Hello, after a long long time the 0.9.8 was marked stable this week. There were no big ovations or cheering, just a quite "stable sticker exchange":) The bugs forum is not empty though, as someone would expect. Quite a few small issues remain, but for the sake of moving on we decided to put them to our backlog and mark the release as stable. However if some game crashing or very serious bugs are discovered in 0.9.8, we will make a hotfix. Oh, and the good thing is that we managed to break the streak (for now) of ever increasing number of bugfix releases (the 0.9 had 8 bugfix releases - the same as 0.8). The whole "programming department" has been fully commited to the work on multiplayer for a while now. The task divison for now is following: Michal - fully deterministic simulation. This is an absolute must, because all multiplayer peers will calculate the simulation themselves and only the player input (we call it input actions) will be exchanged over the network. Nice effect of having deterministic simulation will be having functional replays again (hmmm not really again because there have always been some bugs in them even when they were "working":)). Kuba - lower level network layer. This includes the connection management, packets management (we will be using UDP for all the communication) and eventually things like NAT punching to allow connections for peers behind NAT (few people have public IP address). Tomas - synchronization layer. This logic will take care of keeping the simulation state same for all the players in the game. This includes queing up the input actions, sending them out in batches (tick closures to other peers), requesting missing tick closures, etc. These things are absolute minimum necessary for our multiplayer implementation. However there is more to be done after this, things like: starting the game (the lobby), mechanism for a player joining already existing game, hiding the latency for the player (most of the time the actions for different players will not collide so we can act as if common actions - like moving the player around - were confirmed immediately) and more (see our battleplan whiteboard in one of the previous friday facts). There is a lot of work ahead, but the good news is that we have finally fully dived into it. We will keep you updated about the progress:) Albert has finished with most of the map trailer tweaks. Today we also did a first test with exporting the trailer using the new screenshot mechanism. We did this on Michal's computer which is way more powerful than mine (it does take a while to export 3600 screenshots). However there was this funky bug that parts of the terrain in the screenshots had strange, kind of inverted, colors. We have spent like half a day looking into this issue. Finally it turned out to be a problem in our custom optimized version of d3d drawing routine (this was happening on windows only). Spending hours in frustration hunting bugs (that are not even visible to the player in the end) happens more often than you would think, so game programming is not just about sitting back, playing video games and calling it "research" (but that is part of the job too:)) Anyway to give you an idea of what was going on you can see a visualization of the problem below. For better effect (and for us to easier analyze the problem) the corrupted regions of the image (here all of the terrain) are drawn with reddish overlay. Any idea for the picture title? Want to cheer us up for the multiplayer work? Or feel like laughing at us for taking so long with the trailer? Go to our forums.
The new GUI tileset (Albert) The process of the GUI re-design is moving slowly but steadily. By making new mockups, re-thinking old mechanics, and with the proper feedback from a different range of people, the parts are falling into place. I'm starting to feel very confident with the actual general contrast and font sizes. Also the conversion from high resolution to normal resolution is working just fine. These subjects are very important to move forward with. Below you can see a demo of the current state of the new GUI. Not all the widgets are shown yet, but this document is helping us a lot in order to define the future elements. Seeing the big picture makes it much easier to tweak them altogether with a better coherence and consistency, not to mention for testing any kind of font, specifically non-latin characters sets, a subject that I personally have not paid too much attention to yet. This document is being used also to create the general tileset and see how it behaves in the engine. This is a work in progress, and we are tweaking details constantly. Many things will change during the process. Overall here you can see a sneak peek of the Factorio GUI to come. I want to also mention that we are actually taking care of the 8% of the population who has some sort of color vision problems. This subject is still very new for us, but we are without a doubt researching solutions to different conditions.
Hello, since 0.16 is stable we can assign more of our effort into the work on 0.17. One of those features planned for that release is the Rich & interactive text. Having more text formatting options was one of the things we wanted for quite some time, and it is finally starting to become reality in the 0.17 branch. The initial motivation was to have more possibilities in the tutorial related texts, but it proved to be useful having it available globally in the game. The current format for any text markup we use is [<type>=<value>], but it might change somehow before 0.17 hits the public. This feature is being developed by wheybags, and it is progressing forward quite steadily.
Good evening, after a long long bug fixing period we have declared the 0.12.20 as a stable release. Owing to the great effort of all the developers, the open bugs count at the forums is at unbelievable ... wait for it =) ... 3 items. And one of these will be solved by us dropping support for the OSX Snow Leopard. So unless there are quite a few people who have been holding the bugs reports back (out of pure mercy with us of course=)) the game should be rather stable.
Hello, so this is the 100th edition of Friday Facts! It has been a while :) Feels kind of incredible that we have managed to put a (more or less) relevant blog post about what we do every week for 100 consecutive (!) times. However, somehow in line with Murphy's laws, there hasn't been much happening this week=)
Hello, the struggle to finish the latest features and fixes so 0.13 can be in time, or just reasonable delayed, goes on. There is always last missing icon or tweak that was hiding around the corner. It is still not certain whether we can really deliver next week, but we will certainly try to.
Hello, the days here in Prague are getting longer so the afternoons (and evenings) in the office are becoming less and less depressive. We have been working with a good consistent effort for the past week and the results are IMHO there.
Hello everyone, so this is a bit of a guest post to regular progress reports on Factorio development. As indicated before I have gone to Mysore, India for a 2-month Yoga study session. It has been three weeks since I have arrived here. I will sum up my observations and feelings in today's Friday Facts.
Hello, A bunch of us will be travelling to Gamescom next week as visitors, if you see anybody wearing a Factorio t-shirt, it might very well be one of us. We don't have a booth or exhibit this year, as we don't want to take any focus away from the development of the game.
Hello, the office has had a very lively atmosphere this week. With some very productive team discussions taking place, we reach another Friday with an optimistic outlook of the weeks to come.
