Hello, Today we want to share some exciting news!

A long time ago, in FFF-191 I wrote about improving the GUI. Well, things are finally starting to move, so this week I'll bring you an update on that. We even have a GUI team: Twinsen(me): UX and programming Albert: UI, graphical design, layouts, mockups, UX Rseding91: main programming and GUI internals The plan is to go through the entire game's GUI (including main menu, all entity GUIs and all game windows) and improve it both visually and interaction wise. This is quite a huge undertaking because: Factorio's interactions are quite complex If you count all the entity windows and panels, we have about 120 windows to go through in the game. Mods can change many aspects of the game so we have to account for that to make sure windows still look good and are still easy to use: e.g. having 15+ recipe categories, having assembling machines with 20+ module slots, having recipes with 20+ ingredients, having players with 200+ inventory slots, etc. Many players are already used to interacting with the game in a specific way, so any major changes are hard to make. Our GUI back-end (heavily modified AGUI) is not exactly well written, programmer-friendly, or feature-rich. Many of the features and polishing we want to add were not done previously due to their programming complexity. At the moment we are still early in the project, just defining the style and the concepts. During the next months, I'll try to make a series of FFF talking about the improvements we are making (starting with this one) so you can see how the project progresses, and offer feedback along the way. Everything I mentioned in FFF-191 will be there, but we have even more cool improvements coming to the toolbar that we are working on, so today I'll talk about something else: the new train/locomotive GUI. Disclaimers: Everything you see are mockups made by Albert and are not from the game, but we will try to make it look almost identical in game. The style (colors and look) is not final. This is the 3rd iteration and Albert is still experimenting with making everything look nice. The purpose of these mockups are mostly to define the layout and interaction. This is how the new Locomotive GUI will look. As you notice, apart from the style changes, they way the stations and conditions are shown is very different, but I'd say much more intuitive, informative, and easy to use. Let's go through a short use case. You click add station and the list of stations appears. You can add a station by clicking on the station in the list or by clicking it in the small map. The map can be zoomed and moved around so you can easily find your station. Also, as you hover over stations in the list, the map will show their location. The stations marked differently are unreachable from the train's current position. This way you can more easily recognize and possibly ignore stations outside of the current network. Once you click a station, it is added to the schedule, along with a default condition. You can continue adding more stations, or add/edit the conditions for the new station. Finally a schedule can look something like this. The path of the train will be shown. We will try to paint the path the train is taking at the moment, it will change as the train takes different paths. The fuel can be accessed from the separate tab and the color of the locomotive can be changed using the color picker. The buttons in top of the map, from left to right are as follows: Turn station names on or off. Change the angle of the station names. Switch to map view. Switch to camera view. Center view on the train. The small 'info' button you see on the right side will be a help button we will use throughout the game to help explain how different GUI work and when their elements mean. We will write more about this in some of the next parts of the FFF GUI update series. We also want to add a neat tool for advanced players. Control-clicking on any point on the locomotive's map (or any station) will add a 'Temporary stop' to it's schedule. The train will try to go as close as it can to that point, wait a few seconds and finally automatically remove the 'Temporary stop' from it's schedule. This is very useful for quick transportation. It also allows you to quickly 'hijack' an existing train and use it to get somewhere, since the 'Temporary stop' will be deleted and the train's normal schedule will be resumed. Another quality of life improvement will be a game option to automatically add some fuel from the player inventory when building vehicles (car, tank or locomotive), making rail transportation as simple as placing a locomotive on a rail, entering it and control-clicking where you want to go. We hope you like the proposed changes. No doubt things will change as we implement and playtest these changes, but we thought it would be interesting to show you an early preview. Finally the million dollar question is when will this be in game? Because it's quite a bit of work we already pushed the GUI update to 0.17. On the bright side, this mean 0.16 will come a bit sooner. Let us know what you think by commenting in our usual topic at the forums.

