Hello, most of the team is out of the office today attending the Game Developers Session here in Prague, if you're around you can look out for some people wearing Factorio t-shirts. As we were thinking about what to write in this Friday Facts, kovarex suggested "In the next Friday Facts we should write about how hard it is to write Friday Facts". Sometimes it is really difficult to find something interesting to write about. Thankfully we found some short things that that we thought you would like.

Christmas is coming early for Factorio fans. We have a lot of exciting things to show you and announce this week, so hold on tight.

Hello, recently we had a lot of discussions on our forum about interaction with the community. You can have a look at the details . The result is that we have realized, we have done a poor job in providing updates about our progress. And we have decided to change it. This is a first blog post from the "Factorio Friday Facts" series. Every friday we will sum up our weekly progress here. This will include insights into what we have been working on, what is planned, sometimes art sneak peeks of course occasional fun facts from Indie game developers live. All right, let's have a look at what we have been up to in the past week. The single point of focus for the whole team has been finishing the 0.7.0 release. This release has taken the most development time so far. Partly because we were getting our attention together after the holidays and partly because there was a LOT of work to be done:) Actually most of the changes are under the hood (combat framework, AI routines, pollution modelling, etc.) but their results will be well visible in the game. Just a taste of what is coming. The biggest change is probably the overall shift in enemy logic. Before they were simply controlled by the lua script behind the scenario. Now they are more autonomous and integrated in the game. This is because of a new concept we have introduced - the pollution. Pollution is produced by the factory (mining drills, furnaces, etc.) and then spreads in the world. Some objects can actually lower pollution (for now only trees). After a while the deadly pollution clouds arrive to the enemy spawners. The spawners "clear" the pollution but in turn produce an "angry" biters (new name for our basic class of enemies). After certain period of time, all the angry biters from the local neighborhood are sent together to the closest local optimal pollution source to destroy everything that they find there. This follows a simple logic: you destroy their environment - they get angry - they attack you / your machines. For now there is no way to deal with the pollution in the "peaceful" way, but there will be in the future. You can imagine pollution clearing machines or even making pacts with enemies to tolerate pollution in exchange for providing them with supply of resources. Anyway this changes the game significantly. It is not enough to fortify the labs / radars now. You need to protect your whole factory / keep checking the pollution levels and examine from which direction the attack will come (the pollution is visible on the map after pressing the alt key). For Albert (our graphic) the release has been especially challenging because after months of working on machine design he had to completely shift his style and model the enemy units and structures. The result are three new biters and three worms taking up a lot of MBs in the package:) Last week Albert spent with the most difficult structure - the enemy spawner. In the end we didn't put it into the release, because it still needs to be tweaked and better integrated, but it is definitely coming in one of the following bugfix releases. Apart from that Albert also spent some time preparing a new set of selection boxes and arrows. He was correct that the old ones "were hurting the eyes". You can check an example of new boxes in the screenshot below (personally I am really fond of them, that is why I share them here). Since the release is rather big we have spent the last week mostly by fixing bugs and solving small remaining issues. AI behaviors are especially tricky to test because they are often not exact or easily reproducible. The final count of solved issues in the 0.7.0 has stopped at symbolic 111. Couple of them done at the very last moment:) After this sprint we will now take some rest over the weekend and start preparing the plans for the next update. Next month will be especially interesting because we will start actively preparing for the Steam greenlight campaign. This will require further graphical polishing in the game (namely player animation) and most importantly a new trailer. We already have couple of ideas and for sure we will discuss them with the community on the forums. And finally the fun fact. During release compilation on our Linux virtual machine we got an error: "Virtual memory exhaust, cannot allocate more memory". Factorio code is getting really big. So there is no Linux build until we fix this:| Well that would be it for now. The 0.7.0 release is actually out already, you can read more details on our forum . It is still experimental and it will probably take some time before it stabilizes, but if you don't mind the bugs then go ahead and give it a spin.

Status report (Twinsen) On Monday June 18th, we marked the last version of 0.16 as stable. There were no major problems, so now we are almost exclusively working on 0.17. Work on 0.17 is progressing well: Regarding the new campaign, we are already internally playing a rough version of the new player experience. We are still trying to figure out the exact and final style and concepts for the improved GUI, but we have some GUI windows implemented in game already, plus many base widgets. We use those to get a feel of what works and what doesn't. The new graphics back-end rewrite is nearing finalization. A closed-beta branch was sent to a few players to test that rendering works correctly across different hardware. The rendering is faster and no major issues were reported so far. But there is still much to do, such as improvements to VRAM usage and many experiments with shaders. Since from the graphics department Albert is working on the GUI and V453000 is working on the new campaign, only Ernestas is left working exclusively on the entity graphics. He is reworking some more entities for high-resolution, so expect some teasers in the future. There are of course other small projects that are ongoing, such as improved pipe-fluid physics and improved map generation, but more on those when they are fleshed out. Oh, and our coding always goes as planned without any problems.

