Hello, engineers! I'm a newer face at Wube and have been mainly working on expansion content for about one year now. Today, I'm here to share some exciting non-expansion news for our Mac players.
Hello, it has been a while since we've talked.
Release plans Klonan This week we released version 0.17.79, and marked it stable. Internally we have been calling this 'Stable 3', and the main feature was the new tooltips we showed in FFF-318. There is one constraint we put on ourselves when we started this more swift feature release schedule: We want to avoid breaking mods. This is easy enough in principle, don't start renaming things, don't remove API features, etc. However as we develop further, there are certain features and improvements that we can't realistically do in a way that won't break mods, such as the new Character GUI (FFF-289), and color correction (FFF-320). It is for this reason that we are going to accumulate some of these mod breaking changes, and release them all at once. Since it will definitely be breaking mods, we will bump the major version number, so it will be 0.18.0. We have already internally started merging in these 0.18 features into our master branch, so we will not be doing any more 0.17 releases (unless something absolutely catastrophic is discovered).
For the past one and a half years I've been working on a secret Factorio project. Today we are finally revealing it. As announced during Nintendo Direct, Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch! It's already in the final stages and the global release date is set for 28th October 2022. Here is what to expect: All of the game's content will be available. The gameplay is not simplified and there are no artificial limits. There will be no mod support. Multiplayer will be available, including playing cross-platform. Nintendo Switch Online is required for online play, but not required for LAN games. Save files are compatible between all platforms. There will be no save transfer feature at launch, but you can transfer your saves using multiplayer.
Hello, Robert here again. It's time for the information I teased about in the previous Friday Facts edition.
Hello, after weeks and weeks of going through bug reports and fixing stuff (after all 0.15 was one of our biggest releases), it seems that we are approaching the end of 0.15 stabilisation. The (wishful) plan is to have a stable candidate for 0.15 next week. Sadly, this will change our attention to just different category of bugs: Those that we plan to fix for the 0.16 as they are not so critical and the changes required to fix them are too big to be done in 0.15 at this point.
Hello, The year is wrapping up, and we have been hard at work finishing off some topics before we take our Christmas break. As you can imagine, releasing any new version of the game without a few weeks to do bugfixing wouldn't be wise, so you can rest easy this holiday period without the worry of a surprise 0.18 release.
Hello, Today is actually the 6 year anniversary of Factorio launching on Steam, and just recently too we passed 3 million total sales (and we're even past 3.1 million at this point), so it is quite a milestone. It is great for us that the game is still selling consistently year on year, even though we never take part in sales or bundles.
Tile transition collisions Klonan We first mentioned a change to our tile transition logic back in FFF-199, and not long after in FFF-214. These two posts focused more on the visual side, and how it makes the game terrain look so much better. In short, the tile transition logic overlays an additional sprite over adjacent tiles, so that where the two tiles meet has a much more natural look. Left: Tile transitions on; Right: Tile transitions off. So while the looks were taken care of, we also had to deal with the 'feel' of the tiles. The easiest example of this is the 1x1 landfill 'stepping stones'. It really looks like you should be able to walk/drive across the 1 tile of water. So we added in an additional layer of collision checks, which will consider the transitions when performing the logic of what can go where. Now some of the cheesier among you will know that biters don't know how to get across these 1 tile gaps. That is because simply we never enabled the biters to use this collision check logic. One reason is that more checks means more UPS usage for the biter pathfinding, another is that we didn't think it was necessary. However it was available in the engine, and any mod could enable it if they want. That is exactly what I did with my Mining drones mod. Initially this seemed to work, and I thought it might make them walk around lakes a bit more naturally (like the player character does). However quickly I noticed that people were reporting on the forum that the game was crashing with the mod installed. I quickly reverted the change to my mod and we started looking into it. It turns out that the new abstract pathfinder we added for better unit pathfinding (FFF-317) was not set up to consider units using this tile transition collision logic. This same crash was happening sometimes without any mods installed, but the case was more difficult to reproduce, so this is a nice situation where mods help us work on issues in the base game. Recently I have been working on another unit heavy mod, Transport drones, and the principle design behind the mod heavily relies on the tile collision logic (the units don't even collide with entities). It turned out to be a really nice test of our new pathfinder, but also highlighted some of the issues that not considering the tile transitions can bring. By not considering the tile transitions, the drone takes an awkward path along the diagonal road. This week Oxyd finished his work on an upgrade to the pathfinder, so we can enable the tile transition collision logic with units. The change is immediately noticeable with the above example. By considering the tile transitions, the drones path much more naturally. With the logic now in place, we are debating whether to enable it for biters or not. We probably won't, it is only a minor change and would have a non-zero performance impact (a rough test puts the worst case at about 5%), but then again it is a fun way to surprise those who thought the 1 tile of water would stop the biters attacking, and it kinda makes sense they can walk over it just as the player can. Well we will see if there are any issues with it in the modded cases before any further consideration. As a bonus fact (this is Factorio facts after all), I spent a bit of time benchmarking some late game Transport drone based factories (screenshot), and found a few nice performance gains.
