Hello, Make Way for the Pentapods! Last week (FFF-424) we announced two entirely new enemies coming to Factorio: Space Age: Stompers and Strafers. This week, we're going to take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the features, systems, and optimizations that brought these adorable monsters to life. We'll also talk about the techniques we used to prepare last week's announcement. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so let's dive right in.
Hello, trains are one of our most favorite parts of the game. We already talked about the ways we improved rails (FFF-377), so its time to talk about how we improved the way you can control the trains that ride on them.
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.
New Fluid system 2 (Dominik) Hi Factorians, Here is Dominik, with an update on the fluids. This time it is pretty much finished so I can tell you facts instead of just speculations. You will find how the new algorithm will work and some new handy usability features. In FFF-260 I wrote about how it all started, why we are doing it and what the plan is. There was a huge response from you all and I want to thank everyone for their contributions. Let me apologise to redditors, as at the beginning I started responding on the forums and when I realized there is reddit too, there were too many comments for me to handle. The forum users produced many ideas on how the system could work. About third of them was a fluid teleportation, many where known but many were entirely new and interesting. What intrigued me was the large variety of backgrounds they came from - differents kinds of engineers (mechanical, CS, electrical, ...), mathematicians, physicists, and even people with real pipes hands on experience. I won’t go through them here, you can find them on the forums or reddit. There were two proposals on the forum though that were so good that they made it into the game - from quinor and TheYeast. Both of these proposals were very similar and kinda similar to the previous game logic. What it shares is that the mechanic still uses fluid physics simulation and volume in a pipe as a base for the movement calculation. As a result, not much changes on the first glance. What they add though is an emphasis on the fluid network update being independent on the current state (i.e. updating one pipe only depends on state from the last tick) and is therefore independent on evaluation order, which was one of the big pains of the old model that led to sometimes ridiculous junction behavior. Difference between these two was rather small - quinor’s version allowed perfect throughput with 3 passes over the fluidboxes (fluidbox is the thing managing fluids for entities, so I will talk about them), while Yeast’s one was 2 pass with ¼ throughput. What was outstanding though is that TheYeast, a physicist, supported the model with a nice theoretical background and what’s more, he made an amazing JS simulator to test and compare various modification of the model. Because that extra pass in quinor’s version was too high a price for the perfect throughput, I went with TheYeast’s two pass one. Since the old algorithm only used a single pass run by entities for the update, I first needed to overhaul the whole system to allow accommodating the new one. Going from one pass to two passes necessarily means higher complexity, so we made a big effort to optimize everything we could to make sure we will still end up faster than 0.16. Kovarex wrote about it in FFF-271.
Hello, we have only 2 weeks left before the 0.11.0 release date. It is scheduled to 31. october. All the things in progress are starting approach the finish line, but as always before the release, it will be tight.There are quite a lot of things we want to deliver and multiplayer (mainly for lan and low ping games until 0.12 don't forget!) is one of those, not even mentioning the backlog of bugfixes we need to go through before the release.
Factorio logo patches Jitka We would like to introduce our new fabric Factorio logo patches, which are now available at our e-shop. These sew-on embroidered patches are ideal for clothing, hats, backpacks, etc. The dimensions are 2.5 x 12 cm. As we are uncertain how large the demand for these patches is going to be, we have only limited stock available at the moment. Please note that our online store ships only once a week every Wednesday, and it is highly possible that the orders placed now will not be delivered before the 25th or December, this applies especially for orders shipped outside of Europe.
Hello, It is time. STOMPY TIME! If you don't want spoilers on enemies and want to discover them naturally then you might want to skip this one. Let's continue the story from FFF-413. A trumpeting scream quietens all the small animals. You hear the breaking of waves followed by stomping: earth-shaking steps that are getting louder and louder. Looking in the direction of the sound, you see a cliff rising to a tall hill. The fungus at the top shakes a little with each stomp, but the source is somewhere further behind the hill. You ready your weapons, but the sound stops getting louder and instead moves to the right, then gradually fades into the distance. Whatever it was, it was big. After climbing the hill to investigate, you see a valley on the other side. Some large translucent green eggs float on a raft of slimy foam in a pool of shallow water. You get closer. The eggs are soft like jelly, the portion above water sagging under their own weight. In the centre is a dark blurry mass of... tangled limbs and eyes. This video has sound. Also available on YouTube in 4k. Suddenly the egg erupts and a clawed limb swipes at your face. A strange creature wriggles around in the water trying to claw at you, and through the splashing you make out 5 limbs like a starfish. A bulging head-like structure has many eyes on one side and a sponge-like material on the other. On the sides of its head are crests of transparent blisters that are inflating with air to form something like a paddle or wing. It drags itself around like some sort of ravenous tentacled baby. With the occasional lurching movement it launches itself at you, trying to grapple you with its limbs and bite you with its underside. The claws glance off your energy shield with minimal damage. Your personal laser defence springs into action and in a flash of light the newborn is cut to shreds. The laser then switches targets to the egg raft. A few moments later all the eggs burst into a horrifying swarm of angry thrashing creatures. The sea of flailing limbs and odd movement makes it