Hello, the 0.15 has been declared stable. Unfortunately we found some smaller problems, so there is going to be at least one bugfix release. One of the problems we discovered yesterday, is a glitch in the blueprint transferring logic that results in the transfers stopping forever when a player that is just transferring his blueprint into the game leaves. I'm quite surprised that I found it out myself when I was testing something else, and we didn't have a single bug report regarding it.
Hello, This week we will talk about some technology and research related changes coming in 2.0 and the Space Age expansion.
Hello, I have an irresistible urge to tell you a little story. I'm sure you come here for stories, don't you?
Hello, we've already shown the space platform processing cycle in FFF-380. Let's talk a little bit more about the machine which makes it all possible - the asteroid collector.
I decided to write about the results of the item stack optimisations explained in the FFF-198, so I rushed today to finish its implementation, just to find out that the task affects an even bigger part of the code than I expected, Items are related to many things in Factorio :) After many hours of rewriting and fixing, I can compile it and even start a game, but most of the things are broken. It is quite funny to see some of the basic item interactions to be broken. Now I'm making commits like "Now I can split stacks", "Now I can merge stacks", etc. It reminds me the old days. In conclusion, the details of the optimization will have to wait for next week, and since it is after 10pm, this Friday facts will be somewhat shorter :)
A few bugs left... WoW classic has been released, which means several of our top men have taken time off to spend hours raiding and having fun in Azeroth. This isn't great timing, as a few new bugs related to train signals appeared. We want to get these bugs solved before we do another release (another stable candidate). As it turns out, the only person with the skillset to fix these specific train signal bugs is also deep into levelling his Priest... (Kov on Pyrewood Village) We are still making the rest of the preparations for the stable release. We have started writing up the stable annoucement blog post, and have produced a 0.17 postcard image. Other than the few more critical rail bugs, there doesn't look like there is much else to block the stable release, on the forum we are down to 27 bugs. Since there are so few bugs left to deal with, some of the team has starting working on 'post-stable' features. Wheybags is working on the new campaign, Oxyd is diving into some detailed pathfinder improvements, and Rseding has started work on some particle optimizations. We will delve deeper into these topics and more in future FFFs, as we always love to do.
Hello, the sunny spring weather seems to have taken a break these last few days after Denis' arrival to the office. His work continues on the belts optimization, as the rest of the team has been playtesting 0.15, as well as closing off remaining minor features on our Trello board.
Hello everyone, Factorio 0.6.4 release has just been marked stable! Following our usual release procedure the 0.6 release has been around for a while. Users from the forum helped us to find the most annoying bugs and now the release is considered "serious bugs free". The release has been packed with features and new stuff. Here are the most significant gameplay improvements: The world map (and a minimap). These allows for a much better orientation in the world. The steel furnace (faster) and the electric furnace (requires no coal). Smelting resources is one of the basic tasks in the factory and these new furnaces provide interesting alternatives to using brute-force approach of many stone furnaces. Logistic robots can suplly the player directly. In the later stages of the game the player can focus more on managing and extending the factory and not running around collecting the created items. Modules and beacons. It is now possible to influence machine properties (speed, productivity, energy efficiency) with inserting module items. This way the assembling machines in the production bottleneck can be sped up without extending the production line. Improved terrain generator. The trees now follow the same fractal terrain generation as the terrain. This makes them look more realistic. Apart from the features we have focused a lot of energy on speed improvements as well. With larger factories the players often experienced slowdowns because too many objects have to be updated every tick. We have made optimizations to the way items move along the belts. These were the biggest "performance eaters" (there are often tons of items on the belts in the factory) so this helped quite a lot for the big factories. We also optimised the way graphical rendering works. This is mostly notable on the Windows operating system (our graphical library uses a different backend - d3d on the windows compared to the linux / mac - openGL). Another major improvement has been made to the core loop of the game. The graphical rendering can now run parallel to the game update using different threads. This can take advantage of at most two threads. And finally the render preparation phase (collecting the sprites to be rendered) has been parallelised as well. This can take advantage of multiple threads, we empirically tested that the best results are shown for 4 or 5 threads (given that there are enough cores for these threads to run on). Last but not least our artist has also done a lot of work. There is a new terrain and plenty of objects have new graphics (labs, car, chests, logistic robots, etc.). The game is less contrastive compared to early versions with RGB colors, on the other hand it is also more aesthetically pleasing now. As usual you can find the full changelog of the changes at our forum in the news section . The changelog is now available also directly in the game in the "About" dialog. As mentioned before, the work on 0.7 is in the full speed now together with preparations for the Steam Greenlight campaign. So stay tuned for more news.
Since the release of 0.16 experimental in early December, we have had over 30 bugfix releases, and are confident that 0.16 is ready to be enjoyed by all players. The goal of 0.16 is to wrap up the addition of any major features, so we can begin to focus on the final steps towards a 1.0 release.