Hi all, what a week. Let's see what has happened. The Launch Week The game launch at Steam has obviously been a highlight of the week (well not just the week=)). However quite a few other "launches" have happened as well. As for the game, together with Steam launch we have launched the game at Humble Store. Based on how this goes we might add a few other popular retail sites (i.e. GOG, Green Man Gaming). Prior to the appearance of the Game on Steam, we came up with the 0.12.24 (imho a magical release number) which fixed a couple of last minute bugs. This is the version available at Steam. Outside of the digital world, there have been quite some news as well. Kovarex's son Robin has been born on Monday early in the morning. As Kovarex reported, the whole process went quite smoothly and fast. The family is back at home from hospital already. And finally, a baby girl called Ema has been born to our artist Vaclav. This has happened some time ago already, however there were quite a few complications and only this week Vaclav has returned to the office. All is fine by now as well with his family. We were thinking of posting some pictures of the babies, but as kovarex rightly noted "All babies look the same". So there is not much point=) Gameplay Trailer You have probably noticed the homepage layout has been changed. This is due to the release of our new Gameplay trailer. The Factorio Trailer is focused on giving an impression of the game. Without giving too much explanations of what is going on. Basically it goes for the WOW EFFECT. With the Gameplay Trailer our goal was to introduce the real aspects of the game to new players in a short video (well still keeping a bit of a wow effect=)). Show how the game actually looks, how player progresses in the game, how some common UI work, etc. Albert, Robert and others have poured many, many hours to the video. From the comments on Youtube it seems that it was more than worth it. Thank you Yesterday was pretty intense. Fixing last minute issues at our website, tweaking the Steam page, finishing the Factorio guide (see below), putting everything together, etc. Finally at 8 p.m. we have semi-automatically launched the game. Huge relief has replaced the frantic preparations. Everybody, except for Albert who went for vacation, was in the office. There was a bit of champaign and positive atmosphere. This got even stronger after a while when positive reviews started to pour in, Steam in-game counter kept going up and discussion at Steam page kicked off. Months of preparation culminated during that evening. After the launch we just relaxed and basically watched what was happening. And it was great to see the communnity engage so actively in promoting the game. So it feels more than appropriate to use this section for a big THANK YOU to you guys for all the support. It is difficult to capture everything, but I will try to list the imho most important stuff (I am a methodical type after all=)). So thank you, especially for: Awesome reviews. At this moment there are 630 reviews with rating of 99%. There is literally 2 "not recommended" reviews. That is mind blowing. Makes it a challenge to stay "with our feet on the ground"=) Support at reddit. The new Factorio Gameplay Trailer link has stayed at the top of r/Games for nearly full day. Heck, it seems that we have received as much exposure as highly anticipated Superhot. Spreading the word to your friends, youtubers, etc. Helping out new users at Steam discussions, Reddit, our forums etc. Factorio guide In one of the previous releases of FFF, we have mentioned a new third party documentation project called Factorio Strategy Guide. There has been some more development regarding this one. The result is that we (Wube Software) have bought the guide from the original author (Xterminator). We have turned the original .pdf document into a free online guide. Albert has spent his last "finishing" hours, before going for a well-deserved vacation, polishing this online document. This is linked from the Steam page as well. The guide should be considered to be very much a work in progress. There are many things that we plan to improve - phrasing, screenshots, general consistency. However we feel it could be of a good value for new players in the current state. That is why we pushed to have it ready for Steam release. There is a chance of integrating this one with Wiki in the future for instance. However at the moment this feels like the most comprehensive introductory resource into the game there is (apart from messing with the game yourself). Lua API documentation There has been one more update in the documentation. This time aimed at the modders community. The Lua API documentation at the wiki has always been a bit messy, not properly updated and often confusing. Couple of weeks ago, Oxyd and Rseding have finished a resolute mini project of making the Lua API documentation autogenerate from the source code. So basically the function bindings in the code are annotated with special-formatted comments (imagine something like java Doxygen) and based on this a comprehensive reference is then generated. You can checkout the result at the Lua API doc page. We will link this website from some appropriate place soon. Another great advantage of this approach is that we can keep clear separation of documentation for different versions. The only drawback is that the feedback for the documentation is now more cumbersome. If you find something that could be improved, sending us an email is probably the best option at the moment. We might make a new topic for this in the modding subforum if necessary. Funny Stats Last couple of days and hours before the Steam release there has been an escalation of sales at our webpage. That was to be expected - people were taking advantage of cheaper price before Steam launch. It was also expected for sales to drop after the release. Still it is rather funny to watch the hourly sales stats from yesterday. Life goes on So this is it. A hectic week is over. The game is launched and it seems to be doing really well. Let's see how it goes=) I have a feeling that our support department (Scott=)) has some rought times ahead. Anyway, Monday seems like a good opportunity to "get back down to Earth" and continue in the 0.13 development, which has suffered a bit in the past two weeks. As usual you can post your comment at our forums.

