplay mechanic that I liked. It was not forced on players, but it allowed to get some extra efficiency if they cared enough. On other hand, the solution to the problem is kind of obvious, and having to use it in all the setups everywhere might add more repetitiveness than fun. So after some discussions, we decided to make compression automatic. But we weren't really sure how to do it. The problem is, that once the items are pseudo-randomly added to the belt, with lot of gaps not big enough for another items to fit, it is not clear how should the additional inserters compress it: The solution was, that whenever there is any gap bigger than the standard distance between items on a belt, item can be inserted there and for a (usually) brief moment, the items are squashed together closer than usual. But once the belt starts moving, the gap between the two squashed item extends to the standard size. This change required us to do some fundamental changes to the belt logic, which could introduce a lot of new problems, but since we just wanted this to be resolved in 0.16, we had to do it now. The result is, that the same setup in 0.16.25+ results in perfectly compressed belt: The belt mechanics are now easier to use, but the game also flows more nicely. The belt flow still needs to be controlled and belt balancers are still needed. As that feels to be the more interesting part of belt handling to me, I am happy with the final result.
Hello, on Thursday we received a belated Christmas package from our friends over at Steam: They definitely won't be lasting long :-).
