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.

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.

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.

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.

Cliffs - introduction and gameplay (Twinsen) Several months ago TOGoS (Dan) half-jokingly mentioned that what Factorio really needed was mountains and cliffs. This was also suggested many many many times. Albert immediately got very excited and they started having some discussions about how to make it happen. Fast forward a few months, and Ernestas had made some cliff graphics that looked really nice when layered onto pretty much any type of terrain. Fast forward a few more months and add a few months of programming and polishing, and cliffs are almost done, so we will be showing them to you today. Cliffs, together with the other map changes TOGoS did, should make the map look much more diverse and interesting compared to 0.15. Hopefully it will make exploration more fun, since you will be finding more diverse and unique areas in the world. Since cliffs block your path, they can affect gameplay significantly. To not make this annoying, cliffs are never too long and often have gaps. We tried to balance the length so they will be long enough to create interesting combat situations, or with some modifications serve as a natural wall against the biters, but so long that they block your path when you want to get somewhere. Cliffs will also not appear in the starting area, to give you plenty of space for your initial base. Finally, in Factorio nothing should stand in the way of automation, so if you don't like cliffs, you can always blow them up using a new mid-game item called "Cliff explosives". Cliffs - graphics (Albert) Map generation is hard mainly because it is procedurally generated. That means that the computer is mixing all the pieces to create the terrain on the fly. This leads the artists to a very difficult situation,because it is very hard to guess in which conditions the tilesets will be used. Factorio terrain 0.1 We started the generation of terrain in Factorio with very basic rules, mainly mixing clusters of 32px tiles. But obviously that wasn't enough. Factorio terrain 0.3 With better looking tiles, transitions from one terrain to another, and variations of tiles, terrain looks much better. But this technique was a pain for the artist to generate an interesting and detailed tileset. The 32px grid was killing any attempt to have a natural looking terrain. Factorio terrain 0.12 New technique: Instead of having only variations of 32px tiles, we produce a tileset with different sizes (x32, x64, x128, x256) in order to break this squary sense of grid, and even being able to render more detail in bigger sized tiles. So terrain looks much more natural. The visible tile-grid is almost gone, and we start spreading a new concept for us: the doodads. These are little sprites of plants and rocks randomly spread throughout the map in order to provide more variability and an organic feeling. Factorio terrain 0.15 Things are getting better, the doodads were optimised and we're able to place much more of them, creating more interesting patterns and mixtures. It is also worth it to mention that the introduction of the high resolution graphics does a lot to help the look of the terrain. Factorio terrain 0.16 After all those iterations, the next terrain generation integrates a couple of new concepts: the decals which are "just" doodads but ground-related. Decals are meant to generate terrain accidents and details without being oppressed by the rules of "tileability" and size. Basically decals are patches on top of a tileset that are very rich in detail. In combination with the doodads, the absence of the tile-grid and the high-res, we start to have a natural looking terrain. I have to add that the good and fast work of Ernestas, our environment artist, made possible the evolution of this new state of terrain. Now with our new techniques, the creation of a new tileset is very smooth. Even with all the improvements, terrain still looks too flat, so another addition to 0.16 are the cliffs. Finally we can break the flatness of the Factorio surface, without having to change the mechanics of the game. This new feature can add a bit to the fun of designing a factory by taking advantage of the topology of the map. Or can lead combat to more interesting situations. There are more additions to the terrain, and we will dedicate more time to this subject in future posts.

Hello dear biters and related species from unexplored planet full of life and natural resources. Recently I have been working on several high resolution graphics for your best friends - the tank and the player character. In this article I would like to show their updated visuals to you, as well as a sneak peek at how they are produced. The following text may contain traces of automation.

Hello, most of the team is out of the office today attending the Game Developers Session here in Prague, if you're around you can look out for some people wearing Factorio t-shirts. As we were thinking about what to write in this Friday Facts, kovarex suggested "In the next Friday Facts we should write about how hard it is to write Friday Facts". Sometimes it is really difficult to find something interesting to write about. Thankfully we found some short things that that we thought you would like.

