Hello, welcome to the weekly dose of information that proves that we are not slacking :)
Hello Factoriods, last week we parted with a sad postcard of a biter dying after massacre on st. Valentines' day. Well they are tough fellas these biters so they got their claws sharpened, got some of their best boys together and set off for a revenge mission on the players' base. If you want to see them in action sweeping through a poorly protected oil expansion then check out the composition below. It was made by Albert, our fearless reporter from the Factorio planet. Now back to the Earth. Or more specifically Prague, yes that pretty city in the middle of Europe, where (among other wonderful things) the Factorio team is working day and night to deliver you the best build-factories-in-your-computer experience. And the day and night is not an overstatement. The "programming department" (me, kovarex and blue cube) usually works from something like 9 am to 7 pm. The working hours are VERY flexible. The part of the "working shift" is regular lunch with brainstorming at awesome local restaurant called The Carp in the honey (yeah no kidding - and they actually do serve the Carp in honey). The "art department" (Albert) has recently been in habit of working overnight. There are days when we chat in the morning after I wake up and he is just about to go to bed. Well the result is that sometimes (during very hectic days) we have a 24hr Factorio "development coverage". We do jokes about it, but it is definitely not something that we are proud or happy about. And actually it is getting better, in the early days we didn't do anything else then sit at home and code the game, nowadays the atmosphere is way more relaxed. Alright, so our efforts in the past week have been spent mostly on cutting down the massive list of bug reports that appeared after the Friday's 0.9 release. These efforts have culminated tonight by making the 0.9.1 bugfix release. While it fixes a lot of bugs we don't really expect it to become stable, namely after experiences from 0.7.x and 0.8.x generations :). Also some things are just not finished yet - like a migration of campaign or scenario pack to the new oil recipes. But if you were one of those who got corrupted saves from 0.9, chances are that this release will solve the problem for you. That is actually the reason why we tried to push it before the weekend. But as usual, no guarantees. We have been looking for someone to work on Factorio icons/items/technology images and graphic design in general for a while. It seems like we might have found such a person in the end. We will bring you more details when the deal is closed, for now it must suffice to say that the person is a she so Factorio could get a bit of a womans touch :). Also the rumors are that new assembling machine graphics are just around the corner, so stay tuned... No comments, no fun. Tell us what you think on our forum.
Hello, let's start with small random facts: Tomas is on vacation this week, he is having a break from the system. Our boiler is broken again, so it is pretty cold in the office and everyone is wearing long sleeves or jackets here. We are slowly switching to visual studio 2015, so we might use even more of the C++11 features soon.
Hello,the hopefully final 0.14 version was recently released, meanwhile most of the team have been assigned their major tasks for 0.15.
Hello hello, the April has started in a crazy manner here in Prague. Last couple of days the weather was switching from winter (cold and snowing) via spring (chilly and rainy) to almost summer (warm and sunny). The nature is definitely playing some April fool's jokes on us. Kovarex took some time off to go to Paris with his girlfriend over the Easter holidays. The rest of us has been merrily meeting in the office.
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.
Hello FFF readers, another week, another set of news. Kovarex took some more vacation days for a visit to Slovakia where his relatives live. He will come back on Sunday just in time to switch places with me. I will be off for the whole next week, playing Go, hiking and relaxing in the Czech Beskydy mountains. Another fun fact is that the most active forum user ssilk took some vacation as well and he actually came to Prague. I will go meet with him tomorrow.
Hi folks, so this has been one of those weeks when it is suddenly Friday afternoon and you are wondering where did the week go. Fortunately there are the Friday Facts to put myself together and retrace the events=)) The Grey Zone At the moment we are kind of in a grey zone. The 0.12 bugs are more or less solved (though there is still some "popping up" of new issues) and the full speed work on 0.13 hasn't started yet (actually not even slow speed work has started). We are finishing with little (often technical debt) tasks from our internal lists. There is just ton of issues like: fixing locale fonts, updating tips and tricks, writing tests for compilcated existing functionality, tweaking our automatic deployment and testing setup, auto-generating the Lua API documentation, fixing sound glitches, etc. The list goes on. One of the tasks has been related to our headless binary. This is the binary to run on linux servers without graphics card. This is now available in the downloads section alongside other releases. There is a small convenience difference where by clicking the download, the resulting download link (from one of our cdn servers) is valid for 10 minutes (instead of regular 10 seconds) so the server owner can conveniently copy this url and download the game directly from the server. In the future we plan to have the updater work for headless servers as well so that will make things even more convenient. The good news is that the list of these little tasks is getting shorter. Also we have already more or less agreed on distribution of big tasks for the 0.13. These have been discussed in the past and are also visible at our roadmap. Some work on these should start already next week. We will keep you up to date=)
Hello, the 0.14 stabilization is still ongoing, we are in the final stretch now and hope our latest release might be declared stable soon, along with a marketing push on steam. Until then here is some news about ongoing developments this week:
