Hello, you can sit tight, because the batch of insiders from the world of Factorio development are here.
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, 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.
Hi there, fifth anniversary for the Friday Facts is here. Nothing big, but we got into the mood of doing these updates regularly and so far it works fine. The release clock has stopped on 0.7.4. This looks pretty stable though there were still some minor annoyances and rare crashes. So the show goes on and there will be a 0.7.5. That will make the 0.7 a release with most bugfix subreleases so far. Actually Kovarex took it as sort of a challenge to fix all the bugs that are reported on our forum (which works as a kind of bug tracker for us). Now there are last four. Actually this led us to a rather interesting conversation about the bugs and our approach towards them. We have always took the stance of fixing bugs first, adding features later. This is contrary to some very popular and successful indie games out there. So we naturally wondered whether it makes sense for us to keep doing this or whether we should try to move forward faster and build more features (there is plenty on the list). The conclusion was that it is important to find a balance. Crashes and bugs which prevent someone from playing or are annoying are not tolerable and must be fixed immediately. However we will be spending less time on tiny little bugs. Things like "if you are in the god mode and select a gun turret and pause the game and open the menu, then the description of the gun turret is broken". Obviously a made up example to demonstrate the point:). We are really grateful that people are reporting even the smallest bugs, it's just that we think we need to draw a line and don't be afraid to say "this is tolerable now and we will fix it later". This will allow us to spend more time with the new features and content. Which is what we really need at the moment. On the side note the work on the trailer is in the full speed. As mentioned before we have decided to go for a not so traditional approach without scene cuts. So the trailer will basically present an existing factory by sliding the camera from one place to another. The factory is done. Actually I took the factory from one of my freeplay games and adjusted it to fit the trailer's needs. Now we work on the script logic behind it. The script controls everything. Movement around the factory, speed, zoom, dynamic adjustments to particular machines, timing of actions, etc. This is also positive because it led us to extending the Lua API - for instance we have added routines to control the trains. These changes will be available in the 0.8 together with the trailer map and the script. There is still a lot of work ahead - finishing the script, balancing the speed and flow, polishing. After all this is done we will just press a button and capture the trailer from the screen. Lastly we will need a background music and sound. We haven't arranged anything yet, but Albert has some good contacts among sound professionals who could do this for us. There probably will be some spoiler discussions regarding the trailer on our forums soon. For the impatient there is a screen shot of a possible first trailer scene below (still needs some polishing - namely new terrain and additional decorative objects). There is a link on our forum to this blog post so feel free to share your comments. To finish with the fun fact there is now over 7000 commits in the Factorio project repository. And counting.
Hello, The title says it clearly. After a long long time, one of the most core elements in the game has been graphically redesigned to fit the art direction. Albert played around with couple of shapes and in the end the winner is surprisingly lightweight and elegant. If you are impatient to see how the new inserters look like, then scroll down and check them out on the screenshot from one of our playtesting games. This is one of our many final preparations for the new trailer, which has been supposed to be finished so long time ago it is not even funny. Today we have released the 0.9.2. Regular bugfix release at regular time with regular expectations (meaning that more bugs are expected to be found - the forum users are becoming pros in this :)). There are also couple of small balancing changes that should make the game slightly better (namely that poison capsules will hurt worms as well now, oil industry is not needed for making cars and trains and that pipe to ground is longer). Check out the details for yourself. While this release still will probably not become the stable release, we feel we are slowly getting there. We are about to start planning what to do after 0.9 is stable. As mentioned couple of times in the past we feel that the time has come to take on the multiplayer. This will be a gargantuan task indeed - at least for us, maybe Chuck Norris would wrap up the whole thing by simply giving the 0s and 1s on the hard drive an angry look. But he has better things to do I guess, so it is up to us to do it the old fashioned way - designing and writing the code. So the MP will be developed in a separate branch by +- 2 people (we will be rotating), this will leave some small development power to carry on with the standard release cycle - working on little features and improvements, integrating new graphics, etc. And just to clear up the speculations, the next planned release will be 0.10 not 1.0 :D Now a small rant on Indie vs. AAA. Recently kovarex has played quite a bit of Starcraft II - namely the Terran and Zerg campaigns. I was watching him playing now and then. He was extremely positive about the whole experience. Namely the level of detail and playability were supposedly superb. Playing AAA games can be quite intimidating for the Indie developer. But then there are the credits. It turned out that SC II was done by a LOT of people. We don't have the exact numbers but we suppose there will be like couple of hundreds of people in the team. We have 4 people in the core team now (plus we work with freelancers here and there). So we made some rough estimates taking into account that SC II took 7 years to develop and it sold around 5M copies. Let's presume it will take us at least till next years summer to "finish" the game (see the last post:)). Let's also assume that we will manage to sell 50k copies by then (which we believe is doable). After some rounding (yeah many things can be achieved by "good rounding") and some math we get that we could have 0.5% of costs and also 0.5% of revenue compared to SC II. So in the end the Indie vs. AAA struggle doesn't look that futile :) We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.
