Trains in blueprints Building trains again and again might be a daunting task. Especially when you start making a lot of mining outposts, artillery/supply trains with filtered cargo wagon slots etc. So I decided that we should extend blueprints to work with trains as well. The first condition was, that trains are only selected when you explicitly allow it in the checkbox, so they don't get in your way when building rail setups. Checking the button allows the train that was there to be put into the blueprint (similar to the way tiles work). For the sake of simplicity, we decided that once there is any rail in the blueprint, the train in it will be always buildable (as a ghost obviously), even if there are not rails to support the train at the moment. The train ghost will simply stay there and won't be buildable until rails are placed under it in a way so it can be placed. If I remove the rails from the blueprint, I get a second type of rail blueprint. In this case, all the parts of need to have rails to support it, this is mainly needed as without rails, there is no rail grid forced, so we should make sure, the train ghost won't be created in some wrong position. The small touch here is, that the blueprint also contains the schedule. With little-bit of improvisation, I can optimize the mine building a lot in the late game. I create a blueprint of mine train station. The stop will be called " Mine X". Both of the trains in the blueprint will have the " Mine X" -> " Smelting" schedule setup. Once I build the blueprint, I just rename the " Mine X" to whatever I want (" Mine 12" for example), and the train schedules are updated as well, so I'm almost ready to go. The last tweak I'm considering is to allow blueprints to contain the fuel insertion info similar to how they contain the module insertion info for assembling machines now.
Hello guys, just a quick one today. A lot of the people have asked for more payment options, especially the popular Paysafecard. We listened to them. Starting today the Paysafecard is a supported payment method. So if you own one, you can use it to buy the game before the price goes up on 1st of June. Based on the recent influx of new players we have also updated the game presentation on the webpage. There is now way more information. The main menu has been updated. Game and Support tabs contain links to many more pages. You can read about the game features, there is a troubleshooting page, page for the press guys, etc. There will be more to come in the future (information on modding, system requirements, some general information about the "history" of Factorio creation, ...). If you have any comments let us know at at our forums.
Hi guys, we are still busy working on the 0.7 update, but in the meantime here is a little news on our youtube channel: We have had a youtube channel for a while. You can have a look. However there hasn't been that much activity. Actually main reason for that is rather funny. The account was connected with my personal email address. After a while we figured out it would be useful to use some common email address so the other members of the team can manipulate the channel as well. It turned out that it was not possible to change the email or even migrate the videos to a different channel. So we were sort of stuck with a channel with quite some content already, but one that couldn't be used in a longterm. However recently the situation has changed. Youtube has allowed connecting the account to a Google+ page which can be administred by multiple people. So effectively we got what we wanted - our youtube channel with the original content, that can be controlled by different people on the team. This is a new motivation for us to produce videos now and then. We have started by making a new video about one of the scenario pack campaigns - the Tight spot. Have a look at the video and let us know what you think;)
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.Douglas Adams Today was our internal deadline for a public demo. Well it just whooshed by without leaving any demo behind. The code and functionality is pretty much there in place. However we are still waiting for the graphics. It takes time and gets frustrating, but we carry on. Just to stay on the safe side I won't mention any more deadlines, even though we still have some internally :). As you might have noticed the webpage got a new look. This comes in multiple flavors:logo We settled on simple text in interesting font with a dominant element being the wheel representing the factory.icons We are using free svg icons taken from raphaeljs projecttemplate We moved to slate bootstrap template. As for the work on the game itself we continue along exhausting path full of fighting bugs and adding small improvements. Recently we focused quite a bit on speed improvements as well. Things get challenging once you have a factory with transport belts moving around heaps of ores, coal, iron plates, etc. Oh and weapons. Are you getting tired of those creepers attacking your factory ? Well now you can get rid of them by way more means than just shooting from the rifle. There is a machine gun, rocket launcher, flamethrower and mines are just around the corner. We also have news regarding the team composition. You don't get these that often with teams of our size :) Petr is now a full-time member of the team. Until now he has been working on the project part-time while doing his daily job as a database developer. Well, he quit and now he is a full-time "Factorian".
