Hello, today we are going to talk about some flying robot behavior improvements. Some of the problems we fixed were reported countless times, so I hope that some people will appreciate it :).

Poison cloud Ernestas, posila The poison cloud animation is a placeholder spritesheet (that kovarex found somewhere on the internet), we have wanted to improve it for a long time, but since it was always such a small detail other things took priority. Well now is the time to finish everything, big and small. Some of the problems we see with the old placeholder animation: The edge (where damage will apply) is not clearly defined The center strongly obstructs vision underneath the animation It breaks the perspective/height illusion with its very circular shape The new animation was done quickly and without the need of any large changes to the Factorio engine. This is the mindset we are in these days, use the engine features we already have to finish things quickly and without trouble, and we try to stop ourselves going crazy with more detail. The smoke capsule itself spawns a bunch of smaller dummy entities which do the smoke drawing, while the damage is kept consistent by only using the central smoke cloud to apply damage.

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.

Entity info experiments (kovarex) The Entity info is the information about the currently selected entity that appears on the right side of the screen: We had 2 problems with its current state: As it is on the side of the screen, and the entity you are inspecting is generally in the center, it feels cumbersome to move your eyes from the entity to the info and back all the time. As it is always appearing, it adds unnecessary clutter to the screen. It is always blinking there, while 99% of the time it is not really needed. So we experimented with entity info as a tooltip next to the cursor when hovering the entity: So we tested 3 different ways to activate it: It always appears at the cursor, which has the disadvantage of always being in your way in the middle of the screen. It always appears, but it has some delay. It only appears when a hotkey is pressed (we tested it with Shift), which has the disadvantage that you have to actually do something to see it. We assigned each of the options to be tested by someone, with the hope to figure out which (if any) of them is better than the current one. Vaclav tested option 1, Twinsen tested option 2 and I tested option 3. Unfortunately the result was that in the end everyone preferred his option the most, and we had no conclusion at all. Then we realized that the flaw of the test was that each of us picked the kind of option we already knew we would probably like. After some discussions, we decided on the following: The current version of entity info will be the default. We add an option to set a custom delay for it, that is different than the normal tooltip delay (or never). We add an option to activate it with a key. We add an option to have it next to cursor or on the side. Two years ago, I was under the impression, that we need to eradicate all the weird options, to make the game just work for everyone. Over time and after all experience and feedback we have gathered, I started to realize that different people have different expectations, and their brains are wired differently. Some option might be useless for 99% or players, but for the 1% of players, it might be the most annoying thing to be able to customize it.

Hi there, after a hectical sprint, the 0.8.0 release is done. We have continuously reported on the progress, so the content of the release won't be a big surprise. Still, you can checkout the release notes on our forums. And if you are brave enough you can even try it out. The thing is that considering the circumstances the release will be "very" experimental. We have fixed all the major errors and crashes we came acrros. But still there were plenty of changes under the hood in non-trivial areas (namely the logistic system) so there are a lot of potential places for error. Just a reminder, you need to set "Enable experimental updates" in the "Other settings" for the builtin updater to update your version to 0.8.0. After a major release we usually take a day or two off. This time it will be no exception. Moreover it was Kovarex's birthday yesterday, so today in the evening we will have a party in our place. After the headaches are gone, the place is clean again and we recharge our batteries, we will be after the (supposedly found) bugs in 0.8 and planning the 0.9. It is kind of a never ending story:). The last bigger feature we worked on for the 0.8 was the Roboport. That is the "home" for the logistic and construction robots, where they can charge, station and which navigates them on the map. This neatly solves some issues there were with the logistic system before: Balancing - Roboport requires quite some energy to charge the robots. So the Logistic Robots will be less overpowered than they have been. Stationing - In the past robots without orders kept hanging at the place where they stopped. This was annoying and even caused robots to become a target for enemies after they delivered stuff to the player's inventory. Now every robot that has nothing to do goes to the roboport to station there. Area Separation - Before, all the logistic robots could fly all over the map. From the base to the expansion if necessary. Following the player fighting the enemy bases, etc. This was also less than desirable. Now the connections between the roboports define separate logistic networks which can't be mixed. This way, small independent systems can be setup in the expansions and one large network in the main base for instance. And on top of all that the roboports look really cool:D Albert happily took the break from the terrain and made a great machine in a short amount of time. You can checkout the "making of" animation below. Some of the instructional pictures in the demo were getting really outdated. So we replaced them with setups with the current graphics. Below is a side-by-side comparison for the instruction on how to use inserters from some months ago and from now. The last picture is the courtesy to Kovarex's grandmother, who made this wonderful cake for his birthday. The tradition is the commenting thread on our forum.

