Hello, as mentioned in the last update the word about Factorio started to spread much faster than we were used to. We are happy about that and we would like to thank to all the people who helped to spread the word. We have been contacted by several youtubers, and told all of them to wait for the release of their videos until the 1st of May so there is a good chance that we didn't even reach the peak so far. The reason why we want to wait for the 1st may is because it is the release date of our new trailer, we were ready to send Albert home to see his wife already, but his perfectionism didn't let him as he decided to remake the last entity for the trailer, the steam generator. It is already remodelled now, waiting to be retextured, so we are almost finished. Most of the work now is still related to the multiplayer. I keep fixing one desynchronisation bug a day, so I'm near to being able to replay the demo campaign. We are discussing the details of networking almost daily and it seems like our second model of network synchronisation is going to be more consistent than the first one. I hope that the Factorio dev proverb (The third version is usually good) will not apply to this. In the meantime, I started to do a little research of the problem with the growing video memory requirements. It is going to be more relevant in the future if we want to add different enemies or machines, so anyone who knows about game programming could give us a hint. Destroying and building stuff is always more fun with effects. We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.
Hello, it feels really nice these weeks. We actually have some time to improve the game instead of just fixing bugs. Lets take a look on some of the improvements.
Hello, trains are one of our most favorite parts of the game. We already talked about the ways we improved rails (FFF-377), so its time to talk about how we improved the way you can control the trains that ride on them.
Hello, we have written a lot about multiplayer in the past weeks, it started by the reports at the beginning of the rewrite, and now it finishes with our reports of mega games being played. But as most of our time still goes to bug hunting to achieve 0.14 stable as soon as possible, I just can't help myself:
Hello fellow builders, There is this commotion about the paid mods on Steam. (It had been cancelled already). I understand that the implementation was far from optimal, as people would be suddenly expected to pay for mods that were free until now. It was also sad, that the modders were to get only 25% percent of the money. But I personally think, that there is nothing wrong about the idea generally. If a reasonable price tag on a great mod allows the creator to develop the mod full time, create professional content, and people are willing to pay for it, everyone wins. Free mods would still exist so it would be up to the players to choose. I'm NOT saying we are going to allow paid mods for Factorio anytime soon. But I'm not denying this possibility in the far future.
Hello, since 0.16 is stable we can assign more of our effort into the work on 0.17. One of those features planned for that release is the Rich & interactive text. Having more text formatting options was one of the things we wanted for quite some time, and it is finally starting to become reality in the 0.17 branch. The initial motivation was to have more possibilities in the tutorial related texts, but it proved to be useful having it available globally in the game. The current format for any text markup we use is [<type>=<value>], but it might change somehow before 0.17 hits the public. This feature is being developed by wheybags, and it is progressing forward quite steadily.
You might have noticed that a lot of rail related stuff was broken during these past releases, and now it is working more or less fine again. The story behind it is not so trivial.
Hello, Another week has elapsed, which brings us another week deeper into the declining weather of autumn.
Environmental particle effects Dom Since the particle optimization we did for 0.18 (FFF-322) and the introduction of new explosions (FFF-325), we were able to push our vision even more. It always bothered me that the grenade and other explosions would emit the same type of particles regardless of the context. In most cases it isn't that bad, and somewhat okay, but when you throw a grenade into water, it will still emit stone particles, which breaks the illusion. Another problem is that we have the nice decoratives on the ground, but they don't really 'interact' with anything that goes on, and can feel like fake flat stickers instead of something 'real'. You would expect that when there is a massive explosion 2ft away, the bushes might have some reaction to that. The explosion effect currently in 0.18