Hello, this week the Friday Facts are coming a little bit earlier. The reason is that in the evening I will be lost somewhere in the middle of Brno (second biggest city in the Czech Republic). I will participate in a popular annual deciphering game that is taking a place there. The 0.7.5 with another batch of bugfixes went out this Tuesday. Since then there has been no reports regarding major issues or crashes. Couple of teeny-tiny bugs were reported however that is not enough for us to make a new release now. So the 0.7.5 will become a stable version. Finally:) I have spent most of the time during the past week working on the trailer. The first version has been done already. There is a discussion thread on our forum (with a link to the unlisted video on youtube) where people can give us feedback about it. This is by far not finished. But we needed to get it out in order to start talking to the music & sound guy and give him some baseline to work with. Yesterday we had a long chat with Albert about the trailer and we agreed that the first scene (standing in the middle of the ruins) should be changed. Now it feels too out of the context from the rest. Apart from that we are quite happy with the general flow. Of course there are plenty of details that need to be tweaked so there is still a long way to go. On the other hand having all the trailer in the script makes things a hell lot easier for us. Changing things like the zoom behavior, camera movement or speed is just a breeze. Same goes for extending / shortening the scenes or adding a new scene all together. Another issue is the final video quality. There is a lot of movement going on in the trailer and currently after youtube compression, often the video is just blurry. We have used the 720p for now but that proved not to be enough. Oh and regarding the music. Just for fun we tried to run the Raymond Scott's Twilight in Turkey together with the trailer. It turned out to work surprisingly well, so one option is that the music would go in this kind of direction. Apart from preparing the 0.7.5 Michal spent most of the time on the new scenarios for the main campaign. It starts to slowly shape. At the moment there are 5 levels that introduce basic things like assembling machines, research, trains, etc. to the player in the course of playing. Often the player is not starting from the scratch but he can use already existing pieces of the factory. Writing the scenarios (and the trailer) is also a good opportunity for us to review, document and extend the Lua API. Kuba and Albert keep working together on the terrain. There are couple of variations of the dirt by now and Albert is now spending his evenings with the grassy terrain. Kuba made couple of Blender scripts to ease the manual terrain work. This way Albert can take advantage of generated tileable noise or terrain transitions. Also yesterday Kuba showed me a great picture he generated that I can't resist to share with you. In case that you always thought that there is a lot of recipes in the game and that the whole thing is too complex, then worry no more. Here is an ultimate Factorio recipe cheatsheet for you: As usual there is a post on our forum where you can discuss this update.
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.
Hello, recently we have been programming day and night to ship the features we have promised for Factorio 0.4.0 release. However apart from that we also found some time to start delivering the promises we made in the Indiegogo campaign. So this is an update on the state of perks delivery from Indiegogo and the preorder. To start with I will repeat the obvious. All the membership accounts are eligible for Factorio alpha access, beta access and full release (when these are made). This is including all the future updates. Whenever someone buys Factorio membership he immediately receives upgrade code and can go and play the alpha right away. On top of this the Furnace Attendant tier promises digital factorio wallpapers and a scenario pack. The wallpapers are ready and if you have the Furnace Attendant (or higher) membership you can download them already. The wallpapers are available on your user settings page. Just click your username at the top right of the screen and scroll down. The wallpapers come in different resolutions. These are some of the most common resolutions in terms of widht : height ratio. If your resolution is not there you might still use a wallpaper with the same width : height ratio and higher resolution. For instance if your resolution is 1280 : 800 you can use the 1680 : 1050 which has the same width : heigh ratio. Originally we promised three wallpapers based on our theme pictures. However we decided to add some more. So at the moment our concept artist is working on two additional theme pictures which will be available as wallpapers as well in the near future. The other highly anticipated perk is the scenario pack. We are working on that right now. The first version of the scenario pack will be available together with the Factorio 0.4.0 release at the end of April. As mentioned already the scenario pack will be work in progress as well. We intend to keep adding new content until we feel "it's right". The Mining Drill Operator on top of these contains the "name in the game" and the Concept Art Book. First backer names will appear in Factorio 0.4.0. If you have the Mining Drill Operator tier or higher you can already insert your name into the form at the user setting page (below the wallpapers). Before every release (starting Factorio 0.4.0) all these names will be collected and exported into the list directly in the game. The names from the list will be used as name tags for different machines in the game, train stations, etc. The concept art book should be released by the end of April as well. Even though our concept artist spent a lot of time with the concepts in the art book we are still not sure whether it is up to the standards. Therefore we will name it version one and it might get updated in the future. Also we are toying with an interesting idea regarding this topic at the moment. We have sort of internal graphical wiki using Google sites. We use it for communication with Albert (main graphic behind the game), for sharing graphic proposals, concepts and finished sprites. What we are considering is to give readonly access to this wiki as part of the Mining Drill Operator tier or higher. This way people could actually see the process of graphical shaping of Factorio. Things that never made it into the game, evolution of some machines graphics, etc. We are still not sure whether this is a good idea so in case you would find this interesting please let us know (email, forum, facebook). Last thing regards the Inserter Constructor. This tier was only available during the Indiegogo campaign. After the campaign ended we sort of felt that the tier was a bit overpriced. That is the reason why for the preorder on the site we created the new tier Mining Drill Operator with pretty much the same content but cheaper. This can naturally happen however we feel it would be correct to somehow compensate the people who bought the Inserter Constructor tier. One thing we came up with would be giving them an extra upgrade code for Factorio which they can use as a gift for someone they know. Again this is something we are considering at the moment so if you have any ideas in this regard please let us know. Ok enough talking. Go and download those wallpapers and put them to your screens;)
Hello, the summer has hit Prague with full power. The temperatures are above 30 Celsius in the shade. Fortunately, our office is in the old stone building, so the climate here is quite comfortable even without the air-conditioning.
