Hello, Denis has joined us for another month here in the office, a small overlap with Rseding who is flying back to the USA next week. With the festive season upon us, Tomas and Kovarex have both taken some time off for a vacation.
Hi there, past couple of days have been absolutely wonderful back here in Prague. Pleasant temperatures, mild wind and summer atmosphere. This has made our free time moments even more enjoyable than usual. Another great thing is that our office is situated in an old and sturdy house. So it retains a reasonable temperature without any air conditioning even when it is 30+ celsius outside (not yet:)).
Hello guys, past week has prepared some ups and downs for us. On the up side, we have marked the 0.10.12 as stable and we also moved closer to getting the multiplayer reasonably working. On the down side our reservation for the new office has been cancelled which means we had to start looking for an office place yet again. That is rather unfortunate because we really liked the place we picked originally. Anyway, I am sure we will find another one soonish (we have already had couple of viewings this week but so far without success).
Hello, it has been a pretty hot week here in Prague, and we have finally wheeled-out and hooked-up our little air-conditioning unit, which has been making a valiant effort to keep the office cool.
With most of the team away for Gamescom or vacation, I have the pleasure of writing a Friday Facts for you this week.
Today, it is exactly 5 years since the initial Factorio commit. As you may, or may not know, the first version was created in java, and it took me (kovarex) a whole 12 days to realize that it is not a good idea, and I switched to C++. As a small celebration I provide the Factorio pre-alpha version 0.1 . It is a good reminder of how much the game has moved forward in all directions. The controls are cumbersome, the graphics are funny and glitchy, the GUI is horrible. The campaign has 4 levels, where the last one is quite a challenging defense mission. There are also 2 savegames with one of the first Factorio Factories ever created.
Hello Factorians, Most of the week has been spent by tweaking and fixing stuff that keeps coming up for the Monday release. Even though things seem to work reasonably well for us a lot of the reported issues are to be expected. Especially regarding the Matching Server and the Mod Portal. It is quite tricky to test these things in our limited environment. So please keep calm and report the bugs=) Some time ago we came up with an idea of involving more people from the team in writing Friday Facts than just kovarex or tomas. The motivation was to take off quite some responsibility from our shoulders but also to give other team members the opportunity to present their work - which we believe can be interesting to the readers. So slowly, posts written mostly by other developers (related to what they currently work on) started appearing. We would like to go in this one even further. So today, the post is written by Albert, our art director, who will give some introduction into the project from the point of view of the graphics creation and where he is going to steer the project art-wise in the future.
Regional pricing exploit (Klonan) Earlier this week I received an unusual number of support emails, some players were having trouble redeeming their Steam keys on our website. In each case, the key they purchased was not a key eligible for a Steam key. Our order/account system isn't the most intuitive, so let me explain the ways in which people can buy the game, and how it relates to our website: Our website - You buy from our website, and you get a key from the Humble checkout. You use this key to upgrade an account, and you can redeem a Steam key. Steam - You buy on Steam, which adds it to your Steam account. You then link your Steam on our website, which upgrades your account. Humble Store - You buy a Steam key, which you activate on Steam, and then follow the steps above. GOG - You buy the game on GOG, which lets you download the DRM free version. You can also redeem a retail key, to upgrade your account. So in the cases above, the only way to get a Steam key from our website, is by buying directly on our website. The players in question managed to get their hands on 3rd party retail keys. These retail keys aren't distributed for reselling anywhere, so the fact I was seeing a lot of emails coming in about these keys, was an indication something fishy was going on. The source of these keys is GOG, I double checked this my comparing some of the keys these people purchased with the list of keys we generated for GOG, and they matched. My first suspicion was someone cheesing the GOG return policy, buying the game, redeeming the key, and then refunding it. I emailed our contact and there were only 21 refunds in the last 3 months, so it was not the case. The second suspicion was that the GOG server was breached somehow. They reported no incident, but we disabled all the unredeemed keys anyway just to be sure. I checked with the list again, and none of the keys that we deactivated were used by any account. This led to the conclusion, at the very least, these keys were purchased legitimately. So people are legitimately buying keys, GOG confirmed sales had shot up in the last week. Then the question, where are the sales coming from? One last email to GOG and we had our answer: Russian Federation. The reason? We have regional pricing on GOG at parity with Steam, which means someone buying from Russia could buy the game for ~$8.30. Once they buy on GOG, they can redeem the retail key, and sell it for about $20 on a 3rd party site. So one clever guy saw this opportunity, and started buying the game hundreds of times on GOG. The immediate solution is to remove the regional pricing, and in the long term we may be able to implement some 'GOG linking' similar to the current system for Steam users. It is strange that it was only taken advantage of recently, as we have had regional pricing since our launch on GOG 2 years ago. It may be related to the recent price increase.
Further optimisations I finished the item stack optimisations mentioned in FFF-198, and was able to do some performance tests. First I tested how many stacks on a big map actually need to use an externally allocated object (Item), and how many of them are plain. On the huge map I tested, it turned out that only 36K out of 1M stacks need the Item object. These were mainly science packs, as they need it for the progress of how used-up they are (and now when I think about it, it could also be omitted by only using the objects for science packs that are partially used up already). Overall factory performance was increased approximately 2% by this. It is nothing huge, but every bit matters. One of the programmer that has read access to the code (Zulan), came up with a pull request that improves performance in Factorio by prefetching memory in the update loops ahead. The problem when normally updating objects is, that CPU asks for memory representing the object. The memory is slow, at least compared to the CPU cache or the CPU speed. The memory transfer speed itself is not that slow, but the waiting (latency) time between ordering and receiving it is. This means, that what very often happens is, that CPU orders data of next entity from the memory, then it waits for quite a long time to get it, and then it does its logic. The memory prefetching partially solves it by doing this: Order data of the next entity from memory (prefetch) Do the logic of the current entity in the meantime Go back to start The overall measured performance improvements vary between 9-12%, which is certainly a nice addition.