Hello, this week wasn't easy, I spent most of it in bed, drinking hot tea and trying to get healthy. The rest of it was spent by cooperation on the release preparations, which basically means bugfixing. Yea, and I also had to do the first steps of my wedding preparations, oh didn't I tell you? Now you know :)
Hello guys, Factorio 0.5.2 release has just been marked stable! The 0.5.0 has been released more than two weeks ago however it took a while to stabilize. We listened to our users and fixed loads of annoying bugs. The biggest thing in the release was probably the visual update. Factorio finally got a decent looking gui and menus. Though many people claim that they don't care about the (gui) visuals we think this is really important. The broader audience often judges the game already by looking at the first menu screen. And the old looks were not really helping there. As part of the gui update we tweaked some UIs - for instance the recipe gui now contains the tabs for different categories. This allows for easier navigation in the growing list of available recipes. Apart from the gui the visuals of quite a few entities were updated. There are still a lot of patches and inconsistencies in the game, however we are slowly improving the arts and (hopefully) preparing the game for wider audience. There is a new boiler, steam engine, pump, pipes, mining drills, locomotive, splitters, lamps and radar. The next target for visual face lift is the terrain=) Another important (yet technical) improvement is the new auto updater. This allows the players who have purchased the alpha version of the game to receive new versions automatically when they are released. The game connects to the server on the startup and after login / password authorization, checks for updates. This feature can be switched off if the user wishes so. When automatic updates are switched off Factorio will not try to establish any connection over the network. We respect users privacy. Factorio has no DRM protection mechanisms. The point of auto updater is to make the life of people who bought the game easier by removing the hassle of downloading and reinstalling the game when new version is released. As usual the release contains tons of little improvements. You can find the full changelogs on our forums in the news section . We have also recorded a video about the major changes in 0.5.x. You can check it out at our youtube channel. Stay tuned - there will be more Factory news coming in the summer.
Hello guys, Factorio 0.4.1 has just been released! This is a bugfix release to the 0.4.0 update that has been made on Friday. The 0.4.0 has been tested by the guys at the forum and in 0.4.1 we provide bugfixes to the things they found. Let's have a look at the biggest changes introduced in the 0.4.0 and 0.4.1. The main theme has been the trains. Connected rolling stocks form a train. The trains can be assigned schedules of stations to visit. In the station the train can be loaded / unloaded an refueled. There are also semaphores to guide trains in the railway network. Apart from this we have also fixed some bugs in how railroads and rolling stocks work. Further information about how railway transportation works is available at our wiki. Apart from the trains we have added quite some functionality to the electricity. There are three new elements for energy distribution: the medium electric pole, the big electric pole and the substation. They all have different properties and are appropriate for different situations. Also there is the long awaited accumulator. Now finally even in night the factories can be protected from the alliens by the laser turrets. We have invested a lot of time into the tuning the determinism. The game is now (almost) fully deterministic. This is a necessary first step towards the multiplayer. Players can see our effort in action already in the replay functionality. Because of the determinism limitations the replaying functionality works only on the games that has been played within the same version with the same sets of mods all the time (and started in 0.4.1). As usual the release contains a lot of fixes and extensions in the scripting. As a result some of the 0.3.x version of the mods (especially those using a lot of scripting functionality) might cause errors with the new version. This can be repaired by using updated mods (when that happens). As before, the new version is compatible with all the previous saves. We really don't want the players to lose the games they have spent so much time with. After the long time of waiting we have added more Linux support. Next to the .deb package there is now a generic .tar package available for download. This is aimed at the more experienced users who will be able to deal with the dependencies themselves. That was longer than expected. The release details are available as usual on our forums. Time to go for a run to clear the head:)
A few bugs left... WoW classic has been released, which means several of our top men have taken time off to spend hours raiding and having fun in Azeroth. This isn't great timing, as a few new bugs related to train signals appeared. We want to get these bugs solved before we do another release (another stable candidate). As it turns out, the only person with the skillset to fix these specific train signal bugs is also deep into levelling his Priest... (Kov on Pyrewood Village) We are still making the rest of the preparations for the stable release. We have started writing up the stable annoucement blog post, and have produced a 0.17 postcard image. Other than the few more critical rail bugs, there doesn't look like there is much else to block the stable release, on the forum we are down to 27 bugs. Since there are so few bugs left to deal with, some of the team has starting working on 'post-stable' features. Wheybags is working on the new campaign, Oxyd is diving into some detailed pathfinder improvements, and Rseding has started work on some particle optimizations. We will delve deeper into these topics and more in future FFFs, as we always love to do.
