Hello, the stabilising (hopefully) 0.10.1 release is here along with the regular news from the Factorio development.
Hello, I was talking with a guy in a pub yesterday and when we get to the topic what we do, I told him that I do a computer game. He asked me what is the name of it, and when I told him it is Factorio he couldn't believe me. He actually knew it, he played it from the alpha release and he apparently really liked it. I didn't expect at all that some stranger would know the game. This was really a nice confirmation, that the sales and forum posts are probably real people playing the game, not just some numbers in a database and I won't lie to you, the experience is nice :).
Hello, this week has been a week of typical bug fixing of 0.16, so development news wise, there is not much to write about. However we have some updates on some other goings on in the company.
Hello, another bugfix themed week passed and the release is here. When I'm asked to do something on friday and I say that we have the release, the typical answer is something like: "Again? Didn't you release it last week?", well we did ... :) Apart the bugfixing and moral preparation for the MP coding beast, the integration of new sounds for the 0.10 is in progress as well. First experiments of the environment sounds are done, which means that as the player goes through the factory, he can hear nearby machines working. This is very delicate matter as we don't want to make the player turn it off 5 minutes in game, but if done right, it can add a lot to the factory mood. We are very happy that people communicate on the forum, and I try to read every single post, but the last time I had marked everything read is more than 2 weeks ago. More than 5 pages of Ideas and Suggestions are waiting. The question is what exactly should we do about it, as the time spent on the forums is getting bigger and bigger every week, and I can easily "wake up" after reading it for 2 hours straight and not doing any real work on the game. We are starting to have these habits of reading in quick mode, which usually means just getting some general idea of what is going on in the thread and we usually don't read at all when we see that some other staff member replied already. So if we didn't respond to your thread, please don't take it personally, and If you feel it is important, you can bum it after some time (week at least). The big part of the work on the modding capabilities of Factorio was done during the days we were unsure about the its future. Working on something that could be used to extend the game that we were not sure anyone would play at all was looking useless. Hopefully we are still here, and new mods are arising. Some of the mods are simple but useful, like the TIme buttons, that is patching the lack of time speed configuration in-game, some are just tempting to be used because of the pictures, like Mocombat, for people that found the production chains not complex enough, there are the content-based mods like Dy tech, F-Mod and more. The growing variety of mods can only exist because modders pushed us to extend the moddability regulary and it proved more than once, that the extended interface was handy to have later even in the core Factorio, not mentioning that mods are also great incubators for new ideas that could grow into the vanilla game. So after all, we rate the time invested on modabbility to be well spent. The tesla tower from the mocombat: We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.
Hello, the summer is officially over soon. I have this tradition of denying it by wearing just a t-shirt as long as possible, so I'm getting less and less comfortable outside until I accept the defeat by the cold weather. The experience is, that the short days and ugly weather speeds up the work on Factorio as we tend to stay inside and code all the time.
Poison cloud Ernestas, posila The poison cloud animation is a placeholder spritesheet (that kovarex found somewhere on the internet), we have wanted to improve it for a long time, but since it was always such a small detail other things took priority. Well now is the time to finish everything, big and small. Some of the problems we see with the old placeholder animation: The edge (where damage will apply) is not clearly defined The center strongly obstructs vision underneath the animation It breaks the perspective/height illusion with its very circular shape The new animation was done quickly and without the need of any large changes to the Factorio engine. This is the mindset we are in these days, use the engine features we already have to finish things quickly and without trouble, and we try to stop ourselves going crazy with more detail. The smoke capsule itself spawns a bunch of smaller dummy entities which do the smoke drawing, while the damage is kept consistent by only using the central smoke cloud to apply damage.
Hello, This past weekend we beat our previous record of most simultaneous players with a peak player count on Steam of 22,457 players, and no doubt another couple thousand playing the non-Steam version.
Hi all, despite the ongoing vacation period there has been 4 of us meeting at the office for the past two days. I returned from the prolonged yoga weekend, Kovarex came back from the paragliding course (yes he will be getting his own paraglide with Factorio logo on it, I saw the proposals :D) and Kuba has finished moving and equipping his new flat. As mentioned in the last edition, the 4th person is a new Factorio developer called Mira who started this Monday.
Hi all, so it feels like the Cucumber time is here. Also known as a Silly season, this is the time of the year when not much is happening on the public scene and newspapers are scrambling for stuff to write about. Seems like we are going through such a period in the Factorio world as well. Not that much has been happening recently. We carry on with our work and progress slowly but steady. I have divided my time among multiplayer work, bugfixing and administration. Kuba has been focused on some internal refactoring in the past days. And Albert has been finishing with the player animations. Kovarex is coming back from vacation sometimes next week so the 0.10.4 release will happen most probably next Friday.
Hello, the 1st of June, which is the goal of the 0.13 release is starting to feel uncomfortably close, especially if I want to start play-testing 2 weeks before the release date. There are a lot of bigger and smaller tasks appearing all over the place. It is now the time of moving some of them to the next release again. Many of them are moved like this for years already.
