Hello guys, the winter is not yet completely over in here. Even though we had a few days that felt like real spring still now it is cold and unwelcoming outside. One more reason to stay in the office with a cup of tea and a screen full of Factorio code.
Hello, so this is the 100th edition of Friday Facts! It has been a while :) Feels kind of incredible that we have managed to put a (more or less) relevant blog post about what we do every week for 100 consecutive (!) times. However, somehow in line with Murphy's laws, there hasn't been much happening this week=)
Hello hello, the April has started in a crazy manner here in Prague. Last couple of days the weather was switching from winter (cold and snowing) via spring (chilly and rainy) to almost summer (warm and sunny). The nature is definitely playing some April fool's jokes on us. Kovarex took some time off to go to Paris with his girlfriend over the Easter holidays. The rest of us has been merrily meeting in the office.
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, 3 days to go!
Sound design update Ian One advantage of switching to home working during the COVID-19 crisis is the ability to listen to the game using speakers rather than headphones, and this has proved useful in balancing the relative levels of the game. Val has also been getting to grips with Lua, and this has led him to working on attenuations, which have been proving problematic. For instance, we noticed that sounds such as the radar were getting cut off when you walked away from them, rather than fading out cleanly. I investigated and discovered we had a maximum environment sound limit of 15, by raising this to 50 we have eliminated many of these problems. But then the downside is that there are now more sounds playing and therefore more clutter to mix and balance. Pink squares indicate which sounds are active. Left: limit of 15 nearby sounds; Right: limit of 50 nearby sounds. Rseding has been working through the list of sound design programming tasks, for instance we finally have the sound for the artillery turret rotation integrated into the game (which was featured in FFF-252 quite a while ago). Real in-game footage of the new artillery sounds In other news, we have an updated concept for the transport belts. We listened to feedback from the community that they were still a bit too present and annoying. The idea of the new sounds is that they will drift into the distance a bit more and become unnoticed (until you try to fall asleep). More fun sounds include water splashes, electric and laser beams, more powerful weapons such as the gun turret and vehicle machine gun. And our old robot sounds have come back as additions. If all goes to plan, we will merge the sound changes into master very soon, and once we've done all our pre-release checks, release it to the 0.18 experimental. After that, I plan to spend time on UI sounds, and also balancing the overall levels to get them more in line with other games, which is trickier than normal given the lack of audio middleware. However we have also made some changes to the default sound settings that move us in the right direction.
Hello, A bunch of us will be travelling to Gamescom next week as visitors, if you see anybody wearing a Factorio t-shirt, it might very well be one of us. We don't have a booth or exhibit this year, as we don't want to take any focus away from the development of the game.
Hello old time Factorio players and steam newcomers as well!
Hello, quite unsurprisingly, yet another week has passed (in my experience this has always happened so far:)) and it is the FFF time. Our almost almost fully automatic release mechanism (now only missing the big red button) has taken care of the latest 0.12.8 release which is looking quite good so far (only 17 outstanding issues! YaY!). We have shifted the release day to the middle of the week (this time wednesday) to have some time for a hotfix in case something goes wrong. And also to alleviate the "Friday release stress". However, long ago are the times, when release would take hours to prepare then some more time to test and then waiting with fingers crossed if some serious issue doesn't appear in bug reports. Now all the process is automated, tests give us kind of security than things won't go horridly wrong, so we can just start the script in the evening and go home :)
