I decided to write about the results of the item stack optimisations explained in the FFF-198, so I rushed today to finish its implementation, just to find out that the task affects an even bigger part of the code than I expected, Items are related to many things in Factorio :) After many hours of rewriting and fixing, I can compile it and even start a game, but most of the things are broken. It is quite funny to see some of the basic item interactions to be broken. Now I'm making commits like "Now I can split stacks", "Now I can merge stacks", etc. It reminds me the old days. In conclusion, the details of the optimization will have to wait for next week, and since it is after 10pm, this Friday facts will be somewhat shorter :)

Hi there, past week has not been the most productive one in the Factorio history. The Christmas was a good opportunity to take couple of days off, relax and spend some time with the family. In the meantime some more bugs have popped up in the 0.8.x resulting in the release of the 0.8.4, the current shot at the stable release. The end of the year is a good time to look backward and do some balancing. Many things have happened in the 2013 but for me, one of them clearly stands out. And that is the change in sort of a general feeling from the project. What I mean is following. In the beginning of the year we didn't have a plan, we didn't have an artistic direction, we didn't have any income, we were just two guys working over-full-time from the living room on kind of a hobby project. I remember that those were often desperate times filled with insecurity about the future. The comparison to now is staggering. We received the trust in the Indiegogo campaign, 5000 people (almost there) have bought the game, there is a great community at our forums, we have a clear roadmap and we are working on it, the looks of the game have improved drastically and we now have an actual artistic direction to follow, and much more... All in all we overcame many obstacles, some of them seemed impossible a year ago. Of course it hasn't been all smooth ride, but the despair and uncertainty are gone. Yes, often there is the stress (especially during the sprint before the release) or anxiety but, I think that is unavoidable and it often actually pushes us forward. Overall Factorio now feels to me like a healthy project with clear direction rather than a very uncertain experiment it was a year ago. We all have worked hard to achieve this but a big thanks goes also to our fans, without you we wouldn't succeed in the Indiegogo, we wouldn't have the funds to continue the development later on when things started to drag and also we wouldn't have all the positive feedback that have kept us going. Thank you! Now, for a more humorous look on what the development of Factorio is like check out this series of gifs by Kovarex on our forums. Albert has worked a lot on the doo-dads and some good results start to come out. Below is the preview of the desert with new trees, rocks and plants. The name of the image is "The desert hunt". Just to make sure, it is an artificial composition, not a screenshot from the game:). Next on the list are doo-dads for other terrains and then ship wrecks, destroyed machines, etc. As always check out the post on our forum for the comments.

Hello, the sunny spring weather seems to have taken a break these last few days after Denis' arrival to the office. His work continues on the belts optimization, as the rest of the team has been playtesting 0.15, as well as closing off remaining minor features on our Trello board.

Hi everyone, The full crew seems to show its results in its bug-fixing struggle. The working version of 0.11.16 contains historically biggest count of bugfixes and counting. We wanted release it by the end of this week, but it apparently needs more time as we always find some new problems when we test the multiplayer with more people. But the fact that we already managed to have less than 30 (relevant) unresloved bugs on the forums, and the fact that the multiplayer feels more stable every day makes us feel, that the hardest time of the stabilisation period of 0.11 might be over soon (TM).

Hello, we try to fix bugs as fast as we can, the more we fix, the more get reported, it will takes weeks to get to stable version ... blah blah blah

Hello everyone ! We thought it would be a good time to recapitulate a bit on the current progress of our Indiegogo campaign. We are at 1.5k Euro with 20 days left to get onto 17k Euro at the moment. Here is what happened so far. We made some big mistakes. Probably the biggest one being starting a crowd funding campaign without a solid community to back us. There were couple of our friends who knew about our campaign upfront and that was it. Another crucial error was the financing goal we chose. The amount we agreed on reflects our rough estimates on what it will take to deliver the final product. However we should have gone with lower amount and rely on setting up a pre-order later on on our web site. Despite having fixed funding it is quite possible that the amount we asked for put a lot of people off. There were more mistakes but these two stand out. The start of the campaign was really slow. No one knew about our game and it was a struggle to spread out the word at all. Actually like 5 days into the campaign we were pretty much ready for resignation. But then the Futile Position (symptomatique name for our situation) wrote a short post about Factorio. We got a small spike in pledges and some emails with a positive feedback. On top of that a friend of ours started to actively help us with the campaign. We were back on. Since then the awareness was slowly increasing. There is a great thread and nice community around Factorio at the Face Punch forum .We have been getting a lot of supportive emails recently. People urging us to not give up and expressing their hopes that we will continue even if this crowdfunding fails. Reading emails like this is a huge motivator. On top of that we got another spike yesterday. Nathan Adams from Minecraft noticed our game, backed it and tweeted about it. And we got like 20 pledges within two hours. Couple of people offered to help us spread the word by featuring the game on forums and youtube previews. Things really started to look a bit brighter yesterday. So here we are now. Still far behind the expected funding schedule. But encouraged by a lot of positive feedback and interest in our game. We have spent past months working hard on Factorio. Programming like crazy. Burning through our savings. Getting strange looks when explaining to people what we do. And not knowing whether what we are building will have any meaning at all. It is then even more rewarding to read on the forums people discussing their factory setups, sharing screenshots of their creations and generally being excited about the game. No matter whether the Indiegogo campaign fails or succeeds. Things like these make the project a success in our eyes already. Finally we would like to say a big thank you to all our current supporters and people sending us feedback. We are really grateful to you and we will try hard to stand up to expectations.

