New Campaign Abregado Have you ever been playing a Freeplay game and realised you don't know what your next big goal is? And then, once you decide to pick a new goal, you realise while you worked on automating the last goal, there were 10 new technologies unlocked and now you don't know which to pick next. These are the situations we hope to address with the new full Campaign. A guided Freeplay, in which the player plays through the whole tech tree, without being overloaded with choice, while still having the permanence and unidirectional progression of Factorio. The permanence problem has already been solved using the new map expansion technique which is playable in the Introduction scenario. Over the last year we have been working on the bigger design task of unravelling the tech tree and breaking it into a set of choices for the player. This task has been made all the more Interesting as the tech tree is also constantly getting tweaks and revisions over that time as well. I look forward to providing more insights but for now I will leave you with one example (read: spoiler): Just to note, we won't be changing the freeplay tech tree, which will still have all the choice and diverging paths as it does now.
Inching closer to stable Klonan The last 2 weeks have been less productive than we would like on the bug fixing front. The Easter festivities along with a wave of illness have dampened our efforts. We have still managed to push out 2 more experimental releases, and fixed a few desyncs. We encountered one specific desync in the mass MP stress test last weekend, caused by a characters inventory size changing (such as researching the toolbelt technology) while the player is respawning. The graph of crashes paints a similar story to how the office atmosphere feels. It is natural though, most of the major crashes affecting most players are resolved, so all that remains are the more difficult issues that only affect a handful of players. This means that each bug fix is less effective at reducing the overall crash count. This last weekend, we had over 500 total crashes reported, which is a slight improvement over the prior weekend's ~650. One thing that makes our progress hard to evaluate is that we don't know how many people are actually playing experimental. Most people play through Steam, and so far we have found no way of determining how many people are opted-in to the 0.17 experimental through Steam. It could be that the game is more stable, or it could be that less people are playing. There are still over 250 open bug reports on our forum, so it seems it will be a few more weeks until the first stable 0.17. Some people have been asking when we will release the new GUI and GFX updates that we promised before 0.17 release. The plan is that after the first 0.17 stable version, some of the team will be moved from fixing bugs to working on features. At the point where we have a meaningful amount of new content ready (A few GUIs, some new GFX, etc.), we will release it as a new experimental 0.17 version. We plan to give some explanation and notice about these 'mini-content releases' in a FFF before they are each released.
Hello, after a lot of planning and preparation, the party on Saturday went very well. We really enjoyed spending time with some of our fans, and it has definitely sharpened our motivation to do right by our community and make the game as great as possible. With this festivity behind us, we started this week with some renewed focus.
Hello, We released 0.18.2 and 0.18.3 this week. In terms of major releases, this one has very few bugs, so we haven't had a lot of pressure to crank out the releases at lightning speed.
The multiplayer megapacket Twinsen Last month I joined KatherineOfSky's MMO event as a player. I noticed that after we reached a certain number of players, every few minutes a bunch of them got dropped. Luckily for you (but unluckily for me), I was one of the players who got disconnected every, single. time, even though I had a decent connection. So I took the matter personally and started looking into the problem. After 3 weeks of debugging, testing and fixing, the issue is finally fixed, but the journey there was not that easy. Multiplayer issues are very hard to track down. Usually they only happen under very specific network conditions, in very specific game conditions (in this case having more than 200 players). Even when you can reproduce the issue it's impossible to properly debug, since placing a breakpoint stops the game, messes up the timers and usually times out the connection. But through some perseverance and thanks to an awesome tool called clumsy, I managed to figure out what was happening. The short version is: Because of a bug and an incomplete implementation of the latency state simulation, a client would sometimes end up in a situation where it would send a network package of about 400 entity selection input actions in one tick (what we called 'the megapacket'). The server then not only has to correctly receive those input actions but also send them to everyone else. That quickly becomes a problem when you have 200 clients. It quickly saturates the server upload, causes packet loss and causes a cascade of re-requested packets. Delayed input actions then cause more clients to send megapackets, cascading even further. The lucky clients manage to recover, the others end up being dropped. The issue was quite fundamental and took 2 weeks to fix. It's quite technical so I'll explain in juicy technical details below. But what you need to know is that since Version 0.17.54 released yesterday, multiplayer will be more stable and latency hiding will be much less glitchy (less rubber banding and teleporting) when experiencing temporary connection problems. I also changed how latency hiding is handled in combat, hopefully making it look a bit smoother.
