Hello everyone, we have just released Factorio 0.3.0 ! We took quite some time and put a our effort into this release. There is a lot of internal refactoring and preparations which won't be visible to the player but they will make our live a lot easier in the future. We are "tying our laces before setting for a run". Apart from that we have put quite some effort into improving modding capabilities. Uptil now making and using mods was just for the hardcore fans of the game. We really see the importance of good modding system so we started building one. The mods are now standalone packages and allow for much easier and cleaner combination. Together with modding improvements we updated our Lua scripting API based on the feedback gathered from our forums. Apart from code changes there is some new graphics in the game. Our graphic Albert has spent more than two weeks here in the Prague. That allowed us to get a lot of work done. There are new inserters, turrets, walls, etc. Even though these all pieces are new graphic they might not be the final version. At the moment Albert is working on a high level artistic direction for the game. That might look like quite late (with the game already in the alpha). But better late than never :). The release is marked as experimental. This means that in order to download it you need to click the "experimental" link on our download page next to the "Download" title. After the release gets tested and no serious bugs are reported it will be marked as stable. Allright, enough of the talking. You can find more details about the changes on our forums. Now go and test the 0.3.0 out ;)
Hello, Albert is back this week, and has resumed his work on the liquid wagon and associated accessories, as well as offering his guidance to some visual related programming tasks. Kuba and Honza are also both back from their respective holidays, and overall the office is feeling much more full than last week.
Hello, Grab your best lube, because it's time to talk about fluids!
Hello everyone, another weekly Factorio update is here. The 0.7.0 release from the last Friday night has triggered a lot of discussions on the forum. It seems that in the end we didn't get the balancing quite right and the natives are now rather overpowered. People reported cases when they were overrun by the biters after less than half an hour of playing. Another issue would be that the biters in the enemy bases would level up too quickly and when the player arrives to conquer the base there were plenty of medium or big biters (which are quire resistant). Apart from that the release was relatively smooth. There are some minor bugs but no deal brakers. After recharging some energy during the weekend at a local wine festival:), we started working on the 0.7.1. Unlike in previous minor releases, the 0.7.1 will contain also couple of new features. Most notable of these is the addition of late game player following robots (aka "destroyers"). They are quire expensive, but they allow to conquer even large enemy bases. And they are a lot of fun to play with because of their acceleration based behavior. Apart from this and other small features the week has been spent mostly by bugfixing the issues reported by the community. This is now more or less finished and we have started with playtesting and further balancing. The 0.7.1 is expected to be released during the next week. As mentioned before afterwards we will focus some of our energy on making the new trailer and preparing for the Steam Greenlight campaign. Another thing that kept us busy for a while has been the wiki. Originally it has been spammed to a degree when any ressurection seemed hopeless. However after many tries (what do you do with a 4GB sql dump file?) Blue Cube has managed to prune the database and resurrect the wiki at its original location. For now we have restricted the access only to people who has been confirmed manually by us. So if you are interested in contributing to the wiki (which would be more than welcomed) then request an account on the wiki page . You will need a forum account for that as well. All this is to avoid further automated spamming of the wiki. Not only the wiki has been resurrected but also thanx to Kovarex it now contains up to date information on Factorio 0.7.1 scripting interface. Albert has been busy and productive as well. He has finished with the enemy spawner which we had to redo couple of times because of notable noise in the final animation. The resulting animation is imho worth it. You can see it below (animation for breathing) together with the gif capturing the process of making the spawner model. After this Albert has worked on other small issues that we have been putting off for a while. Things like: slowdown particles, underground objects indication (belts to ground, pipes to ground) and finally the remnants after destroyed objects. These are especially useful because as a player you can see what has been destroyed when your base has been attacked by the natives. And here is a fun fact for this episode. Technically it happened last week, but it so funny that it still qualifies. So the thing is that recently we looked up that there will be an indie game conference here in Prague. We were super excited and all three of us went there really enthusiastic to talk to the people from the indie game industry and maybe propagate Factorio or something. It took place in the local startup hub. We arrived and saw that a workshop was about to start soon. So we sat down and waited for a while. It was a little bit weird that nothing was happening but after a while a guy appeared who said he is coming for the workshop as well. He started explaining to us what he does and it was all about some very advanced server management stuff. We waited all the time when he will get to the indie game part but it never happened. And it turned out that the workshop is actually about some advanced server management stuff. The indie game conference happened a year ago on the same day. So we were one year late. The people at the reception had quite a good laugh. All right, back to the reality. Recently we have created a new "Updates" category on the forum where we will try to regularly post small updates. We will also create there a post for every friday facts episode where you can post comments.
