Hello, the days here in Prague are getting longer so the afternoons (and evenings) in the office are becoming less and less depressive. We have been working with a good consistent effort for the past week and the results are IMHO there.

This week's Friday Facts is brought to you by Robert, also known as that guy from Romania. I'll be talking a bit about the feature I've been working on: the Combinators. The post is very fresh: Albert worked overnight to bring you the awesome combinator graphics and I integrated them in the game just minutes ago.

Blueprint library finishing touches kovarex At the time of writing the Friday Facts last week, not all of the planned changes were finished, here is the finalisation, so here we go.

Hello! Welcome to Fearghall's Factorio Friday Facts! (FFFF, if you will.) Over the last few months, you have seen asteroids a few times as a background part of some other FFFs, but for all their understated majesty, they were actually quite a complicated trick to pull off! Come with me as I take you on a 3720 to 1 journey through this asteroid field.

It's the last Friday of 2018, and as such the last Friday Facts before the New year of 2019. We all hope everyone has had a great 2018, and looking forward to a lot more automation fun to come in 2019. Albert has produced a postcard for you all to share to give the year a good send-off.

Hello, so today is Saturday (more specifically half past six on Saturday morning). The point of Friday Facts is that they are written on Friday. So what went wrong? Yesterday we were working all day long to make the promised release happen. We gave up on social life on Friday evenings long time ago:/ There were new and new things coming up. At one point we were ready to "push the release button" but then we found out that the game performance can drop significantly due to some strange Allegro sound issues. As a result the game was not playable at all. That was already late in the evening and we started to fall asleep over our keyboards.

Hello, technically this post is the π Friday Facts, but unfortunately we can't think of anything special to do... maybe someone can make a Combinator cake... that can calculate π?

Hello, another Friday means another update on what is happening here in the Factorio central in Prague. It doesn't really feel like the Christmas are actually around the corner. There is no snow (just cold) and the shopping spree / Christmas tree hunt doesn't really affect us that much:) Therefore the only clear signal that the year is coming to an end has been the Christmas concert we attended with Kovarex. The stabilization of the 0.8 has been our main topic for the past week. We have found and fixed many bugs ranging from little annoyances to serious game-crashing or save-corrupting beasts. The 0.8.1 contained a magical number of 42 bugfixes, but unfortunately some of the fixes brought in new bugs (this happens so often that it became a programming folklore). Therefore we made another bugfix release - the 0.8.2 which has been published today and so far it has been looking good. The way I put it sometimes, the bugfixing probably sounds like a boring / tedious work. Well there is not that much creativity involved, but it can get really interesting. It is like solving a puzzle or a small criminal case of your own. In the beginning you only have the problem. Then you are looking around, noticing small odities and other clues. If you need, you can use the debugger or debugging prints to get a glimpse of what is happening behind the curtains. You need to think a lot and picture how the different parts of the code interact and what could be going on. You make a hypothesis, test it and often ... find nothing. But in the end you get this AHAAA moment when everything becomes clear and the source of the problem is revealed. Actually fixing the bug is usually the simple part, once you have traced its origin. The AHAAA moment feels really good, it is like figuring out a riddle or solving a tricky math problem. Kuba started working on the biomes for the 0.9. The model he is using is taking into account two semi-independent variables: the temperature and the humidity. The noise of temperature and humidity is generated over the map, assigning a specific combination of values to every tile. The placement of terrain and doo-dads (trees, rocks, fauna, etc.) are driven by these two variables. For instance, the definition of plain green tree would say that it has the peak at humidity of 0.5 and temperature of 17 degrees. The probability distribution is then formed around this peak to determine whether the tree should be placed on a given tile (based on the tile's temperature and humidity values). In the end, based on these definitions, the different biomes should emerge (we are already curious if they do:)). Below there is an image which demonstrates the relationship between biomes and humidity / temperature. Albert is at the moment working on the doo-dads (new trees, rocks, plants, etc.) to give the environment a realistic feel. We have collected quite some feedback on the new logo direction in the past week. Personally, the biggest surprise to me has been that a lot of people would prefer the current logo to the old one. We still believe in the new logo and we will use the feedback from the forums and emails to improve it (experimenting with the color, increased readability, the wheel shape, etc.). The second post picture is called "The giant and the machines". It demonstrates the scale functionality of the engine that can be used to draw scaled pictures on the fly rather than scaling them first. This way the picture uses both less space on the drive (some mods are already bigger than the vanilla game:)) and less video memory. It was really funny to see the giant player walking around the tiny machines:) As always you can let us know what you think in the dedicated post on our forum.

