Friday Facts #94 - No 0.12 Release today
Hello,
this week wasn't easy, I spent most of it in bed, drinking hot tea and trying to get healthy. The rest of it was spent by cooperation on the release preparations, which basically means bugfixing.
Yea, and I also had to do the first steps of my wedding preparations, oh didn't I tell you? Now you know :)
To Release or not to release, that is the question.
The decision whether we should release can be tricky. Releasing earlier lets the brave players help us to find more bugs, but as long as there is enough of bugs we know about, the extra work related to sorting and answering all the bug reports is not making it worth it. So the rule is, that we release when the game works for us. It can contain some minor issues, but it shouldn't be game breaking, this is why there is:
No 0.12 today
The game works (almost) pretty fine on singleplayer, but the multiplayer part still needs lot of love. We fixed several determinism issues this week, but it still isn't enough, as we have desync issues every few minutes. All the new programming reinforcements have to learn the tricky methods used to investigate these determinism issues rather then wait for kovarex to magically fix it, and this takes time as well :) I hope we can fix it until the end of the next week, but the problem with these kinds of bugs is, that you never know how many of them is waiting there to be fixed. We are really grateful for the patience, we are doing what we can.
If the multiplayer still doesn't work reliably next week, we might consider releasing the game as it is and let the players help us locate single-player bugs in the meantime, but I wouldn't feel good about it.
T shirt testing
We are going to have few of the first Factorio t-shirts for testing. If they prove to be fine, they could become first pieces of the Factorio merchandise. Do you have some idea what could be there instead of the "Loading sprites" text?
Let us know how much you hate us for postponing 0.12 again on our forums :).
