Taipei Game Show 2018 (Twinsen) After a long 14 hour flight back, Albert, kovarex and I arrived back from Taipei, after our attendance at the Taipei Game Show. Jitka started her vacation by staying there to visit the Taiwan island. We stayed there for 7 days (2 days in the business area, 3 days in the convention area and 2 days of free time where we visited the city). In the business area we met many potential business partners and got way too many business cards. We made some friends among the other indie developers and tried all kinds of fun, weird, interesting and some bad indie games. The convention area was very crowded, with 350,000 visitors slowly trying to make their way through the fairly small convention hall. I can't speak for the others, but I still enjoyed myself. Even though it was crowded, most of the games were in Chinese, and I only got to try one AAA game, there is something about being surrounded by games, gamers, and game developers that makes me feel great. Our booth was in the indie area. We had many people coming to try the game but also many fans wanting to speak with us and congratulate us for making a great game. AndrewIRL who lived there for a few years, invited us for dinner to "the best restaurant in the city", and we were not disappointed. Factorio is not an easy game to demo, since it takes at least 30 minutes to kind of understand what the game is about. But having the trailers looping on the screen, and having subtitles for the gameplay trailer meant that the people got a fair idea about what the game is about and how complex it is. While not the best, we had people start by playing the campaign. Most of them were leaving after the first level but some of them were also getting addicted and playing for multiple hours. We gave free Steam keys to some of the people who were more engaged with the game. It was a learning experience to see people play the game for the first time and to see the most common problems with the campaign, the interaction, the UI and the Traditional Chinese translation. The days were super exhausting though, many of us collapsing at the accommodation and sleeping for 10 hours. Luckily we had 2 more days to relax and enjoy the city before flying back. We mostly split up and each of us visited what they were most interested in, with me going through the electronics markets and riding a rented bike through the rainy streets. To give credit where credit is due, I'd like to thank the game show for inviting us and sponsoring our booths, and Razer for conveniently lending us the laptops we used to demo the game. Financially there is no point in us going to a game show, our attendance did not bring us any extra sales in Asia, as expected. The point of going there, for us, is to visit the show floor, play and see random games, make gamer friends, meet fellow developers, meet big fans of the game and maybe make some business partners. Since many of you mentioned PAX and some of us are interested in going there, we are trying to see if we can attend PAX East this year (April 5-8th). So you might have another opportunity to come and take selfies with some of the Factorio devs. From left to right: Jitka, Albert, Twinsen, kovarex.
Bugfixing report (posila) Stabilization goes well, the game seems to be quite stable right now (as in - not many crashes are being reported), in fact I think we are at the phase where additional bugfixing makes the game less stable, because more bugs are introduced than fixed, or some critical bug slips through our automated tests. But there are still lot of issues that need to be resolved before we declare 0.16 stable and move on to 0.17 development - the largest issue being belt compression problems. We finally fixed compatibility problem with OS X 10.9 Mavericks after it was broken in 0.15.40, when we updated our development environment to a newer version of boost, and was still broken in 0.16.x despite of us completely replacing boost with standard libraries from a newer version of C++. However, we might drop Mavericks support in 0.17, as we are considering migrating the game to OpenGL 4.1, which won’t be available on Macs that are unable to run a newer version of macOS. Speaking of OpenGL, we have several reports of the game crashing in rendering on Linux when the game is disturbed somehow (for example window resizes, loses focus or user switches workspaces), even though it is terribly inconvenient, the game seems to be otherwise playable on these configurations, and we don’t want to spend a terrible amount of time trying to figure out what is wrong with our current rendering system, when we plan to do complete overhaul of it in 0.17. We will investigate these issues, but they might go unresolved until 0.17. I’ve been looking into some corrupted saves this week, still not being able to figure out how these mysterious corruptions occur. For example this save had two iron ore entities on two different chunks saved with zero entity ID. This could have happened only if those entities had a wrong pointer to the iron ore prototype, so when the game read the ID from the prototype on saving, it would read a value from some random part of memory, or if the ID was corrupted on copying from the prototype to buffer that is saved to disk. Since these kind of corruptions seem to be relatively rare, we suspect it might caused by random hardware failures (maybe cosmic ray hitting a transistor and flipping bit somewhere?), but it would be nice to have some proof it is not some dangling pointer in our code that causes random parts of memory to be overwritten by who knows what. One way to test it would be to check for tile corruptions. Tile data for a chunk is allocated in a 4kB array at the beginning of the chunk. We could create custom allocator for chunks, so that data structure representing chunk is aligned to virtual pages. That way tile data would occupy a whole single virtual page which we could flag as read only. Then, if due to a bug we write over tile data, the OS would crash the game and we would get a stacktrace and crash dump to investigate. But if a cosmic ray would hit the RAM and flip a bit, the corrupted save would still be produced. However, we currently don’t do any custom allocation of virtual pages, so it might be quite hard to implement. We also need to change tiles sometimes (when map generation runs, when player uses concrete or landfill, when a script changes tiles, etc.) and we don’t know how expensive it would be to change pages from read only to read-write and then back to read only. So it might be just easier to spend two hours on fixing a broken save that someone sends us once every week or two.
Hello, another week has passed here, with part of the team still out in Taiwan. They should be back next week, with some news of their great adventure.
Hello, this week has been a week of typical bug fixing of 0.16, so development news wise, there is not much to write about. However we have some updates on some other goings on in the company.
The previous FFF seems to have caused quite a reaction. We had many discussions in the office regarding this topic, so this week some of us prepared some detailed responses.
The 0.16 stabilisation update (kovarex) We had quite a lot of critical bugs after the 0.16.8 release that introduced the logistic chest finalisations mentioned in the last FFF. I'm sorry for the trouble, but it is called experimental version for a reason. It seems that 7 releases in the past week has been enough to stabilize it. We are finally in a state, where we are fixing more bugs than are reported, and we are reaching the first boundary of less than 100 active bug reports. It seems that the most urgent things are to be be finished soon, and we could find the needed time to dive into the belt logic to be able to consolidate it. This is my plan for the next week.
Hello, this is the last Friday of 2017, and as such, the last Friday facts of this year.
Hello, as you could expect this Friday facts is mainly about our fight with the avalanche of bug reports, which is actually not as huge as we expected it to be to be honest. We released 0.16.7 yesterday, and this will probably be the last update for a while. Most of us now are taking a break, enjoying the festivities, and visiting our friends and family.
Hello there. As you probably know, we released the experimental version of 0.16 this week. As usual after such a big release, we are working as best as we can to fix the bugs to make the game reasonably playable as soon as possible. Our current goal is to have semi-stable version before Christmas.
Christmas is coming early for Factorio fans. We have a lot of exciting things to show you and announce this week, so hold on tight.