Hi guys, we are back here for another Friday update. We marched through the "bugfix hell" to release the 0.7.5 as a stable version in the beginning of the weekend. This allowed us to clear our minds and completely focus on the next release in progress - the 0.8. The work on the new trailer is going well. The first prototype started a good discussion on the forum. We took a lot of points from that discussion and came up with an updated trailer. It is a very tiring job - keep iterating over the same 2 minutes over and over again, fixing small things, changing the timings, playing with the composition, etc. However the more work we invest in this, the more confident we get about it. Maybe it is a self-dellusion, or it is really getting better. We really want to get it right. One thing is for sure, the result will be on a completely different level than the old trailer. Since the majority of work is done we also got in touch with a French artist from Dijon, who will make the music for the trailer. So far, the reference music for us has been the lively jazz Twilight in Turkey by Raymond Scott. Today we had a good discussion about one of the upcoming features in the 0.8. Repairs and the repairing robots. For a long time there has been no concept of repair in the game. "Need to repair an almost destroyed turret? Sure, just mine it and build it again. Voila here it is - brand new, shiny and shooting." This will change. We came up with the following: There will be a new object - the repair kit. This will be a universal tool to repair anything. The repair kit will be produced from some low end materials (like iron plate + electronic circuit). The repair kit will be slowly consumed when used. The player can use the repair kit to repair anything by hand. This is nice, but it is not really a Factorio style. On top of that there will be repairing robots. These can use repair kits to repair anything that is broken. The solution to dispatching the repairing robots will be probably the same as the (yet not implemented) solution to dispatching the logistic robots. There will be a robot tower which will refuel the robots and provide a radio distance for them in which they can operate. By creating multiple of these towers the whole repair system can be automated. The first version will probably be without the robot tower to try the concept out. Oh and of course in the future the repair robots will be able to recreate destroyed objects:) One of the biggest changes in the 0.8 will be the new terrain. Maybe now it is a good time to briefly describe how it will be different. There are three main points: Everything from 3D - All the new terrains are based on Blender 3D models. This makes the tiling and creating multiple variations much easier because Albert can use the full power of Blender to change the surface shapes, add tileable noise or run the whole thing through a predefined transformation. He is definitely much happier doing this than fiddling the pixels (that is how the current terrain has been done). More variations - At the moment every terrain has only 4 variations of 1x1 tile. This makes an obvious "grid-like" look. The new terrain will challenge this flaw by having multiple tile sizes. At the moment these will be 1x1, 2x2 and 4x4 (the engine can also handle 8x8). The numbers of variations differ based on the terrain type, but on average it is like 16 for every tile size. This means that one kind of the terrain will consist of roughly 50 tiles. Different variations can be assigned different probabilities for the map generation. This will result in more natural look of the terrain. Biomes - We plan to introduce a concept of a biom. This is an area of the map where only certain terrains and certain doo-dads can appear (for instance green trees will not appear in the desert). It is not yet sure how much of this will be introduced in 0.8, but it is the direction we will take for the future. Of course making the terrain look better means a lot (a LOT) of work. Albert needs to come up with a good model and textures. Make sure they go along with other terrains and existing structures / machines. Then create enough variations, test the whole thing in the game itself and often iterate the whole process. At the moment he is working on the last terrain for this update - the water. This is especially tricky because of the lighting. He made a nice preview from his experiments. I think that the winner candidate is the blue looking one in the middle. You can find a thread for comments regarding this blog post a post on our forum.

1.1 is getting close kovarex I have been tracking the amount of tasks and forum bugs required to finish 1.1 since the 1.0 release. This allowed me to get quantifiable feedback whether we are actually keeping the timeframe of the 1.1 release reasonable, or digging too deep and expanding the scope too much. If we extrapolate the graph, the 1.1 experimental should be ready next week.