Hello, so here we go with the last Friday Facts before the big day next Thursday. 0.12.23 The 0.12.23 is getting latest tweaks regarding the integration of Steam functionality for sharing saves for one account across different locations (different computers). In the meantime the majority of the dev team has been playtesting the game for past couple of days (and doing the usual "factory building shouting" across the office). Hopefully it will be out in the beginning of the next week. Steam page So the Steam page is up and running. We have uploaded the 0.12.22 and that (together with the page content) has been approved by the Steam review. The game is now listed in coming soon section. Things to check out: Updated existing trailer. The new gameplay trailer is hidden and will appear together with the game release (just to keep the expectations=)). New Factorio cover image (Albert is really proud of this one=)). A bunch of selected screenshots. As usual, we are open to ideas and recommendations in the comments on the forum=). Other Steam Stuff There is now a Steam FAQ page on the Factorio subreddit which contains a lot of useful information regarding the Steam release. We have had a betting round in the office what will the Factorio review percentage be in 1 week and 1 month after the EA release (so 2 numbers, i.e. [90, 86]). You are welcome to give your bets in the comments. We took down the Furnace Attendant tier from our webpage. The Mining Drill Operator is still available, because it adds stuff (name in the game, gfx wiki access) which will not be available after Steam release. There has been some discomfort on the forums about people overpaying on the Furnace Attendant tier (because Scenario Pack will be given for free alongside the basic game). We don't percieve this as an unfair treatment on our side. Still, we are thinking about ways how to provide some additional value / recognition to people who supported us by buying the higher tiers. In the middle of the finishing gfx craziness, Albert has spontaneously stopped shaving his beard. This has been going for long enough time to catch attention. I found the "idea" somehow compelling and joined him not so long ago. Though not impressive beards they are quite unusual for us. We might make a picture next Thursday=) There is still a possibility of Factorio release day coinciding with Kovarex's baby being born. New trains overview screen One of the new features in the 0.13 will be a new screen for viewing all the trains in the game. This one is invoked from the mini side menu mentioned in one of previous FFF. The screen basically shows every train depicted as a minimap and a train schedule below it. Trains will be ordered lexicographically based on the first station (also lexicographically) in their schedules (this should be the "expected" ordering - see trains sharing the stations close to each other). Schedules give hint about current station and whether the train is on the way / waiting in the station / in manual mode or without path. Also there is a search field which narrows the listing based on the stations in the schedule. Below is an example of the trains overview. Updated train screen We made some more updates to the existing single train screen. Namely adding the "open ttd" inspired preview of the train. There is a switchable "camera view" and "map view". Both are zoomable by scrolling the preview. Check out below how it looks in the game. We are also thinking about using this embedded minimap / camera views in other parts of the game. One straightforward example would be to have a camera entity (it could also be just existing radar entity). Then there would be a screen pretty much like the trains overview screen showing all the cameras and you could quickly check what is happening in different parts of the factory without physically going there. Or maybe another approach would be to allow player (with a special object in his armor?) view real-time any part of the map covered by radars. The non-surprising comments thread at our forums is waiting for your feedback.
0.18.0 release Klonan Early this week we pushed the deploy button on 0.18.0 (patch notes). This was quite a surprise to many of our players, as more typically the time between major releases and the scope of the release is greater. However this isn't like the old days, we are trying to keep the size of releases as small as possible (FFF-314). What this means, is that what is currently in 0.18 is only really a small part of the work needed to be done on 0.18, and releases in the coming months will continue finishing off our 0.18 task list. Once everything on the 0.18 list is completed and the time is right, we will turn 0.18 into 1.0. What we have accomplished with 0.18.0: GUI Main menu redesign GFX Water animation Tree animation Color correction (LUTs) New explosions and damage effects Other Optimizations New Particle system First work on new sound design Steam login What we have left to do in 0.18: GUI Character GUI Blueprint library Statistics GUIs (production, electric network stats, etc.) Entity GUIs (Inserter, Assembling machine, chests, etc.) Main screen GUIs (Chat, minimap, etc.) Many more... GFX Offshore pump redesign Assembling machine redesign Beacon redesign High-res icons Final tweaks and polish Other Further sound design improvements Mini-tutorials Replace NPE with old tutorial Final game balancing and tweaks Finalised locale and proofreading With this in mind, it wouldn't make sense to mark 0.18 stable before most of the above is finished. We made 0.18 a major version because it will break mods with all the changes we are making, and while initially it hasn't broken that much, many things to come will have a bigger impact, such as the Character GUI.
You might have noticed that a lot of rail related stuff was broken during these past releases, and now it is working more or less fine again. The story behind it is not so trivial.
I've done several optimizations around the game update over the past few game versions but in 0.15 I decided to also look at some of the game GUIs. In particular there are 3 GUIs which tend to take a large amount of time when visible: the production stats, the trains view, and blueprint tooltip previews.
Today, it is exactly 5 years since the initial Factorio commit. As you may, or may not know, the first version was created in java, and it took me (kovarex) a whole 12 days to realize that it is not a good idea, and I switched to C++. As a small celebration I provide the Factorio pre-alpha version 0.1 . It is a good reminder of how much the game has moved forward in all directions. The controls are cumbersome, the graphics are funny and glitchy, the GUI is horrible. The campaign has 4 levels, where the last one is quite a challenging defense mission. There are also 2 savegames with one of the first Factorio Factories ever created.
Hello, as you could expect this Friday facts is mainly about our fight with the avalanche of bug reports, which is actually not as huge as we expected it to be to be honest. We released 0.16.7 yesterday, and this will probably be the last update for a while. Most of us now are taking a break, enjoying the festivities, and visiting our friends and family.
Hello, as we learned countless time before: Visual feedback is the king! Especially when the GUI is as complex as the Train GUI.
1.1 stable kovarex Hello, we have a stable version! When we were releasing the 1.0 FFF-360, we actually stated that there were "around 150 bugs on the forums and around 80 internal tasks to be solved". These were obviously minor issues, things hard to reproduce or very rare problems. In other words, it was quite reasonably stable, which normally goes without saying when it comes to Factorio stable versions. But it proved to be a mistake wording it this way, since some media picked up on it and presented it as a "fairly bugged release". So I'm pretty thrilled to finally get to the point, where we actually have 0 known issues and 0 active bug reports on the forums. Its like cleaning the kitchen properly, so you can start cooking something fresh. More about that next week! For now, we want to go over some of the features of the 1.1 that you might have missed until now if you've been sticking with stable 1.0.
Hello, the struggle to finish the latest features and fixes so 0.13 can be in time, or just reasonable delayed, goes on. There is always last missing icon or tweak that was hiding around the corner. It is still not certain whether we can really deliver next week, but we will certainly try to.