Hello, this week wasn't easy, I spent most of it in bed, drinking hot tea and trying to get healthy. The rest of it was spent by cooperation on the release preparations, which basically means bugfixing. Yea, and I also had to do the first steps of my wedding preparations, oh didn't I tell you? Now you know :)

Hello, It is a busy time fixing bugs and cleaning up after the Space Age release.

Hello dear biters and related species from unexplored planet full of life and natural resources. Recently I have been working on several high resolution graphics for your best friends - the tank and the player character. In this article I would like to show their updated visuals to you, as well as a sneak peek at how they are produced. The following text may contain traces of automation.

Ok→Cancel versus Cancel→Ok (kovarex) A really strange debate started as a continuation of FFF-238. I insisted that the button order should obviously always be OK Cancel, as in any UI I see around. But little I knew, that this is actually specific to windows, and on Linux or macOS, the order is reversed: Eventually, we figured out, that we are not the first one trying to solve the problem. The solution we are now experimenting it sounds like a bad idea: "Make it so much different and Factorio specific, that the way it is done in your specific system will not interfere with your muscle memory". Which brings me to the load game dialog mockup:

Hello, We know you love to blow things up, and the Space Age expansion will be bringing ever more advanced and powerful ways of bearing arms against your enemies.

New sound design Val: Do you remember the smell of the fresh air near the seashore? Can you describe, a forest that rumbles its trees after a summer rain? All that you hear and see goes right into your mind. All of our senses are connected with each other in our memories. When we feel at least one of them, our imagination brings the others. Sometimes, and even often, we can't see the object, but we can hear it! You can't see the wind, but you feel it and hear it! The bird is singing. You can't see it hiding in a bush, but you hear a beautiful song and can define the direction it comes from. The forest, the sea, the desert... Night and day. Clanking of a loading cannon and snoring of unseen monsters. That is what we are planning to do. To put the unseen colors of sound and add some feeling of life to the planet of Factorio. Even the emptiness has it's own voice... Albert: As you probably know, we are in a stage of polishing all the possible aspects of the game. Last week we were cooperating with Val, our new sound designer, and we spent the entire week defining new concepts for environmental sounds and sound effects. Also we were working on the sound of the biter nests and the artillery cannon. This is definitely a huge subject full of details that can really improve the play experience of Factorio. Here I can show you a work in progress of the artillery cannon: We have to tweak some behaviour of the entity in order to make it act more mechanical, but overall, the possibilities that sound design can bring to the game are really interesting. Compare the simple shooting of the cannon in the actual version with this proof of concept with all those details in rotation and loading. Of course this level of detail complicates the work a little bit, but I'm convinced it's worth it.

New hope demo levels Klonan A few weeks ago we discussed the changes to the demo and tutorial in the game (FFF-342). One piece of feedback we received after publishing the news was about the old 'New hope' campaign levels, and specifically the 'Abandoned rail base/Broken rail map'. It seems a lot of you in the community really really enjoyed the new hope campaign levels, and several of the team here share the same feelings. After we scrapped the plans for a new campaign and reverted to the old demo, we had initially dismissed the idea to revive the New hope campaign... However due to popular demand... we have decided to bring back the favourites, the first 2 levels of the new hope campaign. This time though, they will also be included in the demo version of the game. This represents a very significant increase in scope for the demo, increasing the demo content to include research, red science, green science, trains, and much more. These levels should be ready for release within a week (but no promises).