Hello, this week the Friday Facts are coming a little bit earlier. The reason is that in the evening I will be lost somewhere in the middle of Brno (second biggest city in the Czech Republic). I will participate in a popular annual deciphering game that is taking a place there. The 0.7.5 with another batch of bugfixes went out this Tuesday. Since then there has been no reports regarding major issues or crashes. Couple of teeny-tiny bugs were reported however that is not enough for us to make a new release now. So the 0.7.5 will become a stable version. Finally:) I have spent most of the time during the past week working on the trailer. The first version has been done already. There is a discussion thread on our forum (with a link to the unlisted video on youtube) where people can give us feedback about it. This is by far not finished. But we needed to get it out in order to start talking to the music & sound guy and give him some baseline to work with. Yesterday we had a long chat with Albert about the trailer and we agreed that the first scene (standing in the middle of the ruins) should be changed. Now it feels too out of the context from the rest. Apart from that we are quite happy with the general flow. Of course there are plenty of details that need to be tweaked so there is still a long way to go. On the other hand having all the trailer in the script makes things a hell lot easier for us. Changing things like the zoom behavior, camera movement or speed is just a breeze. Same goes for extending / shortening the scenes or adding a new scene all together. Another issue is the final video quality. There is a lot of movement going on in the trailer and currently after youtube compression, often the video is just blurry. We have used the 720p for now but that proved not to be enough. Oh and regarding the music. Just for fun we tried to run the Raymond Scott's Twilight in Turkey together with the trailer. It turned out to work surprisingly well, so one option is that the music would go in this kind of direction. Apart from preparing the 0.7.5 Michal spent most of the time on the new scenarios for the main campaign. It starts to slowly shape. At the moment there are 5 levels that introduce basic things like assembling machines, research, trains, etc. to the player in the course of playing. Often the player is not starting from the scratch but he can use already existing pieces of the factory. Writing the scenarios (and the trailer) is also a good opportunity for us to review, document and extend the Lua API. Kuba and Albert keep working together on the terrain. There are couple of variations of the dirt by now and Albert is now spending his evenings with the grassy terrain. Kuba made couple of Blender scripts to ease the manual terrain work. This way Albert can take advantage of generated tileable noise or terrain transitions. Also yesterday Kuba showed me a great picture he generated that I can't resist to share with you. In case that you always thought that there is a lot of recipes in the game and that the whole thing is too complex, then worry no more. Here is an ultimate Factorio recipe cheatsheet for you: As usual there is a post on our forum where you can discuss this update.
Good afternoon, this week we have finished assembling last pieces of furniture for our office. It took us more than half a year. Albert also put up a big poster in the graphics department room. I guess it is time for an office-warming party ...
You might have noticed that a lot of rail related stuff was broken during these past releases, and now it is working more or less fine again. The story behind it is not so trivial.
Work this week has been progressing nicely on 0.15. We hope we will be able to start our internal play testing soon, as the team works to close off the rest of the major features. Rseding will be arriving here in Prague next week for another of his infamous visits, and Harkonnen will be joining us shortly after, so the office will be prepared for tackling any issues that may arise. Since we are going to be spending the next period polishing and fixing what we already have, you can look forward to some less interesting FFF posts in the coming days. Take the lack of exiting new topics to cover as a good omen that the whole team's effort is on getting everything ready for the release.
Hello, it is a great weather here. The weather is actually so nice, that I had to take 4 day vacation last week. It was a paragliding vacation placed in Italy, Basano. It was my first proper flying with the "Factorio" paraglide and the experience was extra fantastic. I was able to turn off the programming/Factorio part of the brain for the time, which is very hard to achieve usually. This allowed me to recharge and clear the head so I can work on Factorio with the full enthusiasm again.
With most of the team away for Gamescom or vacation, I have the pleasure of writing a Friday Facts for you this week.
Hello Factoriators, greeting from rainy Prague. Bad weather makes perfect environment for making good development progress and that is imho exactly we did this week. Just before we start I have to share this picture I came across when checking out Factorio subreddit. I find it super funny. The Factorio subreddit has an active community and it is becoming a good alternative to the forums.
Good evening everyone, we have spent the week doing various stuff. Playing and testing the multiplayer game, working on some promised features (yes, talking about the tank) and also sorting out administrative issues. In the end we have signed an agreement to rent a place in the Prague city center so since this week we officially have an office space. The place is still empty but we are already looking for furniture and computer equipment to turn an ordinary looking flat it into a true Factorio HQ.
Today's edition of the Friday Facts has been written by Blue Cube, enjoy! Hello fellow Factorians! I'm breaking away from our magnificent testing / team building session here at our office to bring you more babbling about the development of your favourite game. This time there will be less of the regular "fixing bugs, fixing multiplayer, designing spaceships" theme from the past weeks and the post will be a little more technical, focusing on the workings of our magical multiplayer code.
Hello, it's another Friday, so time for another Friday Facts.