A long time ago, in FFF-191 I wrote about improving the GUI. Well, things are finally starting to move, so this week I'll bring you an update on that. We even have a GUI team: Twinsen(me): UX and programming Albert: UI, graphical design, layouts, mockups, UX Rseding91: main programming and GUI internals The plan is to go through the entire game's GUI (including main menu, all entity GUIs and all game windows) and improve it both visually and interaction wise. This is quite a huge undertaking because: Factorio's interactions are quite complex If you count all the entity windows and panels, we have about 120 windows to go through in the game. Mods can change many aspects of the game so we have to account for that to make sure windows still look good and are still easy to use: e.g. having 15+ recipe categories, having assembling machines with 20+ module slots, having recipes with 20+ ingredients, having players with 200+ inventory slots, etc. Many players are already used to interacting with the game in a specific way, so any major changes are hard to make. Our GUI back-end (heavily modified AGUI) is not exactly well written, programmer-friendly, or feature-rich. Many of the features and polishing we want to add were not done previously due to their programming complexity. At the moment we are still early in the project, just defining the style and the concepts. During the next months, I'll try to make a series of FFF talking about the improvements we are making (starting with this one) so you can see how the project progresses, and offer feedback along the way. Everything I mentioned in FFF-191 will be there, but we have even more cool improvements coming to the toolbar that we are working on, so today I'll talk about something else: the new train/locomotive GUI. Disclaimers: Everything you see are mockups made by Albert and are not from the game, but we will try to make it look almost identical in game. The style (colors and look) is not final. This is the 3rd iteration and Albert is still experimenting with making everything look nice. The purpose of these mockups are mostly to define the layout and interaction. This is how the new Locomotive GUI will look. As you notice, apart from the style changes, they way the stations and conditions are shown is very different, but I'd say much more intuitive, informative, and easy to use. Let's go through a short use case. You click add station and the list of stations appears. You can add a station by clicking on the station in the list or by clicking it in the small map. The map can be zoomed and moved around so you can easily find your station. Also, as you hover over stations in the list, the map will show their location. The stations marked differently are unreachable from the train's current position. This way you can more easily recognize and possibly ignore stations outside of the current network. Once you click a station, it is added to the schedule, along with a default condition. You can continue adding more stations, or add/edit the conditions for the new station. Finally a schedule can look something like this. The path of the train will be shown. We will try to paint the path the train is taking at the moment, it will change as the train takes different paths. The fuel can be accessed from the separate tab and the color of the locomotive can be changed using the color picker. The buttons in top of the map, from left to right are as follows: Turn station names on or off. Change the angle of the station names. Switch to map view. Switch to camera view. Center view on the train. The small 'info' button you see on the right side will be a help button we will use throughout the game to help explain how different GUI work and when their elements mean. We will write more about this in some of the next parts of the FFF GUI update series. We also want to add a neat tool for advanced players. Control-clicking on any point on the locomotive's map (or any station) will add a 'Temporary stop' to it's schedule. The train will try to go as close as it can to that point, wait a few seconds and finally automatically remove the 'Temporary stop' from it's schedule. This is very useful for quick transportation. It also allows you to quickly 'hijack' an existing train and use it to get somewhere, since the 'Temporary stop' will be deleted and the train's normal schedule will be resumed. Another quality of life improvement will be a game option to automatically add some fuel from the player inventory when building vehicles (car, tank or locomotive), making rail transportation as simple as placing a locomotive on a rail, entering it and control-clicking where you want to go. We hope you like the proposed changes. No doubt things will change as we implement and playtest these changes, but we thought it would be interesting to show you an early preview. Finally the million dollar question is when will this be in game? Because it's quite a bit of work we already pushed the GUI update to 0.17. On the bright side, this mean 0.16 will come a bit sooner. Let us know what you think by commenting in our usual topic at the forums.

Hello, after a lot of planning and preparation, the party on Saturday went very well. We really enjoyed spending time with some of our fans, and it has definitely sharpened our motivation to do right by our community and make the game as great as possible. With this festivity behind us, we started this week with some renewed focus.