Hello, it is me, posila, with another technical article. Sorry.
As you are probably already aware, some of our team members are going to attend PAX East in Boston next week. We figured we need some representative prints for our booth, but what to put there? We could have just made a big mega high resolution render of the player character or some other entity, but that would not tell the viewer much about what the game is about. So we thought it would be much better to "just" take a giant screenshot of a working factory, print it, and done! Now of course it’s much more complicated than that… The first obvious hurdle is that you need a savegame to take this screenshot of. So you go and try to take a bunch of random saves on your disk, you open them and find that it’s not so easy to just find a factory which would look nice. Such a factory needs to show enough of the various things to represent the game, can fit the logo somewhere, and must be large enough to fill about 275x185 tiles (3x2 meters at 150dpi taken at game zoom 2)... one square in the following picture is a chunk (32x32 tiles) Luckily I just had a savegame which was easy to adapt to those requirements, but I would like to ask the question, how does one build such a factory in general? That’s what I have been trying to figure out for a long time now. As some of you may have already noticed, I enjoy constructing very organic factories, a part of which eventually turns into a crazy mess. A mess as crazy as Factorio itself, representing what your will brain look like after playing Factorio. I find this to be a good opportunity to be a bit more specific and see a few examples to put it into more context...
Hello, not much at all has happened this week. It has been rather quiet with the Art department out of office the last few days. However there has been some additional success on our recruitment drive, so there will be an additional 3-4 bodies (live) in the office within the next month.
Hello, It has been very quiet in the office this week, the calm twilight between Christmas and the New year.
Hello, we just released 0.17.73, with 0.17.74 coming very soon. This is just some bug fixes and further pathfinding improvements, and we hope to be able to mark the release as Stable next week.
Hello, we are really appreciating that the new offices have proper air conditioning...
Imagine yourself living in a perfectly balanced natural environment. With total freedom. A place where your ancestors have been the inhabitants for centuries. Evolving, understanding, and being part of this peaceful world and rich ecosystem. Totally integrated. On this land you can get aliment easily, due the lack of serious predators and pollution, and with the friendly company of your fellows, the only thing you have to take care is food, relax, and reproduction. Imagine that suddenly, something falls down from the sky. Something that starts the extraction of the minerals, and the eradication of your forests. Even further. Imagine that this newcomer, making use of the stolen resources, starts the production of massive machines aimed to automate the robbery and the production of a never ending factory which creates not only pollution in the air and water, desertification on the land, and starvation for your people, but also, creates heavy weapons in order to exterminate you and your entire species. Wouldn't you be angry? Isn't that newcomer a sick bastard?
This post was written as a joke for April Fools' day. Nothing written here should be taken seriously. No doubt you have heard about NFTs, the latest Blockchain innovation. With some big gaming companies exploring NFTs, where does Factorio stand? We have received many offers. Some of the offers were quite silly, others very tempting. Since we have many Blockchain enthusiasts on the team, we decided to explore the subject ourselves. After consulting with some industry-leading experts on Discord, this is what we came up with: Non-fungible blueprints One of the many subjects of debate within the team is the blueprint library. Allowing players to easily share big blueprints (blue science, nuclear reactor setup, etc.) ruins the fun of figuring out how to build those things yourself. One of the best things about the blueprint library is that it contains your unique blueprints, which are almost like unique pieces of art. So it only makes sense to make them truly unique, using the Blockchain, NFT, and Smart Contracts technologies. What this means is that every blueprint in the blueprint library will now be stored on the Blockchain, and they will be truly unique across all of the blueprint libraries of all players. Just like NFTs, they can be traded on the Blockchain, also making them a great speculative asset. In essence your blueprint library will become your personal wallet, containing only the unique blueprints that you own. Unlike most NFTs, blueprints are created (minted) by the players, making it a truly decentralized system, controlled by the smart contracts we created. In order to guarantee uniqueness we will use AI and Machine Deep Learning to analyze any new blueprint before it is minted, this way you won't be able to just move one power pole and mint a copy. Once again, making blueprints truly unique. Our own Play-to-earn cryptocurrency Limiting the creation (minting) of new blueprints using just the AI will not be enough. To ensure the Blockchain is not flooded with useless blueprints, we will also create a cryptocurrency called Factorio Blueprint Token ⚙️. You will need to pay 1,000 of them to mint 1 new unique blueprint. Factorio Blueprint Tokens ⚙️ are earned from Space Science using a variable conversion rate we will control. Since you can now earn crypto by just playing the game, the game basically pays for itself. Factorio Blueprint Tokens ⚙️ come with all the advantages of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, and all the fun of playing Factorio and optimizing factories for maximum UPS. Some say that Factorio offers so much value for money, that they paid more for the electricity bill than they paid for the game, so we are happy to take it to the next level. We will host an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Factorio Blueprint Token ⚙️, so make sure you invest as much as you can and HODL it, in the hopes that someone will tweet about it making the price go to the moon 🚀🌘. Click here to take part in the ICO.
Hello, Tomas is in India already, so the place is more empty again. The more empty it is, the harder we have to work to make for it :)
