Hello, This past weekend we beat our previous record of most simultaneous players with a peak player count on Steam of 22,457 players, and no doubt another couple thousand playing the non-Steam version.
In FFF-241 we discussed how the game delivers information to the player in a number of confused ways; Blinking arrows and circles, chat messages on the bottom left corner of the screen, objectives in the top left, orange modal boxes bubbles on top of the player, and so on. These problems are exacerbated on high resolution monitors, where the information becomes even further spread apart. We have tried a few ways to unify this information, but much of it was required to be in the world space, or needed to have a link between the screen space and the world space. The common solution to this is to have the GUI 'point' to an entity in the game world, but we wanted something more interesting.
Hello, we are going to focus on the general improvements of the way circuit network is used in the game. I wasn't using it often, because all the problems combined made it too big of a hassle most of the time, which was an indication of problems. So we improved each part of the process of using it a little, from UI, to feedback of what is going on, to stronger/more accessible combinator functionality. I can say that it worked, at least for me. Once these changes were available, I used the circuit network way more in my latest playthrough, and it felt good, so lets hope it won't be just me :)
I need to make a confession. I'm addicted. Addicted to optimisation.
Demo upgrade for stable Abregado TLDR; We have released a new version of the Introduction campaign to the Experimental branch. If you are following the campaign development please play it again and send us your feedback.
Hello, It is exactly a year since we moved to the new office. I had also the Factorio presentation in the university for the third time already (third year), and I realized it is the third time I said there that Factorio will be finished in a year. I want to believe it to be true this time so we will try to really make it happen.
Inserters are now smarter Twinsen A few days ago I was investigating a rather minor bug report related to "Rotational Asymmetry in Belt/Inserter interactions" (aka Inserter was not behaving identically when rotated). This was a classic case of floating point equality comparison. The Inserter would move it's arm and then it would pick up the item if the current arm orientation is equal to the desired arm orientation. Because of some chain of calculations related to rotation, some precision was lost and the equality check would fail for 1 tick, delaying the item pickup for 1 tick in some Inserter rotations. So I fixed that by finishing the inserter movement if it's close enough. Now the inserters should be a tiny bit faster in some rotations, plus all rotations should again be symmetrical and identical. While analyzing the code and Inserter behavior for that bug, I also noticed that inserters with stack bonus would do nothing for 1 tick after picking up an item from a belt. I changed it so inserters will start moving to a new target immediately after they pick up something. This also sped up the Stack Inserter by a tiny bit. Both the speedups were enough to fix another bug that was often regarded by the other devs as "not a bug": A Stack Inserter was not fast enough to pick up all the items placed on a belt by another Stack Inserter. Furthermore, because of different timings, the amount of items a Stack Inserter would pick up would depend on how far that Stack Inserter was from the item source: We released the change on Thursday. Something strange was quickly discovered after release... From Nefrums speedrun stream. As someone from Twitch chat noted "Inserters are so fast now, they even don't care about the side of belt". Remember that I fixed the rotation problem by finishing the Inserter movement if it's close enough. Well, what ended up happening was what now the Inserter would stop 0.0001 degrees short of perfectly vertical. That was of course closer to the other belt lane so the item would be dropped there. Previously it was always dropped perfectly vertical, and the lane decision algorithm would choose the right lane. The fix was easy and it's probably released by the time you are reading this. So with everything fixed, inserters are now more consistent, predictable and intuitive, things that I think are important for a precise game like Factorio. Some situation might end up being slightly slower or will consume a bit more electricity, but generally inserters are now faster.
Factorio Nomenclature Abregado Today I want to discuss some common problems that we see in video games. Inconsistent Terminology When I asked out loud "So what is an Intermediate Product anyway?", I got a similar reaction as when someone mentions The Berlin Interpretation at a rougelike convention. So what is an Intermediate Product? Well it is a product that is used only as an ingredient for something else. No, that's not right because Science Packs are not used in any recipe. So what then, Intermediate products are just things that you can use Productivity Modules on? Perhaps they are simply items that can be found in the Intermediate Crafting menu. Then are they not Intermediate Recipes? To give another example, answer these questions: Name the action a player performs when they add an entity to the world? Name the action a player performs when they remove an entity from the world? Name the action a player performs when they add a ghost entity to the world? Name the action a robot performs when they add an entity to the world? Name the action a robot performs when they remove an entity from the world? Here are a few situations where the game displays your possible answers: A player builds. A player mines entities. Robots repair and build entities, but wait… the player places buildings and builds ghosts? But here Robots are constructing machines. Here the robots are deconstructing items! This leads into a discussion about what is an item and what are entities, and that discussion leads us into the next point... Internal nomenclature leaking out During game development it is very common to use internal names to refer to mechanics, items, or characters. It does not feel like such a big deal, and many early access games simply ignore the problem completely. I'm not going to point any fingers, but if you look you will find some examples. Oh wait, here is some from your favourite early access game! Internally, things that exist on a surface in the game are called entities. All these items are capsules internally, but only 5 of them are actually labelled as capsules. Really, these should be categorised by how players use them, and indeed there is an attempt to do so. Remotes are items used to trigger an effect, Grenades are things you throw... but why is the Poison Capsule not called a gas grenade? There are more inconsistencies but to keep this article reasonably not-short, I will let you find the others yourself (and to save something for a future FFF about Tooltips). Why change? You might be thinking that this is not a big problem. Some others might be thinking that the problem is too pervasive to bother changing. There are a few reasons why it is important, the first, and most important of which is our quality mindset; everyone on the team here wants the game to be as great as possible. Next we should see this increase the quality of the translations. A translation is only as good as its source, and having a consistent usage of words can go a long way to helping the translators do better work. The effect of this can be increased by providing a dictionary of important words to the translators so they can be sure to always use the same term in all places. Since we are also working on a guided experience (Campaign), this would also help us give much clearer instructions to the player. An example of confusion here would be if one quest said "Place a chest" and another said "Place the item in the chest". The player needs to read the entire quest caption (probably twice), and can never build up a mental map of our language. This leads to the player spending more mental energy (cognitive load) while playing the game. Changing this to "Build a chest" and being consistent, allows the player to create mental shortcuts, meaning the quest tasks require less effort to understand. Finally, consistency in terminology will help new players, and I don't just mean sub-1 hour playtime players. Factorio is a 'Big Game' and players are encountering new items, entities, concepts, and text for a long time. How many hours did you play before you discovered this helpful trick, or this one? How to change? We could make the vocabulary consistent with what the current player base uses. This option sounds pretty good until I started asking people questions similar to those I asked you at the beginning of the article. Here are another two as a refresher: Where do biters come from? I come in 7 colors, what am I? The only wrong answer is if you said there was only a single right answer. Prepare your rotten tomatoes, Ben is about to say something unpopular. The influx of players that are to be expected from 1.0 give us an interesting option. We could theoretically change the vocabulary of the game to be more consistent, reasonable, and generally more helpful to players. Then, as new players join the community, this new language will slowly replace the old. This would help ease communication between all players; veterans and new addicts alike. Consistency will also help polish the experience to the level that players expect from the game. Who should change it? Before Rseding jumps in with some awesome news, I would ask you to have your say in this Google form. It will be fun to see what you come up with, and I will publish the results in a few weeks.
Hello, we have only 2 weeks left before the 0.11.0 release date. It is scheduled to 31. october. All the things in progress are starting approach the finish line, but as always before the release, it will be tight.There are quite a lot of things we want to deliver and multiplayer (mainly for lan and low ping games until 0.12 don't forget!) is one of those, not even mentioning the backlog of bugfixes we need to go through before the release.
