You would expect that we wouldn't have anything new during christmas, but you couldn't be more wrong, as the Factorio development never stops.
Hello, This week has been non-eventful. We are fixing bugs. There is not much to say, and I have updated the graph to reflect the status of the ongoing Dev vs. Bug war: The massive spike is the specific crash we talked about in the last FFF.
Good afternoon, the work on 0.12 are continuing quite well according to the updated roadmap presented in the previous facts. So this is a good opportunity to talk more in depth about one of the upcoming improvements for the Multiplayer - how we plan to deal with the latency.
Hello Factorio players, lets start our developer to player interaction right now! :)
Merch store open again Klonan Our e-shop is now open again after taking a break over the holidays and new year. We have also restocked our new Factorio sew-on patches, so if you didn't manage to pick one up over the last weeks, now is your chance to order one.
Being brought in to create content on a very mature project has been an interesting experience to say the least. One of the first things I did was analyse the features of the game and which kind of player the game currently supports. The obvious thing is that Factorio Freeplay strongly attracts and engages players who enjoy an open-ended sandbox type of game. Achievement statistics show that only about 11% of players on Steam have ever launched a rocket, which currently means 'won the game'. What about the other player types? Well for those that are new to the game, or unsure if they are interested, we will have the New Player Experience. This is a free, combined tutorial and demonstrator mission which we discussed in FFF-241. But what about those that prefer a guided experience? This is the sort of player who wants to play the game, and experience all of what it has to offer, but wants to be taken on a journey. For these players we have the campaign. Why do we need a new campaign at all? We find that the current campaign: Does not include all the Freeplay content as it currently ends after Advanced Circuits. Severely limits player investment by forcing a new factory to be built each mission. Does not convey the feeling of loneliness that the Freeplay does. Is showing its age visually, as it was made before high-res textures and the terrain rework. To solve these issues we have set about designing new Campaign elements to act consistently to provide the player with a guided experience all the way from Science pack 1 to Space science packs. The first step to achieving this is to have the map border expand each time the player completes a section of the main 'quest line'. This means that the player never loses any of their progress, and as long as these transitions are presented in a smooth way, the jarring effect of the old level restarts will be removed. Having a continuously expanding map presents many other challenges, but we are confident that it will be worthwhile. This style of level will fit with the style of Factorio much better. Such a map should also end up being as huge as a regular Freeplay environment so as to better place importance on exploration. Exploration in Freeplay is generally player motivated, such as when you are almost out of iron and need to find that next big patch. In a guided experience, letting the player know that there is something out there can give them impetus to dive into the unknown. This brings us to technologies. Now that we have removed level transitions, we have also shot ourselves in the foot. How else will we deliver the technology tree in chunks? Simply making the entire tree available from the start of the game will cause all sorts of balance issues. In our NPE discussion we stated that new recipes should only be given to the player via research. In the campaign, unresearched technologies will only be given by moving to given locations on the map. These would include some non-generated terrain and pre-placed factory structures to help to player see where they are. These could also help to show concepts and workable designs, one thing that the current campaign does do well.
Public service announcement - Possible server breach and outages In the past 7 days, our services (authentication, multiplayer matching, mod portal, etc.) experienced multiple outages. One of them was caused by one of our service providers and resulted in a roughly 6 hour long outage on Tuesday evening. This was a widespread outage all over the internet caused by problems with Amazon's AWS S3 and also affected other services, for example Instagram, Imgur or Trello. The other 2 outages were the result of a possible security breach of one of our servers, acting as the master content server at the time. On Friday, just before midnight UTC, we were informed by Linode (our server provider), that a brute force SSH attack was originating from that server, targeting a specific IP in the OVH network. As a precaution, the server was cut from all network traffic, which caused a short outage. We haven't managed to determine, whether that attack was caused by a bug in some software or a runaway process, or if it was caused by someone who managed to gain access to the server. We can't say if it's possible to spoof the IP address of an attack of this kind and make it look like the attack is coming from someone else. As a security measure, we have destroyed and redeployed all 3 content servers we currently operate, improved our firewall and automatic banning rules and invalidated passwords and SSH keys. All the releases that are available for download were checked and none of them were modified. We apologise for any inconvenience we might've caused by these outages. Additional map info The Trello card to improve our map has been sitting in our queue for a very long time, and since I wanted to program some low hanging fruit for 0.15, I decided to pick this. Let me present how far I got. Now when I open the map view, it shows the map view settings mini-panel on the side (icons are temporary), which can be used to toggle different kind of additional info on the map. The logistics area visualisation It wasn't really possible to see the roboport coverage in the scale of the whole factory and I missed that a lot, so it was the first thing to be done. Now I can clearly see why did I get alerts of missing construction robots in the left part of the map. It can be also used to find all these small gaps in the coverage or off-by-one alignment issues. I'm also considering to show the roboport connections in this view, or as additional option. The electric network visualisation This one might be especially useful when you want to find out the reason of electricity breach. As with the previous one, it gives even more incentive to build electric network in OCD friendly way, as all the circumstantial electric pole placements are more than visible in this view. The pollution The pollution works the same as before, but it can be turned on and off the same way as other things. This means you'll no longer have to toggle the detailed info to see your base clearly through the pollution. Map interaction This was the most obvious step of all. You can open locomotives and train stations from any distance, you can access them from the train manager, but you couldn't open them by clicking in the map. It is possible now. Custom tags As the map shows train station names, people were actually using stations to put markers on the map. But as its kind of a hack, and it clutters the train destination selection dialog it needs a proper solution. This is why we have the custom tags now. It can be either text only, icon or both. As you can see it can be used to mark different parts of the factory, it can be used in multiplayer to coordinate different kind of tasks and I don't doubt that people will use it to draw penises or other 'creative art' on the map as well. Resource patch inspection Searching for the best patch around was quite tedious, as you had to walk to the locations and guess how much ore it contains by hovering over several ore patches. It is not needed anymore, as a player can just hover over the patch on the map to see how much it contains. As the area was discovered by radar, or by the player manually, there is no harm in providing this information. It also helps colorblind people as they couldn't distinguish the ore types by color so well. Other improvements There are other things we are considering. Just to be sure, this doesn't mean a promise or a plan, just an idea, that might or might be not implemented: Extend the custom tags, so they can refer to rectangular area. Interactive (clickable) electric and logistics networks that open the window with detailed info. Integrate the interaction into the train stop selection when adding new items to the train schedule Integrate the interaction into the train to allow semi-automatic one-time train order that wouldn't be limited to train stations. Be able to zoom from the map view directly to the world. Things not covered by radars would just be covered by some kind of blackness. Better map colors, more different colors for entities, so you would see whether it is an assembling machine, electric pole or turret. Option of Higher resolution of map. If we have 4 pixels per tile in the map it could be nicer and also provide more information when zoomed in Smarter map info. Especially in the high resolution option, the belts could theoretically remember the resource they are used for (if it is one purpose belt), and draw line of the color on them. Assembling machines could have a pixel(s) inside the square that would depend on the recipe. Etc. I would actually like to know what other things you might want, or what things from this list you find the most needed. As always, we can’t wait to read your reactions and feedback on our forums.
Hello, engineers! I'm a newer face at Wube and have been mainly working on expansion content for about one year now. Today, I'm here to share some exciting non-expansion news for our Mac players.
Hello, long time no talk, we've got some catching up to do... Almost 1 year ago (FFF-365) we said "we don't think that [the expansion] will take less than a year to develop". Well it has been less than a year and it is not finished, so we kept our word on that :). But while it might not be finished, there is a still a lot we have done so far.