difficult to target individuals. You bravely retreat back to the cliff and equip the flamethrower to protect yourself with a wall of fire. The undaunted wriggling creatures run straight into the fire and die soon after. Another trumpeting scream pierces the sky but this time it doesn't sound distant at all. A slender towering creature stares straight at you with its large bulging eyes. It strafes sideways circling you, gracefully stepping over cliffs and tree-like fungi with its 5 thin legs. It launches something from its head, a projectile high into the air and arcing toward you. You start retreating, but 4 wings spring from the sides of the projectile and it steers towards you like a homing missile. The flying creature rams into you, grappling you with its clawed limbs and slowing your movement. You throw it down to the ground and it becomes indistinguishable from the Wriggler you dispatched earlier. Your laser defences make short work of it, but without warning, you're struck by another projectile creature from the other side. Another Strafer has arrived and is also bombarding you. Both Strafers are staying out of range of your automated laser. You dash towards one of the Strafers with your submachine gun in hand, but as you do the Strafer to your front retreats and the other advances. They seem intent on keeping you at range, constantly circling while flinging homing projectiles. No matter, you have another weapon up your sleeve. You dash forwards again, this time with a rocket launcher in hand. A rocket snakes its way through the air and blasts its way into the first Strafer. The creature shrieks and attempts to retreat, but another rocket is already on its way. The second rocket strikes unerringly and a moment later, the Strafer is blown apart leaving a cloud of pieces to rain down on the swamp below. Stomp stomp stomp. The stomping has returned. A colossal spiked shell rises into view from behind a hill. It strides effortlessly over a cliff with its 5 huge armour-plated legs. This creature is clearly related to the others, but it is far heavier with a wide stance and thick legs. The central body or head region is like a shielding shell with small eyes peering through narrow holes. You fire some rockets at the Stomper and they do some damage, but nowhere near enough to take it down. You have very few rockets left and they won't be enough to kill the Stomper so it's better to save them for the other Strafer (which is difficult to catch otherwise). The Stomper charges towards you. Even with your exoskeleton equipment the Stomper can outrun you. You stand your ground with the submachine gun but you can't dodge effectively while you fire. As it gets close the tremors stress your shield, and thrown debris from its stomps pummel the shields further. The creature lands a foot directly on you and your shields falter. That hurt. This isn't working. You start moving again, not to outrun it but to outmanoeuvre it. It may be faster than you in a straight line, but it can't change directions as quickly. The other Strafer is still alive and flinging new enemies at you from a distance. By switching between dodging movement and bursts of SMG fire, you're able to evade most of the Stomper's damage and keep the number of Wrigglers low enough to not get overwhelmed. You wait for an opening when you're not being stomped on, swarmed, and the Strafer is in view. Away go the last 2 rockets and... success. The last Strafer falls dead. Now it's just you and the Stomper. A duel to the death. While continuing to dodge its feet, you make your way to a larger area of land to make your last stand. No more rockets. Gun ammo is low. Time for the flamethrower to shine. As you circle each other, you douse the arena in flames. The dance continues in flames until one of you falls. More fire, more spinning, more fire! The world becomes a hazy blur of flames, smoke, and death.
Hello, magical edition of Friday Facts doesn't bring The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but it does bring news from our studio and development efforts. Kovarex came back from Greece for couple of days before going on another vacation - a small Go camp in Czech republic. Me and Albert we took the opportunity of beatiful weather on Sunday and did a trip to Hazmburk castle ruins not far from Prague. On our way back we stopped at my parents' summer house for relax and loads of home grown fruits :D Oddly enough the following next two paragraphs have the same titles as in the last edition of Friday Facts :)
Sound design update Ian One advantage of switching to home working during the COVID-19 crisis is the ability to listen to the game using speakers rather than headphones, and this has proved useful in balancing the relative levels of the game. Val has also been getting to grips with Lua, and this has led him to working on attenuations, which have been proving problematic. For instance, we noticed that sounds such as the radar were getting cut off when you walked away from them, rather than fading out cleanly. I investigated and discovered we had a maximum environment sound limit of 15, by raising this to 50 we have eliminated many of these problems. But then the downside is that there are now more sounds playing and therefore more clutter to mix and balance. Pink squares indicate which sounds are active. Left: limit of 15 nearby sounds; Right: limit of 50 nearby sounds. Rseding has been working through the list of sound design programming tasks, for instance we finally have the sound for the artillery turret rotation integrated into the game (which was featured in FFF-252 quite a while ago). Real in-game footage of the new artillery sounds In other news, we have an updated concept for the transport belts. We listened to feedback from the community that they were still a bit too present and annoying. The idea of the new sounds is that they will drift into the distance a bit more and become unnoticed (until you try to fall asleep). More fun sounds include water splashes, electric and laser beams, more powerful weapons such as the gun turret and vehicle machine gun. And our old robot sounds have come back as additions. If all goes to plan, we will merge the sound changes into master very soon, and once we've done all our pre-release checks, release it to the 0.18 experimental. After that, I plan to spend time on UI sounds, and also balancing the overall levels to get them more in line with other games, which is trickier than normal given the lack of audio middleware. However we have also made some changes to the default sound settings that move us in the right direction.
