Hello, the bugfixing period boringly continues, we got down to 159 active bug reports, so in few weeks we should be finally down with this burden. But at least the graphics department has something new to show:
Hello, welcome to the weekly dose of information that proves that we are not slacking :)
Hello, another Friday means another Friday update. The main theme of the week has been again the bug fixing. The result of our efforts is the 0.7.2 release which came out yesterday. There were more than 25 bugs fixed in the release. As the experience have shown, releases often take 3-4 iterations to stabilize. Therefore we still sort of expect one more release to stabilize the 0.7:) Along with the coding, the works continue on the new terrain. Albert has finished with the dry dirt and he is now experimenting with patterns for other kinds of terrains like grass or snow. We are aiming for at least two "biomes" combining similar kinds of terrains. The terrain is quite a different task from modelling the machines or the enemies. Therefore there is a lot of researching and experiments involved. Kuba has provided a big help to Albert by generating various noises and tileable patterns for him to work with. There is some good news regarding our team as well. Albert has been staying with us in our apartment (which became an improvized office) for the past month and the half. His presence here in Prague has been really beneficial to our progress on the visuals of the game. Things are moving much faster than before. So the news is that this week Albert rented an apartment for himself and his girlfriend here in Prague. It is situated in the middle of the city close to the historical center. It looks really nice and cosy. They might stay for the whole winter:) After the 0.7 release we got some complaints that the game is using too much video memory. Some players couldn't even load the game for this reason. The 0.7.2 fixes this by providing the low resolution mode (in the graphics settings, needs a restart). In this mode, some of the sprites are scaled down before loading into the atlas. The resulting quality is lower, but the game will fit within 256MB video memory. You can compare how the game looks in low resolution (left) and normal mode below. The difference is naturally most visible when you zoom in. Enabling the multisampling will improve the quality and make the low resolution mode look real close to the regular one. Last but not least, we have started with the new trailer. So far we put together some basic ideas for the scenes and started preparing the map where the trailer will be created. Actually the trailer will be a regular Factorio scenario so after it is finished anyone can load it and "replay" it directly in the game (except for the music though). As usual you can post comments regarding this post at our forum.
Hello, the regular dose of news from the developement of Factorio is here, I (Kovarex) wrote it today, and you can clearly see, that I like structured form of information :) Factorio is a continuous jam session. Albert had this observation yesterday and it is very precise description of our development. In the start I had no idea what will the game be like, I had no plans about the visual styles and proportions of the project that was just a hobby, an experiment. The rails were the first graphical assignment for Albert. I told him to just "do the rails" like it was some obvious one way street task. I didn't give him any clues about the style. Should it be cartoonish? Should it be realistic? Should it look modern, cyberpunk or 19th century like? We didn't know, we were searching for the direction on the fly. Any manager would probably say this is a bad thing, that we need a roadmap for the whole process from the start to the final release with all the contents, features and graphics planned ahead including cost estimates. I personally think, that the freedom of the jam (agile) way of development that allows us to react is the best for Factorio. We are inventing and extending the best ideas on the run, ideas that would never be visible in the start. The 0.8 We have less than a week for the preparation of the 0.8, we integrated all the new terrain tilesets to the game, Tomas is now working on the roboports, and construction robots can reconstruct destroyed buildings. We have few days to add some smaller features before we start bugfixing and preparing for the release. The new terrain The main graphical task of the 0.8 is almost finished. You can judge for yourself: The roboport The roboport is the control building for the logistic/construction robots, it will provide the radio signal with limited range for these to operate. This will limit the robots from following the player out of the factory and allow the player to have more distinct logistic systems. Apart from that, the robots will recharge there and stock inside if they have nothing to do. Reconstruction of destroyed buildings When any building owned by player is destroyed while he has the construction robots researched, the half transparent "ghost" building appear on top of the remnants. This ghost building has limited lifetime (5 minutes) and if the needed component is available in the local logistic system, the construction robots take it and automatically reconstruct the building. Nothing new, but still: the thread for comments is available on our forum.
Hello Factoriods, last week we parted with a sad postcard of a biter dying after massacre on st. Valentines' day. Well they are tough fellas these biters so they got their claws sharpened, got some of their best boys together and set off for a revenge mission on the players' base. If you want to see them in action sweeping through a poorly protected oil expansion then check out the composition below. It was made by Albert, our fearless reporter from the Factorio planet. Now back to the Earth. Or more specifically Prague, yes that pretty city in the middle of Europe, where (among other wonderful things) the Factorio team is working day and night to deliver you the best build-factories-in-your-computer experience. And the day and night is not an overstatement. The "programming department" (me, kovarex and blue cube) usually works from something like 9 am to 7 pm. The working hours are VERY flexible. The part of the "working shift" is regular lunch with brainstorming at awesome local restaurant called The Carp in the honey (yeah no kidding - and they actually do serve the Carp in honey). The "art department" (Albert) has recently been in habit of working overnight. There are days when we chat in the morning after I wake up and he is just about to go to bed. Well the result is that sometimes (during very hectic days) we have a 24hr Factorio "development coverage". We do jokes about it, but it is definitely not something that we are proud or happy about. And actually it is getting better, in the early days we didn't do anything else then sit at home and code the game, nowadays the atmosphere is way more relaxed. Alright, so our efforts in the past week have been spent mostly on cutting down the massive list of bug reports that appeared after the Friday's 0.9 release. These efforts have culminated tonight by making the 0.9.1 bugfix release. While it fixes a lot of bugs we don't really expect it to become stable, namely after experiences from 0.7.x and 0.8.x generations :). Also some things are just not finished yet - like a migration of campaign or scenario pack to the new oil recipes. But if you were one of those who got corrupted saves from 0.9, chances are that this release will solve the problem for you. That is actually the reason why we tried to push it before the weekend. But as usual, no guarantees. We have been looking for someone to work on Factorio icons/items/technology images and graphic design in general for a while. It seems like we might have found such a person in the end. We will bring you more details when the deal is closed, for now it must suffice to say that the person is a she so Factorio could get a bit of a womans touch :). Also the rumors are that new assembling machine graphics are just around the corner, so stay tuned... No comments, no fun. Tell us what you think on our forum.
Hello, I was talking with a guy in a pub yesterday and when we get to the topic what we do, I told him that I do a computer game. He asked me what is the name of it, and when I told him it is Factorio he couldn't believe me. He actually knew it, he played it from the alpha release and he apparently really liked it. I didn't expect at all that some stranger would know the game. This was really a nice confirmation, that the sales and forum posts are probably real people playing the game, not just some numbers in a database and I won't lie to you, the experience is nice :).
Hello, apart few bugfixes, there isn't much of a progress this week in the absolute terms. Most of the work done this week was mainly to save time in the long run, so we should be able move forward faster. There are still some bugs in the 0.10.8 but these are not so critical, so 0.10.9 (stable candidate I hope), will get more time to accumulate more bugfixes.
Hello, Albert is back to Prague, so today we had 5 people in the same room working today. I can see that the team is growing, and the atmosphere is positive, as everyone is refreshed by the holidays and full of enthusiasm to make Factorio better. We are looking forward to be in the new office. I already feel the Factorio touch of the place in advance, the bigger the project is the more we feel the need to separate home and work. It might be a bad idea to say it here, but we have some kind of Factorio level up party prepared as well, so if you are in Prague that day and there are not 100 people coming already you are free to join:)
