Hello, recently we had a lot of discussions on our forum about interaction with the community. You can have a look at the details . The result is that we have realized, we have done a poor job in providing updates about our progress. And we have decided to change it. This is a first blog post from the "Factorio Friday Facts" series. Every friday we will sum up our weekly progress here. This will include insights into what we have been working on, what is planned, sometimes art sneak peeks of course occasional fun facts from Indie game developers live. All right, let's have a look at what we have been up to in the past week. The single point of focus for the whole team has been finishing the 0.7.0 release. This release has taken the most development time so far. Partly because we were getting our attention together after the holidays and partly because there was a LOT of work to be done:) Actually most of the changes are under the hood (combat framework, AI routines, pollution modelling, etc.) but their results will be well visible in the game. Just a taste of what is coming. The biggest change is probably the overall shift in enemy logic. Before they were simply controlled by the lua script behind the scenario. Now they are more autonomous and integrated in the game. This is because of a new concept we have introduced - the pollution. Pollution is produced by the factory (mining drills, furnaces, etc.) and then spreads in the world. Some objects can actually lower pollution (for now only trees). After a while the deadly pollution clouds arrive to the enemy spawners. The spawners "clear" the pollution but in turn produce an "angry" biters (new name for our basic class of enemies). After certain period of time, all the angry biters from the local neighborhood are sent together to the closest local optimal pollution source to destroy everything that they find there. This follows a simple logic: you destroy their environment - they get angry - they attack you / your machines. For now there is no way to deal with the pollution in the "peaceful" way, but there will be in the future. You can imagine pollution clearing machines or even making pacts with enemies to tolerate pollution in exchange for providing them with supply of resources. Anyway this changes the game significantly. It is not enough to fortify the labs / radars now. You need to protect your whole factory / keep checking the pollution levels and examine from which direction the attack will come (the pollution is visible on the map after pressing the alt key). For Albert (our graphic) the release has been especially challenging because after months of working on machine design he had to completely shift his style and model the enemy units and structures. The result are three new biters and three worms taking up a lot of MBs in the package:) Last week Albert spent with the most difficult structure - the enemy spawner. In the end we didn't put it into the release, because it still needs to be tweaked and better integrated, but it is definitely coming in one of the following bugfix releases. Apart from that Albert also spent some time preparing a new set of selection boxes and arrows. He was correct that the old ones "were hurting the eyes". You can check an example of new boxes in the screenshot below (personally I am really fond of them, that is why I share them here). Since the release is rather big we have spent the last week mostly by fixing bugs and solving small remaining issues. AI behaviors are especially tricky to test because they are often not exact or easily reproducible. The final count of solved issues in the 0.7.0 has stopped at symbolic 111. Couple of them done at the very last moment:) After this sprint we will now take some rest over the weekend and start preparing the plans for the next update. Next month will be especially interesting because we will start actively preparing for the Steam greenlight campaign. This will require further graphical polishing in the game (namely player animation) and most importantly a new trailer. We already have couple of ideas and for sure we will discuss them with the community on the forums. And finally the fun fact. During release compilation on our Linux virtual machine we got an error: "Virtual memory exhaust, cannot allocate more memory". Factorio code is getting really big. So there is no Linux build until we fix this:| Well that would be it for now. The 0.7.0 release is actually out already, you can read more details on our forum . It is still experimental and it will probably take some time before it stabilizes, but if you don't mind the bugs then go ahead and give it a spin.
Hello, we have written a lot about multiplayer in the past weeks, it started by the reports at the beginning of the rewrite, and now it finishes with our reports of mega games being played. But as most of our time still goes to bug hunting to achieve 0.14 stable as soon as possible, I just can't help myself:
Hello, Bugfixing for 0.14 has been going quite well this week, and while its still in experimental we've been adding some supplementary features before programming work begins properly on 0.15. With the summer ending, things have been settling back into a nice rhythm here in the office.
