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Friday Facts #296 - All kinds of bugs

Posted by Klonan, Rseding on 2019-05-24

Cars/Tanks remember their color Klonan This really is a tiny feature, the car and tank will now save the color of the passengers when they exit the vehicle. So now you won't forget which vehicle you were driving, and can warn everyone else on the server: "Pink tank is mine".

Friday Facts #178 - Minimal mode and Mini-tutorials

Posted by Klonan on 2017-02-17

Hello, the office has had a very lively atmosphere this week. With some very productive team discussions taking place, we reach another Friday with an optimistic outlook of the weeks to come.

Friday Facts #47 - CRC fun

Posted by Tomas on 2014-08-15

Hello FFF readers, another week, another set of news. Kovarex took some more vacation days for a visit to Slovakia where his relatives live. He will come back on Sunday just in time to switch places with me. I will be off for the whole next week, playing Go, hiking and relaxing in the Czech Beskydy mountains. Another fun fact is that the most active forum user ssilk took some vacation as well and he actually came to Prague. I will go meet with him tomorrow.

Friday Facts #400 - Chart search and Pins

Posted by kovarex, Klonan on 2024-03-01

Hello, Is it me you're looking for?

Friday Facts #242 - Offensive programming

Posted by kovarex on 2018-05-11

Hello, this post is going to be more technical than usual, yet it might still be interesting to know the background of the process for some people.

Friday Facts #160 - Playtesting

Posted by kovarex on 2016-10-14

Hello, once I changed the science packs for 0.15 , I had to do a playtest to have a feel of how the changes affect the game. I finished it just before writing this post: This was the first single player playthrough in a long time, so there was a lot of new findings. I also enjoyed all the new features, like blueprint book, auto trash, train conditions etc. These were little things but they helped a lot.

Friday Facts #83 - Hide the latency

Posted by Tomas on 2015-04-24

Good afternoon, the work on 0.12 are continuing quite well according to the updated roadmap presented in the previous facts. So this is a good opportunity to talk more in depth about one of the upcoming improvements for the Multiplayer - how we plan to deal with the latency.

Friday Facts #415 - Fix, Improve, Optimize

Posted by Rseding on 2024-06-14

Hello, While a lot of time of 2.0 development has been spent on new features and quality of life, we still take care of the smaller details and technical improvements.

Friday Facts #251 - A Fistful of Frames

Posted by Klonan, posila on 2018-07-13

Factorio at the National Library of Technology Prague (Klonan) If you are in Prague this summer, and wanting to satiate your Factorio cravings, you can stop in to the National Library of Technology Prague, where Factorio is loaded onto 150 computers for all to play. Entry is free for all visitors Monday to Friday 08:00 - 22:00 until the 31st of August. The PC's are running Linux (Fedora), loaded with a custom build of the game HanziQ put together, and you can host LAN servers and play with your friends. On the 23rd of July we will be hosting our own Factorio LAN party at the library starting at 16:00 CEST (Prague time), so you can come along and play with us. It is advised to bring your own set of headphones if you are going to attend.

Friday Facts #259 - Scan-codes, Prototype IDs, HR worm

Posted by posila, Rseding, Albert on 2018-09-07

Scan-codes vs Key-codes (posila) While migrating from Allegro to SDL, HanziQ and Jiri replaced the keystroke handling from using key-codes to scan-codes. Before you start jumping with joy, you’ll probably wonder: What is that and why should I care? Well, funny you should ask. You probably won’t care, unless you live outside of USA and/or you use a non-US keyboard layout. In short, key-code is a key identifier dependant on the symbol the key will output when pressed, scan-code is a key identifier based on the physical location of a key. So for example players with French keyboard layout (AZERTY) have to jump to the control options after launching the game for the first time, and remap movement from WASD to ZQSD, in order to be able to move their character without hurting their hand. In 0.17, the controls will map to the correct keys by default, regardless of your layout, and stay mapped to those physical keys even if you for some reason change your keyboard layout while the game is running. The disadvantage is, most of the non-US layouts didn’t end up with completely broken controls, so people kept playing with them and got used to them. So they’ll need to get used to the layout the game was originally designed with, or manually configure controls back to what they are used to. But wait, there is a catch... A few weeks ago we have announced new construction tools, which are by default bound to quite universal shortcuts (Ctrl+C for copy, Ctrl+X for cut and Ctrl+Z for undo). Bilka pointed out that the German keyboard has Z swapped with Y (as does the Czech one, but developers often don't use it) and undo incorrectly defaults to Ctrl+Y instead. To fix these kind of shortcuts we determine the appropriate default scan-codes at start-up, so that undo is always Ctrl+Z, regardless of your layout, but the action will stay bound to those keys if you change keyboard layout at runtime, which is hopefully a reasonable compromise. We might do it for other controls too (it feels natural for M to always be the default key to open the map, and T to open the technology screen), but there is another catch. It is completely reasonable for player to walk north, and Ctrl+click some entities. Remember AZERTY keyboard? Player keeps Z pressed down to walk north and presses Ctrl to start control clicking. Well, I tested this and it doesn’t trigger undo, but still stops player from walking. So it is not completely destructive, rather annoying. I am not sure how or if we’ll solve this, perhaps people with these layouts that create these kind of collisions will need resolve them by changing controls options manually.