Hi there,

after feeble weather during the Christmas it finally feels a bit like winter here in Prague. There is the snow outside, the air is fresh and some warm clothing is a must. When we add a new terrain into the game (and we will) it will definitely be the snow. Just imagine all those machines standing on the snow and puffing the smoke, furnaces glowing with fire and maybe even having traces of snow all over them. I am already looking forward to it:)

All the big programming tasks for the 0.9 are finished and now we are working our way through our never ending issues list. They are either bugfixes, polishing tasks or small features. We have added couple of neat things, for example: better visible entities on the map, the "copy entity settings" feature (previously shift build) or possibility to have custom directories in the saves directory. In the beginning of the week we had around 30 closed and 30 opened tickets. Now we have over 50 closed tickets but 35 opened ones. The new ones keep springing up like mushrooms. The funny thing is that quite a few of these are more than 6 months old and they just keep "travelling across the releases" (when it is time to make the release we move all the unfinished issues to the next one). And of course in case we would actually finish everything, there is always a huge repository of ideas and suggestions to choose from at our forums:)

In one of the previous posts I mentioned that the music for our new trailer(yes, we plan to release it eventually) has been done by Daniel, a musician from the United Kingdom. We decided to continue working together and came up with a plan for complete "soundification" of the game. Yes, we have some sounds at the moment but these are both incomplete and incoherent (they are mostly royalty free sounds we found ourselves in the dusty corners of the internet). We will start by replacing and extending the sounds we have at the moment and then we will move on to make sounds for every moving machine in the game. The sounds of the machines would be then played based on the players position and they should evoke a feeling of "walking through the factory". This is very hard thing to do, because the sounds must play well together, not be too aggressive but also not too monotonous. It might not work out, but we think it is worth a try. And of course this has been suggested before on our forums:) The creation of sounds for the game will be a continunous process, but some first results are coming already in the 0.9.

When people see Factorio for the first time, one of their reactions often is: "oh, a 2D game :| ". Well yes, the Factorio engine works with 2D sprites and all the animations are done by showing sequences of the object in different positions (basically a motion picture). But behind all this there is a twist. All the objects in the game (including the terrain) have actually been rendered from the 3D models (and all of these models have been done by Albert:)). This results in animations with surprising amount of details (at least we hope so). A good example is the new machine Albert has been working on for the past couple of days. It is the oil pumpjack and in my opinion it instantly became one of the best machines in the game. There is a preview of couple of pumpjacks in the desert, together with a detailed look taken from the Blender when Albert was animating the model.

As always, your comments are more than welcome on our forum.