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.

Hello, after a long long time the 0.9.8 was marked stable this week. There were no big ovations or cheering, just a quite "stable sticker exchange":) The bugs forum is not empty though, as someone would expect. Quite a few small issues remain, but for the sake of moving on we decided to put them to our backlog and mark the release as stable. However if some game crashing or very serious bugs are discovered in 0.9.8, we will make a hotfix. Oh, and the good thing is that we managed to break the streak (for now) of ever increasing number of bugfix releases (the 0.9 had 8 bugfix releases - the same as 0.8). The whole "programming department" has been fully commited to the work on multiplayer for a while now. The task divison for now is following: Michal - fully deterministic simulation. This is an absolute must, because all multiplayer peers will calculate the simulation themselves and only the player input (we call it input actions) will be exchanged over the network. Nice effect of having deterministic simulation will be having functional replays again (hmmm not really again because there have always been some bugs in them even when they were "working":)). Kuba - lower level network layer. This includes the connection management, packets management (we will be using UDP for all the communication) and eventually things like NAT punching to allow connections for peers behind NAT (few people have public IP address). Tomas - synchronization layer. This logic will take care of keeping the simulation state same for all the players in the game. This includes queing up the input actions, sending them out in batches (tick closures to other peers), requesting missing tick closures, etc. These things are absolute minimum necessary for our multiplayer implementation. However there is more to be done after this, things like: starting the game (the lobby), mechanism for a player joining already existing game, hiding the latency for the player (most of the time the actions for different players will not collide so we can act as if common actions - like moving the player around - were confirmed immediately) and more (see our battleplan whiteboard in one of the previous friday facts). There is a lot of work ahead, but the good news is that we have finally fully dived into it. We will keep you updated about the progress:) Albert has finished with most of the map trailer tweaks. Today we also did a first test with exporting the trailer using the new screenshot mechanism. We did this on Michal's computer which is way more powerful than mine (it does take a while to export 3600 screenshots). However there was this funky bug that parts of the terrain in the screenshots had strange, kind of inverted, colors. We have spent like half a day looking into this issue. Finally it turned out to be a problem in our custom optimized version of d3d drawing routine (this was happening on windows only). Spending hours in frustration hunting bugs (that are not even visible to the player in the end) happens more often than you would think, so game programming is not just about sitting back, playing video games and calling it "research" (but that is part of the job too:)) Anyway to give you an idea of what was going on you can see a visualization of the problem below. For better effect (and for us to easier analyze the problem) the corrupted regions of the image (here all of the terrain) are drawn with reddish overlay. Any idea for the picture title? Want to cheer us up for the multiplayer work? Or feel like laughing at us for taking so long with the trailer? Go to our forums.

Hi all, despite the ongoing vacation period there has been 4 of us meeting at the office for the past two days. I returned from the prolonged yoga weekend, Kovarex came back from the paragliding course (yes he will be getting his own paraglide with Factorio logo on it, I saw the proposals :D) and Kuba has finished moving and equipping his new flat. As mentioned in the last edition, the 4th person is a new Factorio developer called Mira who started this Monday.

Hi all, so it feels like the Cucumber time is here. Also known as a Silly season, this is the time of the year when not much is happening on the public scene and newspapers are scrambling for stuff to write about. Seems like we are going through such a period in the Factorio world as well. Not that much has been happening recently. We carry on with our work and progress slowly but steady. I have divided my time among multiplayer work, bugfixing and administration. Kuba has been focused on some internal refactoring in the past days. And Albert has been finishing with the player animations. Kovarex is coming back from vacation sometimes next week so the 0.10.4 release will happen most probably next Friday.

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:)).

Good evening, after a long long bug fixing period we have declared the 0.12.20 as a stable release. Owing to the great effort of all the developers, the open bugs count at the forums is at unbelievable ... wait for it =) ... 3 items. And one of these will be solved by us dropping support for the OSX Snow Leopard. So unless there are quite a few people who have been holding the bugs reports back (out of pure mercy with us of course=)) the game should be rather stable.

Hello guys, past week has prepared some ups and downs for us. On the up side, we have marked the 0.10.12 as stable and we also moved closer to getting the multiplayer reasonably working. On the down side our reservation for the new office has been cancelled which means we had to start looking for an office place yet again. That is rather unfortunate because we really liked the place we picked originally. Anyway, I am sure we will find another one soonish (we have already had couple of viewings this week but so far without success).

Hello Factorians, it feels like the warm spring here is making everyone more friendly here. Even the Factorio office seems to be brighter and happier place. Hard to tell if the reason is getting out of the dark multiplayer tunnel or the spring itself, but whatever the reason it is, it feels great.

Hello, as you could get from the caption, the work during the week was pretty frustrating at times, but the more rewarding it felt when the problems were finally fixed. This time I decided to give you another peek to our different kind of bug battles.

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.