Under 100 bugs We 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 also prepared the same graph but for the duration of the 0.17 release. You can see our player numbers are dropping quite a lot, from the all time peak of 22,457 on the 3rd of March 2019. While bug reports might be at an all time low, we are not going to call the game stable yet. We still have an important milestone to reach, that is, implementing the new Introduction campaign graphics (FFF-301). A lot of the team has been on vacation these last few weeks, including the whole campaign team and most of the art department. What this means is that we expect it will be a few more weeks before we can call the current version stable. We have been asked a few times when stable will be released, but my question is, why does it matter exactly which version we call stable? Are you waiting for stable to play a new playthrough? The thing is, this stable is only going to be the 'first' stable. Our plan is to have a number of short experimental phases after the first stable, where we will add new GUI's and such, which will add bugs and technical debt. After fixing the bugs in a 'small' experimental content release, we will then mark that as the 'new' 0.17 stable. Besides, there are still a few edge cases with signals that kovarex is busy fixing: For instance the setup above took him 3 hours to fix. The cause of the issue was that the segment has both an incoming and outgoing signal at the same position.

The multiplayer megapacket Twinsen Last 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 are very hard to track down. Usually they only happen under very specific network conditions, in very specific game conditions (in this case having more than 200 players). Even when you can reproduce the issue it's impossible to properly debug, since placing a breakpoint stops the game, messes up the timers and usually times out the connection. But through some perseverance and thanks to an awesome tool called clumsy, I managed to figure out what was happening. The short version is: Because of a bug and an incomplete implementation of the latency state simulation, a client would sometimes end up in a situation where it would send a network package of about 400 entity selection input actions in one tick (what we called 'the megapacket'). The server then not only has to correctly receive those input actions but also send them to everyone else. That quickly becomes a problem when you have 200 clients. It quickly saturates the server upload, causes packet loss and causes a cascade of re-requested packets. Delayed input actions then cause more clients to send megapackets, cascading even further. The lucky clients manage to recover, the others end up being dropped. The issue was quite fundamental and took 2 weeks to fix. It's quite technical so I'll explain in juicy technical details below. But what you need to know is that since Version 0.17.54 released yesterday, multiplayer will be more stable and latency hiding will be much less glitchy (less rubber banding and teleporting) when experiencing temporary connection problems. I also changed how latency hiding is handled in combat, hopefully making it look a bit smoother.

Demo upgrade for stable Abregado TLDR; 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.

Cars/Tanks remember their color Klonan This 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".

Blog thoughts Klonan As 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: Communicating our progress and roadmap of the next releases. Showing new features and gathering community feedback on them. Diving into the technical side of game development and particular challenges we face. 'Meta-posts' about the company and the changes outside of the game. Community spotlights and interesting Factorio related news. It is always an interesting challenge each week to determine what topics we might be able to cover in the FFF. During the weeks of rapid development the FFF can feel like a triumphant reveal of what we have been working on, and we excitedly await the community response. Other times, such as when most of the team is on bugfixing, we can take the oppourtunity to explore other points of discussion, such as the marketing post last week. The graph of the FFF readership over the last year is quite informative to look into: We had a good run back in January and February, we had week after week of really interesting posts and a build-up of excitement for the 0.17 release. Now after the release, the readership has stabilized at around 40-45,000 views a week (note, that the graph does not include people reading the blog post through Steam). The FFF is close to its 300th post now, with no signs of stopping soon, and the continued audience of dedicated readers each week help to keep us on track and focused on our quest towards 1.0. As we get closer to completion of the game, the general nature of the blog post will no doubt change even further. The good times of showing a new feature each week might be over, but I hope we will be able to provide interesting insights into the game and our development processes. I would also like to thank all the players/readers who share their thoughts with us each week, it is really great to have so much support and care for our project.

More remnants Dom, albert As for the conclusion of the topic opened in the FFF-288 we finally decided to go for a balanced solution in which the player can recognize what entity was destroyed and also walk through them. The solution of going up in the Z-axis is really attractive for designing the destroyed models, but it gives a lot of headaches to the game designers due its need of a bounding box. We are planning also a generic set of remnants for the modders who don’t feel like making the destroyed version of their own machines. Here an example of how a factory can look after a biter attack: These remnants are still a work in progress, many of them are not yet finished and we are planning more iterations with this subject. By now you'll find a sneak peek in today's release (0.17.36).

Inching closer to stable Klonan The last 2 weeks have been less productive than we would like on the bug fixing front. The Easter festivities along with a wave of illness have dampened our efforts. We have still managed to push out 2 more experimental releases, and fixed a few desyncs. We encountered one specific desync in the mass MP stress test last weekend, caused by a characters inventory size changing (such as researching the toolbelt technology) while the player is respawning. The graph of crashes paints a similar story to how the office atmosphere feels. It is natural though, most of the major crashes affecting most players are resolved, so all that remains are the more difficult issues that only affect a handful of players. This means that each bug fix is less effective at reducing the overall crash count. This last weekend, we had over 500 total crashes reported, which is a slight improvement over the prior weekend's ~650. One thing that makes our progress hard to evaluate is that we don't know how many people are actually playing experimental. Most people play through Steam, and so far we have found no way of determining how many people are opted-in to the 0.17 experimental through Steam. It could be that the game is more stable, or it could be that less people are playing. There are still over 250 open bug reports on our forum, so it seems it will be a few more weeks until the first stable 0.17. Some people have been asking when we will release the new GUI and GFX updates that we promised before 0.17 release. The plan is that after the first 0.17 stable version, some of the team will be moved from fixing bugs to working on features. At the point where we have a meaningful amount of new content ready (A few GUIs, some new GFX, etc.), we will release it as a new experimental 0.17 version. We plan to give some explanation and notice about these 'mini-content releases' in a FFF before they are each released.

Hello, we are still focusing most of our resources towards fixing as many bugs as possible so we have stable release in reasonable time. In the meantime, the preparation for the continuation of the work on the GUI rewrite is still happening:

Hello, This week has been non-eventful. We are fixing bugs. There is not much to say, and I have updated the graph to reflect the status of the ongoing Dev vs. Bug war: The massive spike is the specific crash we talked about in the last FFF.

A week in the office This week is another week of typical bug fixing, so I thought we would make a one-time change of style and do a day-by-day account of what exactly that means for us.