Hello there, the 17th of January brings you the 17th edition of the Friday Facts. Recently, even without our active participation the game has been doing quite well. There are plenty of new videos on the youtube and the forum has also been buzzing with activity. One of our fans put it as follows: "Factorio is going places". Well, we certainly hope he is right :). Anyway let's get down to business. The past week has been spent mostly by work on the new functionality for the 0.9. The blueprints and the oil industry. Both of these are quite large tasks so to finish them completely does take a lot of time. Though the core functionality for both is finished and we are now sort of tweaking the details. I have experimented a bit with some new simple pipe vs. assembler setups and it was quite refreshing and fun. We are really curious how this turns out. The oil industry will result in quite a few new recipes and while we are at it we might go and rebalance the recipes overall a bit. There are things we know for sure should be fixed (for instance the green science pack being too cheap and close to the red one) and there are things we want to experiment with a little bit (like introducing a more complex intermediate products - small engine, navigation system, etc.). We haven't mentioned our new trailer for a while. The thing is that we struggled for long to find someone who would be able to compose the music for the video. We even mentioned that in one of the past Friday Facts. After that post we actually got contacted by a player who bought the game and was following its development news. His name is Daniel James Taylor and he is an awesome (now we know that :)) composer from the United Kingdom. Check out his website if you are interested in more details / his music samples. We agreed on the cooperation and he went and composed a great piece of music fitting our new trailer very well. We are now discussing with Daniel further cooperation regarding the sound effects and ambient music for the game. With the music finished, the biggest bulk of the work for the trailer has been done. The last step is to integrate the new graphics (terrain, doo-dads, etc.) into the trailer and polish it to perfection :) This will most probably happen after the 0.9, but we are getting there. Since the "job advertisement" worked so well last time for the music, we have another one :). It is very apparent to anyone opening the game that the items, gui icons, technology pictures, etc. are a mess. So we are looking for a graphic designer to help us out here. Albert's todo list is long enough already and this job is a lot of work. We would prefer someone from the Czech Republic or the vicinity (for easier communication), but the music experience has proved that a quality cooperation can be done based solely on electronic communication as well. Let's see, maybe we will get lucky twice :) Albert has been "in the oil industry state" for a while. We found out that the current pipes are not fitting the art direction very well. Therefore we decided to take a step back and redo the pipes before anything else. The pipes are the base for the other machines so it certainly needs to be done. It does slow the things now a bit, but as the wise man once said: "If you want to run fast, you need to tie your laces well. Or go barefoot." So below is a composition preview of the new pipes and storage tanks that will be used for holding large amounts of fluids. If you feel you have something to say there is a post for that on our forum.

Hello everyone, another weekly Factorio update is here. The 0.7.0 release from the last Friday night has triggered a lot of discussions on the forum. It seems that in the end we didn't get the balancing quite right and the natives are now rather overpowered. People reported cases when they were overrun by the biters after less than half an hour of playing. Another issue would be that the biters in the enemy bases would level up too quickly and when the player arrives to conquer the base there were plenty of medium or big biters (which are quire resistant). Apart from that the release was relatively smooth. There are some minor bugs but no deal brakers. After recharging some energy during the weekend at a local wine festival:), we started working on the 0.7.1. Unlike in previous minor releases, the 0.7.1 will contain also couple of new features. Most notable of these is the addition of late game player following robots (aka "destroyers"). They are quire expensive, but they allow to conquer even large enemy bases. And they are a lot of fun to play with because of their acceleration based behavior. Apart from this and other small features the week has been spent mostly by bugfixing the issues reported by the community. This is now more or less finished and we have started with playtesting and further balancing. The 0.7.1 is expected to be released during the next week. As mentioned before afterwards we will focus some of our energy on making the new trailer and preparing for the Steam Greenlight campaign. Another thing that kept us busy for a while has been the wiki. Originally it has been spammed to a degree when any ressurection seemed hopeless. However after many tries (what do you do with a 4GB sql dump file?) Blue Cube has managed to prune the database and resurrect the wiki at its original location. For now we have restricted the access only to people who has been confirmed manually by us. So if you are interested in contributing to the wiki (which would be more than welcomed) then request an account on the wiki page . You will need a forum account for that as well. All this is to avoid further automated spamming of the wiki. Not only the wiki has been resurrected but also thanx to Kovarex it now contains up to date information on Factorio 0.7.1 scripting interface. Albert has been busy and productive as well. He has finished with the enemy spawner which we had to redo couple of times because of notable noise in the final animation. The resulting animation is imho worth it. You can see it below (animation for breathing) together with the gif capturing the process of making the spawner model. After this Albert has worked on other small issues that we have been putting off for a while. Things like: slowdown particles, underground objects indication (belts to ground, pipes to ground) and finally the remnants after destroyed objects. These are especially useful because as a player you can see what has been destroyed when your base has been attacked by the natives. And here is a fun fact for this episode. Technically it happened last week, but it so funny that it still qualifies. So the thing is that recently we looked up that there will be an indie game conference here in Prague. We were super excited and all three of us went there really enthusiastic to talk to the people from the indie game industry and maybe propagate Factorio or something. It took place in the local startup hub. We arrived and saw that a workshop was about to start soon. So we sat down and waited for a while. It was a little bit weird that nothing was happening but after a while a guy appeared who said he is coming for the workshop as well. He started explaining to us what he does and it was all about some very advanced server management stuff. We waited all the time when he will get to the indie game part but it never happened. And it turned out that the workshop is actually about some advanced server management stuff. The indie game conference happened a year ago on the same day. So we were one year late. The people at the reception had quite a good laugh. All right, back to the reality. Recently we have created a new "Updates" category on the forum where we will try to regularly post small updates. We will also create there a post for every friday facts episode where you can post comments.

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, we have a nice anniversary of the friday facts today, as we have one friday facts for every bit in the 64bit architecture address size. I believe this is the best time to show some of the 64 pixels per tile graphics experiments as well.

Hello, The office here in Prague is still 'closed' until next week, so not much is happening (so our team can rightfully rest). Things will get cracking again on Monday, and our first task is to get 0.18 done! For that reason, the FFF today is a little on the short side.

For a few frames more Previously on Factorio Friday Facts (#264): "No wonder, scenes heavy on smoke or trees can tank FPS, especially in 4K. Maybe we should do something about that..."