Hello, let me show you another dose of things we just can't stop ourselves from doing.
Taming the random generatorTwinsen One of the things in the large TODO list for 0.17 is giving a final polish to the map generator. There are quite a few obvious problems now in 0.16, and some less obvious ones. Here are some of the fixes and improvements (some work in progress): All combinations of settings should no longer create strange maps such as circles of cliffs. Much more predictable starting area resources that don't overlap each-other and are not covered by water. The resource generation settings now have a much more dramatic effect (previously they had little to no effect). Increased the number of steps (small, medium, big, etc) for each setting from 5 to 9 for even more customization. The starting area will always contain water, most often a lake close to the spawn position. Since the algorithm for generating ores was pretty much completely rewritten, there are many small improvements. Now for the less obvious problem: unpredictability. I saw quite a few people complain with vague comments like "the map generator sucks". So I often asked them what the problem is in detail. Some were complaining about the above problems, some did not understand what the settings do, and some had problems finding a "good map". I saw quite a few players click "regenerate" like crazy until they got a map with fat patches in the starting area, big oil patch and also uranium, complaining that it's too hard to find a "good map". Due to the randomness we seem to have set the expectation for "good map" a bit too high. Oil and uranium were never intended to be in the starting area, but due to the randomness of the generator they sometimes were there. Also sometimes maps were so wild that you would start off either swimming in resources or desperately looking for another iron patch. It would be simple to just say "that's just RNG, deal with it", but blaming poor game experience on RNG is just bad design. So what we did is: The starting area contains only iron, copper, coal and stone, in very predictable amounts. Uranium and oil are explicitly excluded from the starting area. Starting area resources are usually in one ore patch each (depending on settings). The starting area patches are usually close together. The starting area size setting no longer affects resource placement, it just has a fixed size. Outside the starting area, the regular algorithm "kicks in" so you can still get quite wild results, but they are far enough that it averages out. I believe this is a good balance where you can still have different experiences depending on your luck, but your starting experience is much more predictable and does not leave you with the feeling that you got screwed over by the map generator. We definitely don't want the map generator to be extremely flat and predictable. Opinions on the subject are quite wild too, with people having different expectations of what a good map should look like, so we try to only make changes based on actual problems. This might seem a bit controversial so we can add an option that disables this whole starting area logic, for purists. We plan some small tweaks coming to biters also (a tiny bit more biters close to the starting area), small tweaks to terrain, cliffs, water generation and possibly some new features to make the generated trees and decoratives look better. Most of these problems including the obvious and apparently simple ones were not that easy to solve. It's hard to make random generators do what you want, so TOGoS will explain what it took to actually get it done.
Hello, We have another exciting batch of facts for you today.
Hello,the hopefully final 0.14 version was recently released, meanwhile most of the team have been assigned their major tasks for 0.15.
Hello, we have shown some bigger things recently, so it is time to also show some smaller things, because the bigger things wouldn't shine that good without the smaller things working properly!
Roadmap update (kovarex) A lot of people have been asking recently, when can they expect a new release and when is the game going to be finished. The original plan was to finish everything, and release the final version of Factorio ideally before the end of 2018. This was the plan at the beginning of the year. We worked in our usual way of "it is done when it is done" for quite some time, but then it started taking a little bit too long, and we weren't even sure what is a realistic timeframe to finish it in. To help this issue, we tried to become a little more organized in the past few weeks. We went through our list of all the development tasks, and tried to finalize it. We removed all the things that we decided to cut, and added all the missing things that we need to do before the game is finished. Then we tried to make some kind of time estimate for each task, to get a general idea of when everything will be finished. We started to be more conscious of who is working on what, and how much time each task is taking, to know how accurate the estimates are. The result was, that if it all goes well, we could be done in 6-9 months. This is probably not something you wanted to hear. After a few rounds of discussions, we decided split the releases of 0.17 and 0.18 in the following way: 0.17 plan It will contain all the things we have done up to this point, mainly: New render backend, which helps performance and solves a lot of issues (FFF-251) The graphical updates: walls, gates, turrets, belts, biters, spawners, electric poles (FFF-268, FFF-228, FFF-253) The GUI reskin (FFF-243) New map editor (FFF-252) Resource generation overhaul (FFF-258) Robot construction tools (FFF-255) Rich text (FFF-237, FFF-267) And more... It will also include some things we know we can finish soon enough, mainly: Redoing some of the most important GUIs (Action bar, character screen, main game GUI, train GUI, play GUI, tooltips) Fluid optimisations And several smaller things, which depends on how it goes We will release this during January 2019, we will announce it more precisely in advance. 0.18 plan It will become the final 1.0 version once it is stable. It will contain mainly: New tutorial New campaign Final mini tutorials Revision of rest of the GUI All remaining high res graphics graphics and final polish We obviously don't know exactly when is it going to be ready, but we hope it to be sooner than 9 months from now.
Hello, we've already shown the space platform processing cycle in FFF-380. Let's talk a little bit more about the machine which makes it all possible - the asteroid collector.
Hello, as mentioned in the last update the word about Factorio started to spread much faster than we were used to. We are happy about that and we would like to thank to all the people who helped to spread the word. We have been contacted by several youtubers, and told all of them to wait for the release of their videos until the 1st of May so there is a good chance that we didn't even reach the peak so far. The reason why we want to wait for the 1st may is because it is the release date of our new trailer, we were ready to send Albert home to see his wife already, but his perfectionism didn't let him as he decided to remake the last entity for the trailer, the steam generator. It is already remodelled now, waiting to be retextured, so we are almost finished. Most of the work now is still related to the multiplayer. I keep fixing one desynchronisation bug a day, so I'm near to being able to replay the demo campaign. We are discussing the details of networking almost daily and it seems like our second model of network synchronisation is going to be more consistent than the first one. I hope that the Factorio dev proverb (The third version is usually good) will not apply to this. In the meantime, I started to do a little research of the problem with the growing video memory requirements. It is going to be more relevant in the future if we want to add different enemies or machines, so anyone who knows about game programming could give us a hint. Destroying and building stuff is always more fun with effects. We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.