Offshore pump redesign V453000, Albert As one of the last entities which do not have high resolution graphics, the time has come for the offshore pump. The offshore pump is practically a 1-tile entity, but they must have a 1 tile gap between each other. It is also the only entity placed on a water tile at the moment. When we changed the way how terrain to water transitions work, we moved the offshore pump to be placed on the water tile. This can result in the pump drawing over terrain in ugly ways. With the redesign, we took the oppourtunity to move the offshore back onto land, and additionally the pump checks a 2x3 tile water area in order to be buildable. The new placement rules only applies to newly built pumps. Offshore pumps on existing maps will keep functioning, they’ll just be shifted out from the shore. There is no blue colour for water integration at the tip of the offshore pump, so the offshore pump will look correct even with unexpected water types (not a big problem in vanilla). The water integration is split to an underwater layer which does not show when the pump gets landfilled over. In the basic concept, the offshore pump is another type of a pump, so it should be similar to the other pump entity Albert made a few years ago, including the animation and visible fluid in it. The obvious difference is the connection to water. However we felt that is not different enough and needs more visual balance, so we added a pair of supportive legs. We are planning to release the new offshore pump graphics with the next release, likely next week.
Entity info experiments (kovarex) The Entity info is the information about the currently selected entity that appears on the right side of the screen: We had 2 problems with its current state: As it is on the side of the screen, and the entity you are inspecting is generally in the center, it feels cumbersome to move your eyes from the entity to the info and back all the time. As it is always appearing, it adds unnecessary clutter to the screen. It is always blinking there, while 99% of the time it is not really needed. So we experimented with entity info as a tooltip next to the cursor when hovering the entity: So we tested 3 different ways to activate it: It always appears at the cursor, which has the disadvantage of always being in your way in the middle of the screen. It always appears, but it has some delay. It only appears when a hotkey is pressed (we tested it with Shift), which has the disadvantage that you have to actually do something to see it. We assigned each of the options to be tested by someone, with the hope to figure out which (if any) of them is better than the current one. Vaclav tested option 1, Twinsen tested option 2 and I tested option 3. Unfortunately the result was that in the end everyone preferred his option the most, and we had no conclusion at all. Then we realized that the flaw of the test was that each of us picked the kind of option we already knew we would probably like. After some discussions, we decided on the following: The current version of entity info will be the default. We add an option to set a custom delay for it, that is different than the normal tooltip delay (or never). We add an option to activate it with a key. We add an option to have it next to cursor or on the side. Two years ago, I was under the impression, that we need to eradicate all the weird options, to make the game just work for everyone. Over time and after all experience and feedback we have gathered, I started to realize that different people have different expectations, and their brains are wired differently. Some option might be useless for 99% or players, but for the 1% of players, it might be the most annoying thing to be able to customize it.
Hello, We are a bit busy this week hosting a small LAN party with some fans and community members to playtest the Space Age expansion, so this FFF might be a little bit shorter than normal.
Hello, I have an irresistible urge to tell you a little story. I'm sure you come here for stories, don't you?
Hi everyone, wednesday (28th of October) was a national holiday here in Czech republic (commemorating the creation of standalone Czechoslowakian republic in the 1918). Still, quite a few of us came to the office. The atmosphere was relaxed (even more than usual) and in the afternoon some people played the recently popular Keep talking and nobody explodes game. It is amazing to see how creative people can get (talking about the creators)=) IMHO this project shows a bright side of indie games scene: good idea + good execution => good fun. Back to the Factorio reality=) In the past two weeks we have increased the frequency of the bugfixing releases. There were a few silly bugs that were created while fixing other things. Thanks for bearing with us. The general mood is to just finish the 0.12 so we can get it off our plate. Kovarex + 2 - 3 people are still focused on the 0.12 while others are either wrapping up other smaller tasks or have started working on some 0.13 stuff already.
Hello, The office here in Prague is still 'closed' until next week, so not much is happening (so our team can rightfully rest). Things will get cracking again on Monday, and our first task is to get 0.18 done! For that reason, the FFF today is a little on the short side.
