Map editor Lua snippets wheybags In the last few weeks, we've really accelerated our work on the campaign. We've been pushing ahead a lot with both the scripting and blocking out the physical level design. One of the problems we've come up against a lot, is that we often need to perform custom edits to the map, which are quite tedious, but not common enough to add a new tool to the map editor for them. For example, something like "disable all the spawners in this region". This kind of problem is easily solved with a little bit of custom Lua code, but getting the specification of the area we want to edit into Lua is a painful process of noting down and typing out location coordinates. It is also easy to lose track of these Lua snippets, as there is no good place to save them. To solve this problem, we decided to add a Lua snippet tool to the map editor. This tool will let you drag your cursor over an area, and it will then run your custom Lua code on that area. The snippets are named, and saved in your player-data.json, so you can keep them around for later. For example, this simple snippet replaces trees with biters. Currently, there doesn't seem to be a very big scene for community made custom maps/scenarios with custom maps, and we're hoping that the example from the campaign once released, as well as the much improved editor we have in 0.17 will encourage more people to give this a go.
Hi all, sometimes, writing FFF feels like spitting out blood - there is simply very little to write about. Yet the Factorio blog subscriber crowd is there and waiting ... Sometimes it is the opposite and there is abundance of interesting topics available. Today it is the latter case. Enjoy!
It was November of 2021 when we started conversations with Petr Wajsar, a very talented Czech music composer, to create the soundtrack for the Factorio expansion. Since then we have been working together on the soundtrack of Factorio Space Age. Conceptualising and finding solutions to our not small amount of problems, and filling the expansion with quality music, specially designed for the best possible Factorio experience. Petr is a very special musician, because besides being a proven master of electronic music, his education and experience in the conservatory makes him capable of composing music using the full range of a classic orchestra. His modern style of going to more experimental solutions, makes him very flexible at creating the score of the Factorio Space Age expansion.
Hello, the summer has hit Prague with full power. The temperatures are above 30 Celsius in the shade. Fortunately, our office is in the old stone building, so the climate here is quite comfortable even without the air-conditioning.
Hello, we just released 0.17.73, with 0.17.74 coming very soon. This is just some bug fixes and further pathfinding improvements, and we hope to be able to mark the release as Stable next week.
Hello, We released 0.18.4 this week, same old same old, more bugfixes, more bugs, more changes. At this stage of development, not many interesting things are happening, we are just polishing what we have.
Status report (Twinsen) On Monday June 18th, we marked the last version of 0.16 as stable. There were no major problems, so now we are almost exclusively working on 0.17. Work on 0.17 is progressing well: Regarding the new campaign, we are already internally playing a rough version of the new player experience. We are still trying to figure out the exact and final style and concepts for the improved GUI, but we have some GUI windows implemented in game already, plus many base widgets. We use those to get a feel of what works and what doesn't. The new graphics back-end rewrite is nearing finalization. A closed-beta branch was sent to a few players to test that rendering works correctly across different hardware. The rendering is faster and no major issues were reported so far. But there is still much to do, such as improvements to VRAM usage and many experiments with shaders. Since from the graphics department Albert is working on the GUI and V453000 is working on the new campaign, only Ernestas is left working exclusively on the entity graphics. He is reworking some more entities for high-resolution, so expect some teasers in the future. There are of course other small projects that are ongoing, such as improved pipe-fluid physics and improved map generation, but more on those when they are fleshed out. Oh, and our coding always goes as planned without any problems.
1.0 date kovarex Hello, we feel that the Factorio development is taking way too long. The approach "It is done when it is done" was serving us well to deliver a high quality product, but if we continued this way, we would be doing it basically forever. A lot of us don't have any problem working on Factorio for some more time, but the main problem is, that we would like to introduce new features and content instead of just polishing parts that are already present in the game. We also considered, that the game is quite polished now, and if we just pushed the button to release 1.0, it wouldn't be a catastrophe. From our perspective, a lot of things wouldn't be finished, but from the perspective of a new player, the things we are working on now are mainly nitpicks. With this in mind, we decided to just specify a 1.0 release date publicly, so we have to stick with it. We will just focus on the most important aspects as we approach the date, and we just do whatever we have time to do. Once the 1.0 happens, we can have some rest and after that, we can finally focus on the content and features again. The date is 25th September 2020. Future edit: The new date is August 14th, 2020 (FFF-349). Version 1.0 does not mean that development on the game will end, or that Factorio is 100% finished. When we have a better idea of what we will be working on after the 1.0 release, we will let you know.
Albert is back from Spain and Cube is back from vacation, so the Wube is not lonely. Once Tomas gets back from India and Robert moves here, the place will feel fully populated again :)
