Hi everyone, we have updated the game preview page on our website. There is now a set of brand new screenshots from the game. These were taken in Factorio 0.6.x, the current experimental release. The old screenshots were more than half a year old and they were really obsolete. A lot of graphic placeholders has been replaced since then and many new assets were added. There is still a long way to go. However the artistic direction of Factorio has more or less stabilised and we now know where we are heading. Probably the biggest change that strikes the eye are the new color tones of the terrain. The terrain now looks more uniform and smooth, though it is still not a final version. Our artist is experimenting with new terrain meshes and variations. On top of that there will be a set of various objects (doodads) to make the environment more variable and interesting to explore. Things like wrecks of space ships, remnants of dead creatures, ruins left behind by the native civilization, different fauna, etc. Apart from the new screenshots there is an update of the theme pictures as well. Now there is a collection of 1 + 5 theme pictures capturing some essential concepts from Factorio. These are available as wallpapers for Furnace Attendant or higher member tiers.
Hi all, this weekend has been very busy. For our sales counter. On Saturday, quill18 made a nice youtube preview of Factorio. The video has been seen by a few thousands of people. The reaction to video was very positive and shortly after it was released, the sales counter went crazy. In the evening the game has already made more money for the day than for the whole month a year ago. There was a glitch in the evening, when we breached an outgoing limit on the number of emails the web site can send out. The result was that people could buy the game, but wouldn't get an activation email. Not the best timing, especially considering that I was out of the house. Anyway, we have resolved the problem in a timely manner and sent the codes to people who didn't get them automatically (sorry for troubles again if you were one of them). The rest of the extended weekend was rather smooth. Today we even went past the magical (for us) threshold of 10k sales. I still remember the time when we were starting with Factorio and plannig that if we can make 10k sales within a year it will be a success. It took much longer, but the prospects are bright. The feedback we got, from the people seeing the latest version of the game (the video was done with 0.9.8) for the first time was very positive. Allright, that is enough for the small happy rant about Factorio getting some traction. If you have something to say please do so on our forums.
Hello guys, this week felt very unfruitful yet we have managed to bring at least some news from the Factorio development.
I decided to write about the results of the item stack optimisations explained in the FFF-198, so I rushed today to finish its implementation, just to find out that the task affects an even bigger part of the code than I expected, Items are related to many things in Factorio :) After many hours of rewriting and fixing, I can compile it and even start a game, but most of the things are broken. It is quite funny to see some of the basic item interactions to be broken. Now I'm making commits like "Now I can split stacks", "Now I can merge stacks", etc. It reminds me the old days. In conclusion, the details of the optimization will have to wait for next week, and since it is after 10pm, this Friday facts will be somewhat shorter :)
Hello, the sunny spring weather seems to have taken a break these last few days after Denis' arrival to the office. His work continues on the belts optimization, as the rest of the team has been playtesting 0.15, as well as closing off remaining minor features on our Trello board.
Hello, we try to fix bugs as fast as we can, the more we fix, the more get reported, it will takes weeks to get to stable version ... blah blah blah
Hello, Albert is back to Prague, so today we had 5 people in the same room working today. I can see that the team is growing, and the atmosphere is positive, as everyone is refreshed by the holidays and full of enthusiasm to make Factorio better. We are looking forward to be in the new office. I already feel the Factorio touch of the place in advance, the bigger the project is the more we feel the need to separate home and work. It might be a bad idea to say it here, but we have some kind of Factorio level up party prepared as well, so if you are in Prague that day and there are not 100 people coming already you are free to join:)
Hello, since we started with the Friday Facts series, it seems to me that the Fridays have been coming more and more often. So here we are again with the handful of fresh news from the Factorio back stage. There is a good news and an even better news regarding the 0.8 release. The good news is that we have a definitive release date now. The date has been set to the Friday, the 6th of December. The even better news is that it will be Kovarexs' birthday the day before that, so there will be two reasons to celebrate on that Friday night:). On Tuesday the first ever "FactorioCon" took place. It was not really a conference, more like a spontaneous meeting. Here is what happened. In the reaction to the previous Friday post we got a message from one of our players on the forums, that he would be coming to Prague for the week. So we agreed to grab a beer on Tuesday night. In the beginning it was supposed to be just me and Kovarex but in the end all the Factorio team was present and even two more of our fans from Prague came (my brother and a friend of his:)). So we were 7 people. We took a beer and snacks in a pub by the river and had a good chat about the game (and life - the usual topic of pub chats). Most of the map editor functionality, mentioned in the last post is done. This occupied the majority of my time over the past week. Now it is actually a pleasure to work with . Maybe it is a subjective feeling, because I had to do some maps with the old editor:) Anyway the mechanism of layers and tools is in place and easy to extend in the future. So we will release the new editor into the wild, gather the feedback from people on the forum and then incorporate it back in if necessary. Includes. They are killing us. Factorio is written in C++ which has an old-school-textually-include-stuff approach to referencing objects in other files. This means that the compile time goes up fast with the growing codebase. Compile time is very unproductive kind of time. And it has been going up steadily. At the moment the Factorio core code base has almost 130k lines of code and it takes a fair amount of time to compile. My 2011 MacBookPro 13" takes already around 8 minutes to build the whole project from scratch. Sometime I take the time to wash the dishes or do a bit of exercise. But most of the time I just kill those 8 minutes by surfing the web or staring at the rolling compilation log. To battle this we have spent quite some time pruning the includes in the past days (it has not been the first time). Kuba was playing with some existing clang include analyzers while Kovarex wrote his own small tool to gather include statistics and try the trial and error include removal (remove - try compile - iterate). This is what the game development includes (pun intended) as well. Albert has defeated the deamons of the water and now he started integrating the new terrains together. On the other hand we are still struggling with the algorithm for correcting the terrain border transitions. The fail attempt number 5 (I think) is called "the weeping terrain": To keep the tradition rolling, the thread for comments is available on our forum.
Hello These weeks are quite quiet. We (Me and Kuba) are fighting the never ending wall of bugs, and Albert with Pavel (The graphics department) are doing the preparations of the 0.12 endgame graphics.