Hi guys, we are back here for another Friday update. We marched through the "bugfix hell" to release the 0.7.5 as a stable version in the beginning of the weekend. This allowed us to clear our minds and completely focus on the next release in progress - the 0.8. The work on the new trailer is going well. The first prototype started a good discussion on the forum. We took a lot of points from that discussion and came up with an updated trailer. It is a very tiring job - keep iterating over the same 2 minutes over and over again, fixing small things, changing the timings, playing with the composition, etc. However the more work we invest in this, the more confident we get about it. Maybe it is a self-dellusion, or it is really getting better. We really want to get it right. One thing is for sure, the result will be on a completely different level than the old trailer. Since the majority of work is done we also got in touch with a French artist from Dijon, who will make the music for the trailer. So far, the reference music for us has been the lively jazz Twilight in Turkey by Raymond Scott. Today we had a good discussion about one of the upcoming features in the 0.8. Repairs and the repairing robots. For a long time there has been no concept of repair in the game. "Need to repair an almost destroyed turret? Sure, just mine it and build it again. Voila here it is - brand new, shiny and shooting." This will change. We came up with the following: There will be a new object - the repair kit. This will be a universal tool to repair anything. The repair kit will be produced from some low end materials (like iron plate + electronic circuit). The repair kit will be slowly consumed when used. The player can use the repair kit to repair anything by hand. This is nice, but it is not really a Factorio style. On top of that there will be repairing robots. These can use repair kits to repair anything that is broken. The solution to dispatching the repairing robots will be probably the same as the (yet not implemented) solution to dispatching the logistic robots. There will be a robot tower which will refuel the robots and provide a radio distance for them in which they can operate. By creating multiple of these towers the whole repair system can be automated. The first version will probably be without the robot tower to try the concept out. Oh and of course in the future the repair robots will be able to recreate destroyed objects:) One of the biggest changes in the 0.8 will be the new terrain. Maybe now it is a good time to briefly describe how it will be different. There are three main points: Everything from 3D - All the new terrains are based on Blender 3D models. This makes the tiling and creating multiple variations much easier because Albert can use the full power of Blender to change the surface shapes, add tileable noise or run the whole thing through a predefined transformation. He is definitely much happier doing this than fiddling the pixels (that is how the current terrain has been done). More variations - At the moment every terrain has only 4 variations of 1x1 tile. This makes an obvious "grid-like" look. The new terrain will challenge this flaw by having multiple tile sizes. At the moment these will be 1x1, 2x2 and 4x4 (the engine can also handle 8x8). The numbers of variations differ based on the terrain type, but on average it is like 16 for every tile size. This means that one kind of the terrain will consist of roughly 50 tiles. Different variations can be assigned different probabilities for the map generation. This will result in more natural look of the terrain. Biomes - We plan to introduce a concept of a biom. This is an area of the map where only certain terrains and certain doo-dads can appear (for instance green trees will not appear in the desert). It is not yet sure how much of this will be introduced in 0.8, but it is the direction we will take for the future. Of course making the terrain look better means a lot (a LOT) of work. Albert needs to come up with a good model and textures. Make sure they go along with other terrains and existing structures / machines. Then create enough variations, test the whole thing in the game itself and often iterate the whole process. At the moment he is working on the last terrain for this update - the water. This is especially tricky because of the lighting. He made a nice preview from his experiments. I think that the winner candidate is the blue looking one in the middle. You can find a thread for comments regarding this blog post a post on our forum.

The previous FFF seems to have caused quite a reaction. We had many discussions in the office regarding this topic, so this week some of us prepared some detailed responses.

Demo upgrade for stable Abregado TLDR; We have released a new version of the Introduction campaign to the Experimental branch. If you are following the campaign development please play it again and send us your feedback.

Hello, we just released 0.17.73, with 0.17.74 coming very soon. This is just some bug fixes and further pathfinding improvements, and we hope to be able to mark the release as Stable next week.

It's the last Friday of 2018, and as such the last Friday Facts before the New year of 2019. We all hope everyone has had a great 2018, and looking forward to a lot more automation fun to come in 2019. Albert has produced a postcard for you all to share to give the year a good send-off.