Hi everyone, wednesday (28th of October) was a national holiday here in Czech republic (commemorating the creation of standalone Czechoslowakian republic in the 1918). Still, quite a few of us came to the office. The atmosphere was relaxed (even more than usual) and in the afternoon some people played the recently popular Keep talking and nobody explodes game. It is amazing to see how creative people can get (talking about the creators)=) IMHO this project shows a bright side of indie games scene: good idea + good execution => good fun. Back to the Factorio reality=) In the past two weeks we have increased the frequency of the bugfixing releases. There were a few silly bugs that were created while fixing other things. Thanks for bearing with us. The general mood is to just finish the 0.12 so we can get it off our plate. Kovarex + 2 - 3 people are still focused on the 0.12 while others are either wrapping up other smaller tasks or have started working on some 0.13 stuff already.

Hello, I was peacefully writing the code when suddenly, I heard the sound of gun being reloaded. I gave a quick glance at my own gun. Yes, it is not loaded, of course. So I took cover under the table to search for some lost ammo. I needed to be able to return fire soon. Long story short, our nerf guns package arrived this week, and the office looks as a battlefield these days.

Hi there, the Friday 0.9.x release "mini tradition" continues by the release of the 0.9.7 today. Though the changelog is rather long, the amount of code behind those changes is rather small (they were all simple fixes). If the amount of stress and haste before the release would be a measure of release quality then 0.9.7 should do rather good. We released it before Friday lunch without any last minute hotfixes and without any complications. The pack in the post title refers to the scenario pack. The set of currently 3 "mini campaigns" available for the furnace attendant tier or higher. We finally got around to make it compatible with the 0.9.x release branch. So now there is a scenario pack 0.9.7 available that will work with the 0.9.7 binary version. The changes have been quite significant, because the Tight Spot and Supply Challenge had to be rebalanced to take the oil industry into account. The playtesting of these has been a refreshing experience and definitely a good motivation to think about new challenge missions and content for the scenario pack (we still take it as a work in progress). You can check out the main part of the factory that got me through the new Supply Challenge below. It was built in about 3 hours under constant pressure to provide 6 "hungry chests" in the center with new and new items - that is why it is called the Supply challenge. Alongside the bugfix branch for 0.9.x the work in the master branch has continued on some small features for the 0.10 (see the new roadmap). Namely things like environment sound playing and map generation strings. But this is now coming to conclusion and Kuba already started with design and planning for the multiplayer network layer. Immediately some scary technical issues showed up: floating point operations non-determinism across different platforms, peer-to-peer communication for players without public IP addresses, etc. We will definitely not be bored in the near future :) Recently a lot of old entities have been reskinned or remade. Things like inserters, transport belts or assembling machines are now (0.9.x) consistent with the artistic direction. This is all part of the plan to improve the visuals for our new trailer. It has been taking ages, but we are really getting close now. Albert is now working on doodads and aesthetic tweaks for the trailer map. Actually we just spent like 2 hours discussing some details of the map :) Please bear with us a little longer. In the meantime you can enjoy the "good-old" red cadillac in the old trailer, it is not going to be around for long. And here is the mentioned screenshot from the supply challenge close to the finish: If you have something to say, then say it at our forums.

Poison cloud Ernestas, posila The poison cloud animation is a placeholder spritesheet (that kovarex found somewhere on the internet), we have wanted to improve it for a long time, but since it was always such a small detail other things took priority. Well now is the time to finish everything, big and small. Some of the problems we see with the old placeholder animation: The edge (where damage will apply) is not clearly defined The center strongly obstructs vision underneath the animation It breaks the perspective/height illusion with its very circular shape The new animation was done quickly and without the need of any large changes to the Factorio engine. This is the mindset we are in these days, use the engine features we already have to finish things quickly and without trouble, and we try to stop ourselves going crazy with more detail. The smoke capsule itself spawns a bunch of smaller dummy entities which do the smoke drawing, while the damage is kept consistent by only using the central smoke cloud to apply damage.