Good afternoon everyone, We have commited to releasing the 0.11.0 on 31st of October 2014. That is next Friday. If all goes well, this will be our Halloween present to the community. But there is a busy week ahead of us:) Apart from regular pre-release craziness, doing significant refactorings the day before or fixing bugs at the last minute, there will be more. On Wednesday we have scheduled moving to our new office and on Friday morning (yes that is the release day) we will be giving a presentation at a local university about the project. We gave the same presentation about a year ago when it was not exactly clear whether / how long will we be able to continue working on Factorio. That has definitely changed for better, especially considering we are moving out of "our garage" (our apartment used as a working place), looking for people to work with us and doing other sorts of longer term commitments.
He who does nothing, breaks nothing posila In the recent patch notes, there was a line "Fixed landfill spawning under player when building landfill elsewhere. More" and some people on Reddit were wondering how did this bug happen in the first place, and asked for the long version and even suggested we could even use it for Friday Facts, and I thought: "Yeah, if I am going to spend time writing this, we should consider using it in FFF so someone else doesn't have to spend time writing something else." ... but I am going to stretch it out. The landfill bug reported after the release of 0.18.21. Disclaimer: I have not been around during the ancient parts of this story (speaking of which, it's my 5 year anniversary at Wube, yay!), and changes I have been around for, or even done myself, I might not remember correctly. So this might not be accurate. In fact, let's say the story is purely fictional and any resemblance to real world events and people is just a coincidence.
Hello, another week of tepid weather here, but the work on the final necessities to 0.15.0 continues with full force. More playtesting We started a new map on Monday, we wanted to see how the game feels with our new 'marathon' map preset, which (among other things) makes many recipes more expensive. What may seem like blasphemy to some, the expensive setting also changes a few of the normal recipe ratios, so new designs had to be thought up: Automated testing 2 A long time ago we talked about our automated testing in FFF-62, and over the last 2 years and 4 major versions, we've added quite significantly to our suite of tests. We have our server constantly running all these tests 24/7, and when something breaks it sends out a sternly worded email to the developers who made the latest commits to the repository. Its sometimes surprising how some innocent change can break some wholly unrelated tests, but it certainly helps us catch these issues before they make it out the door. This might be quite a short Friday facts, but we are trying to spend as much time getting things ready for release. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please let us know on our forum
Hello, this week's Friday Facts is brought to you by Michal (one of the new guys). We are getting close to release of 0.12. We're trying to fix as many bugs as we can; trying to get everything stable and polished. Currently we are so busy that we even haven't had time for any team building activity with Rseding91 who has come to visit us for next few weeks. So, I am going to take advantage of this no-big-news week to present more closely a feature I have been working on for the last month or so.
Hello, I will start today's Factorio friday facts with a famost quote: Only two things are infinite. The universe and the Factorio map. But i'm unsure about the Factorio map. Albert Einstein.
The tradition is to open the friday facts by saying, that the new bugfix release is here, as well as saying that this one is definitely going to be the stable one. But this time we really think that 0.9.8 is going to be the one :). We spent very little time with the 0.9 branch as many things for 0.10 are in motion. As we already said we planned to start using the automated testing, and this week, Tomas finally achieved to revive the testing suite, so we will slowly cover the source code by tests while working. Not only this is needed for the reasons already said, but we need to test all the otherwise hard to test corner cases in network communication logic that is Kuba giving the basic shape to. I'm now doing the hard work of fixing the small errors in determinism. I play the game, while it is saved periodically, then I have to start the replay wait for diversion from the original and find out why it happened by inspecting the differences in the saves. This is cumbersome process, as some of the inconsistencies are very hard to find, but after a few days and several bugfixes, I was able to replay the first tutorial mission without errors while certainly making a new world record of the time to finish the mission :) I gave myself approximately 1.5 hours daily to play computer games, and when playing these and reading Ideas and suggestions on our forums, it gives me so many ideas of what could be done. It is depressing to know, that all of these ideas, even when considering just the good ones, are just not possible to be made. Fight mechanics, alien pets, water-heating/cooling circuits, other planets, supplying orbit, satellites, ending of the game, different vehicles, airplanes, late-game rts controls of building and combat robot minions, equipment (as in armor) based blueprints for combat robots, enemy/neutral/allied survivors, after-landing phase where you have to take care of the people, caves and underground mining, armored trains, 20 different additions to circuit network, nuclear energy that is not just boiler that runs on uranium, 10 different enemies with different types of behaviours and attacks, different types of enemy bases, forests on fire, working eco-system, other downsides of pollution, snow areas with snow particles on machines, rare random Fallout-like encounters, different energy sources, advanced train controls, disasters, flowing rivers, more complex mechanics of armor equipment, ... I could continue like this for a long time. We have already Ideas & suggestions section on our forums, but it might be nice to have something more organised, so people could add their ideas and vote/discuss what they think should have priority, or maybe there is a way how to do it directly on the forum, ideas? I was also thinking, that we might do some kind of technical development blog posts like this one about Starcraft 1 as we are certainly facing some interesting challenges or hard decisions from time to time, would anyone be interested in that? The following picture is the new version of basic electric pole. The main reason for the change was to make it less obstruct the view of the tiles behind and to avoid having the cable and the pole fall loosely when the cable has vertical direction. We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.
Hi there, past couple of days have been absolutely wonderful back here in Prague. Pleasant temperatures, mild wind and summer atmosphere. This has made our free time moments even more enjoyable than usual. Another great thing is that our office is situated in an old and sturdy house. So it retains a reasonable temperature without any air conditioning even when it is 30+ celsius outside (not yet:)).
Hello, the 1st of June, which is the goal of the 0.13 release is starting to feel uncomfortably close, especially if I want to start play-testing 2 weeks before the release date. There are a lot of bigger and smaller tasks appearing all over the place. It is now the time of moving some of them to the next release again. Many of them are moved like this for years already.
Hello, we have spent another week doing fulltime bugfixing for the 0.10 release. This includes working through the backlog of bugs accumulated for past couple of months as well (quite a few train related bugs have been fixed). The result is 0.10.2 which will be released later today. We had a small issue with the updater in 0.10.0 and 0.10.1, so 0.10.2 needs to be downloaded manually for Windows users having these releases. From then on it should work as expected. Eventually we will make an explicit 0.9.8 -> 0.10.x update package that will work for all the distributions.