The release plan (kovarex) This week was the time to close and finish all the things that will go to 0.17.0. Not all of the things that we originally planned to be done were done (surprise), but we just left any non-essential stuff for later so we won't postpone the release any further. The plan is, that next week will be dedicated to the office playtesting and bugfixing. Many would argue, that we could just release instantly and let the players find the bugs for us, but we want to fix the most obvious problems in-house to avoid too many duplicate bug reports and chaos after the release. Also, some potential bugs, like save corruptions, are much more easily worked on in-house. If the playtesting goes well, we will let you know next Friday, and if it is the case, we will aim to release the week starting 25th February.
Hello, the 0.15 has been declared stable. Unfortunately we found some smaller problems, so there is going to be at least one bugfix release. One of the problems we discovered yesterday, is a glitch in the blueprint transferring logic that results in the transfers stopping forever when a player that is just transferring his blueprint into the game leaves. I'm quite surprised that I found it out myself when I was testing something else, and we didn't have a single bug report regarding it.
It's the last Friday of 2018, and as such the last Friday Facts before the New year of 2019. We all hope everyone has had a great 2018, and looking forward to a lot more automation fun to come in 2019. Albert has produced a postcard for you all to share to give the year a good send-off.
New Fluid system 2 (Dominik) Hi Factorians, Here is Dominik, with an update on the fluids. This time it is pretty much finished so I can tell you facts instead of just speculations. You will find how the new algorithm will work and some new handy usability features. In FFF-260 I wrote about how it all started, why we are doing it and what the plan is. There was a huge response from you all and I want to thank everyone for their contributions. Let me apologise to redditors, as at the beginning I started responding on the forums and when I realized there is reddit too, there were too many comments for me to handle. The forum users produced many ideas on how the system could work. About third of them was a fluid teleportation, many where known but many were entirely new and interesting. What intrigued me was the large variety of backgrounds they came from - differents kinds of engineers (mechanical, CS, electrical, ...), mathematicians, physicists, and even people with real pipes hands on experience. I won’t go through them here, you can find them on the forums or reddit. There were two proposals on the forum though that were so good that they made it into the game - from quinor and TheYeast. Both of these proposals were very similar and kinda similar to the previous game logic. What it shares is that the mechanic still uses fluid physics simulation and volume in a pipe as a base for the movement calculation. As a result, not much changes on the first glance. What they add though is an emphasis on the fluid network update being independent on the current state (i.e. updating one pipe only depends on state from the last tick) and is therefore independent on evaluation order, which was one of the big pains of the old model that led to sometimes ridiculous junction behavior. Difference between these two was rather small - quinor’s version allowed perfect throughput with 3 passes over the fluidboxes (fluidbox is the thing managing fluids for entities, so I will talk about them), while Yeast’s one was 2 pass with ¼ throughput. What was outstanding though is that TheYeast, a physicist, supported the model with a nice theoretical background and what’s more, he made an amazing JS simulator to test and compare various modification of the model. Because that extra pass in quinor’s version was too high a price for the perfect throughput, I went with TheYeast’s two pass one. Since the old algorithm only used a single pass run by entities for the update, I first needed to overhaul the whole system to allow accommodating the new one. Going from one pass to two passes necessarily means higher complexity, so we made a big effort to optimize everything we could to make sure we will still end up faster than 0.16. Kovarex wrote about it in FFF-271.
