Removing RTL language translations Wheybags I'm sorry to say that we have removed the RTL language translations (Hebrew and Arabic) in 0.17.20. Until this point we've had a half implementation of RTL languages, where the text is simply flipped when we download it from Crowdin. This 'works' for a decent proportion of things, but not nearly 100%. In order to attain the level of polish we want for the 1.0 release, we would need to spend a lot of time implementing proper support for RTL layouts. This just doesn't make sense for us given our current goals, and the proportion of our player base which uses these languages (less than 0.1%). We decided that instead of completely gutting the translations, we could leave them in for those who enjoy them, but not to offer them in the GUI as defaults. The languages will remain up on Crowdin, and the locale files will still be present in game, but there will be no option in the in-game language options dialog to choose them. If you want to use an RTL language, you will have to manually edit your config file to set your locale. Detailed instructions are available on our forum. What this also means, is that we won't be investigating any bug reports about RTL issues.
Hi all, sometimes, writing FFF feels like spitting out blood - there is simply very little to write about. Yet the Factorio blog subscriber crowd is there and waiting ... Sometimes it is the opposite and there is abundance of interesting topics available. Today it is the latter case. Enjoy!
Hello, Grab your best lube, because it's time to talk about fluids!
The multiplayer megapacket Twinsen Last month I joined KatherineOfSky's MMO event as a player. I noticed that after we reached a certain number of players, every few minutes a bunch of them got dropped. Luckily for you (but unluckily for me), I was one of the players who got disconnected every, single. time, even though I had a decent connection. So I took the matter personally and started looking into the problem. After 3 weeks of debugging, testing and fixing, the issue is finally fixed, but the journey there was not that easy. Multiplayer issues are very hard to track down. Usually they only happen under very specific network conditions, in very specific game conditions (in this case having more than 200 players). Even when you can reproduce the issue it's impossible to properly debug, since placing a breakpoint stops the game, messes up the timers and usually times out the connection. But through some perseverance and thanks to an awesome tool called clumsy, I managed to figure out what was happening. The short version is: Because of a bug and an incomplete implementation of the latency state simulation, a client would sometimes end up in a situation where it would send a network package of about 400 entity selection input actions in one tick (what we called 'the megapacket'). The server then not only has to correctly receive those input actions but also send them to everyone else. That quickly becomes a problem when you have 200 clients. It quickly saturates the server upload, causes packet loss and causes a cascade of re-requested packets. Delayed input actions then cause more clients to send megapackets, cascading even further. The lucky clients manage to recover, the others end up being dropped. The issue was quite fundamental and took 2 weeks to fix. It's quite technical so I'll explain in juicy technical details below. But what you need to know is that since Version 0.17.54 released yesterday, multiplayer will be more stable and latency hiding will be much less glitchy (less rubber banding and teleporting) when experiencing temporary connection problems. I also changed how latency hiding is handled in combat, hopefully making it look a bit smoother.
The many lessons learned from testing the new tutorial We have already pointed out, that we are trying to make a new campaign (FFF-245), and part of it is the core beginning, the NPE/tutorial. The tutorial is one of the very critical parts of the game, as if the first 15 minutes of a game feels shitty, there is big chance that the player will not play any further. I had this experience in many games myself. So the challenge could be articulated like this: "The current tutorial is okay, but can we make it great?" The approach in the current tutorial is to feed the player with the basic knowledge of how to control the basics of the game (the first mission and the start of the second mission) in the fastest way possible. The player is even given descriptive info like this, to diminish the chance of not understanding how the basic entities work. After few steps in the 2nd level, the player can start exploring his first self-feeding loop (make iron to make more iron). The tools used to this is mainly: The message dialog that stops the game and explains the player various things. Minimization of the amount of things the player can interact with to absolute minimum, so he can't start doing other things before the basics are clear. The possible drawbacks: The constant interruptions can get really annoying (typically around 22 message dialogs before the player starts to play relatively freely in the 2nd level). The possibility, that the player will mindlessly follow the step-by step tasks without understanding it, so he can become really lost later on, and the tutorial basically wouldn't help him to understand things. So the question is: Can we make a tutorial that makes these problems go away?, and alternatively, How big are these problems actually? The current direction of the new tutorial attempt is to never use the message dialogs, so the player can learn the game more fluently, and to leave way more things to explore, as learning things yourself has a better chance of success than force-feeding generally. We made a few tests of the new approach with a few people, the main takeaway, is that nothing is for free, and this approach created new drawbacks. If the player doesn't figure out something basic, it can be very frustrating for him to figure out what is going on when not moving forward for a long time. It might be possible, that some things are just not fun to learn by exploration, and it is more comfortable if they are force fed to you. I would compare this to a friend explaining you how to play a game for 5 minutes compared to 2 hours of trial and error. There are more possible outcomes from this, and we shall see how different tweaks of both strategies work in the testings. It might be interesting if you mentioned your experience with the tutorial in the comment section as well.
Hello, We have another exciting batch of facts for you today.
New hope demo levels Klonan A few weeks ago we discussed the changes to the demo and tutorial in the game (FFF-342). One piece of feedback we received after publishing the news was about the old 'New hope' campaign levels, and specifically the 'Abandoned rail base/Broken rail map'. It seems a lot of you in the community really really enjoyed the new hope campaign levels, and several of the team here share the same feelings. After we scrapped the plans for a new campaign and reverted to the old demo, we had initially dismissed the idea to revive the New hope campaign... However due to popular demand... we have decided to bring back the favourites, the first 2 levels of the new hope campaign. This time though, they will also be included in the demo version of the game. This represents a very significant increase in scope for the demo, increasing the demo content to include research, red science, green science, trains, and much more. These levels should be ready for release within a week (but no promises).
We have a long history of trying to bring Factorio to other platforms, including consoles and mobile phones (not including April Fools). We even worked with some external companies, but the projects never even got to the point where they would run technically, let alone the complicated part of making the game playable using controllers or touch screen. After all the attempts, we even had a Friday Facts prepared that was going to say something along the lines of "we don't plan to bring Factorio to other platforms".
Playtesting kovarex We have been playtesting a few days this week. There were some things we had to fix on the fly, but we still were able to play quite a lot, so I would say that it went surprisingly well. We have been able to get 3 multiplayer bases into a late game stage.
