Hello, 3 days to go!
Hello, magical edition of Friday Facts doesn't bring The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but it does bring news from our studio and development efforts. Kovarex came back from Greece for couple of days before going on another vacation - a small Go camp in Czech republic. Me and Albert we took the opportunity of beatiful weather on Sunday and did a trip to Hazmburk castle ruins not far from Prague. On our way back we stopped at my parents' summer house for relax and loads of home grown fruits :D Oddly enough the following next two paragraphs have the same titles as in the last edition of Friday Facts :)
We are aware that we don't add so much content to Factorio these days. The reason we always state is that we are focusing on polishing and finishing the game. There are a lot of little things and details (some call it quality of life improvements), that don't look that awesome when reviewed one by one, but once they accumulate together they should make a big difference in the game experience. I'm going to talk about some of them now, but don't be afraid that we won't add anything new in the 0.16, as the work on the artillery train has already started and it is probably going to be epic :).
Hello, Albert is back this week, and has resumed his work on the liquid wagon and associated accessories, as well as offering his guidance to some visual related programming tasks. Kuba and Honza are also both back from their respective holidays, and overall the office is feeling much more full than last week.
Hello, We know you love to blow things up, and the Space Age expansion will be bringing ever more advanced and powerful ways of bearing arms against your enemies.
Further optimisations I finished the item stack optimisations mentioned in FFF-198, and was able to do some performance tests. First I tested how many stacks on a big map actually need to use an externally allocated object (Item), and how many of them are plain. On the huge map I tested, it turned out that only 36K out of 1M stacks need the Item object. These were mainly science packs, as they need it for the progress of how used-up they are (and now when I think about it, it could also be omitted by only using the objects for science packs that are partially used up already). Overall factory performance was increased approximately 2% by this. It is nothing huge, but every bit matters. One of the programmer that has read access to the code (Zulan), came up with a pull request that improves performance in Factorio by prefetching memory in the update loops ahead. The problem when normally updating objects is, that CPU asks for memory representing the object. The memory is slow, at least compared to the CPU cache or the CPU speed. The memory transfer speed itself is not that slow, but the waiting (latency) time between ordering and receiving it is. This means, that what very often happens is, that CPU orders data of next entity from the memory, then it waits for quite a long time to get it, and then it does its logic. The memory prefetching partially solves it by doing this: Order data of the next entity from memory (prefetch) Do the logic of the current entity in the meantime Go back to start The overall measured performance improvements vary between 9-12%, which is certainly a nice addition.
AMD Ryzen crashes (Klonan) The long fight with the elusive Ryzen bug (more and more) seems to finally have some resolution. A few weeks ago I sent an email to AMD, filling them in on the details of the crash, and asked them if they could help us solve this. Very quickly I was put in touch with a member of their CPU engineering team, and they got to work with their investigation. After a few days, and after providing them all the information we have (log files, source code, crash dumps etc.), the cause of the issue was identified. Some other developers in the industry also had this problem and worked with AMD to fix it, so it's unlikely that the CPU bug was fixed only because of us, but we are honoured to have contributed to this. Unfortunately we do not have any technical or deep insight into where exactly the problem lay, or what the fix was, as it was somewhere between the motherboard BIOS and the Ryzen chipset drivers. So if you are running Factorio on a Ryzen system, we advise you to update your BIOS using the files and procedures found on your motherboard manufacturer's website, and update your chipset drivers to the latest version.
Hello fellow builders, There is this commotion about the paid mods on Steam. (It had been cancelled already). I understand that the implementation was far from optimal, as people would be suddenly expected to pay for mods that were free until now. It was also sad, that the modders were to get only 25% percent of the money. But I personally think, that there is nothing wrong about the idea generally. If a reasonable price tag on a great mod allows the creator to develop the mod full time, create professional content, and people are willing to pay for it, everyone wins. Free mods would still exist so it would be up to the players to choose. I'm NOT saying we are going to allow paid mods for Factorio anytime soon. But I'm not denying this possibility in the far future.
Hi guys, the week since releasing the trailer has been a ride. We have got great feedback about the video, lots the requests to make a youtube coverage or blog preview of Factorio and the general awareness of the game is rising. The hedgehog (our mascot) is extremely happy about all this (or maybe its the spring).
