Hello, the atmosphere in the last week was kind of special. We experienced the feeling of the final release being on the horizon many times. And we were shown that it isn't the case time and time again. So it feels very special when it is actually becoming reality. We were trying to be especially careful with any last minute changes to make sure that we don't introduce major bugs into our precious 1.0 release. The image of all the players having the game crash on some simple stupid bug is horrifying.
Hello guys, Factorio 0.4.1 has just been released! This is a bugfix release to the 0.4.0 update that has been made on Friday. The 0.4.0 has been tested by the guys at the forum and in 0.4.1 we provide bugfixes to the things they found. Let's have a look at the biggest changes introduced in the 0.4.0 and 0.4.1. The main theme has been the trains. Connected rolling stocks form a train. The trains can be assigned schedules of stations to visit. In the station the train can be loaded / unloaded an refueled. There are also semaphores to guide trains in the railway network. Apart from this we have also fixed some bugs in how railroads and rolling stocks work. Further information about how railway transportation works is available at our wiki. Apart from the trains we have added quite some functionality to the electricity. There are three new elements for energy distribution: the medium electric pole, the big electric pole and the substation. They all have different properties and are appropriate for different situations. Also there is the long awaited accumulator. Now finally even in night the factories can be protected from the alliens by the laser turrets. We have invested a lot of time into the tuning the determinism. The game is now (almost) fully deterministic. This is a necessary first step towards the multiplayer. Players can see our effort in action already in the replay functionality. Because of the determinism limitations the replaying functionality works only on the games that has been played within the same version with the same sets of mods all the time (and started in 0.4.1). As usual the release contains a lot of fixes and extensions in the scripting. As a result some of the 0.3.x version of the mods (especially those using a lot of scripting functionality) might cause errors with the new version. This can be repaired by using updated mods (when that happens). As before, the new version is compatible with all the previous saves. We really don't want the players to lose the games they have spent so much time with. After the long time of waiting we have added more Linux support. Next to the .deb package there is now a generic .tar package available for download. This is aimed at the more experienced users who will be able to deal with the dependencies themselves. That was longer than expected. The release details are available as usual on our forums. Time to go for a run to clear the head:)
More remnants Dom, albert As for the conclusion of the topic opened in the FFF-288 we finally decided to go for a balanced solution in which the player can recognize what entity was destroyed and also walk through them. The solution of going up in the Z-axis is really attractive for designing the destroyed models, but it gives a lot of headaches to the game designers due its need of a bounding box. We are planning also a generic set of remnants for the modders who don’t feel like making the destroyed version of their own machines. Here an example of how a factory can look after a biter attack: These remnants are still a work in progress, many of them are not yet finished and we are planning more iterations with this subject. By now you'll find a sneak peek in today's release (0.17.36).
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.
1.1 is getting close kovarex I have been tracking the amount of tasks and forum bugs required to finish 1.1 since the 1.0 release. This allowed me to get quantifiable feedback whether we are actually keeping the timeframe of the 1.1 release reasonable, or digging too deep and expanding the scope too much. If we extrapolate the graph, the 1.1 experimental should be ready next week.
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.
Hi everyone ! So we have a brand new release of Factorio for you packed with new features, improvements and bug fixes. The game is still far away from being graphically complete (surprise) but the gameplay is slowly getting where we would like it to be. So here is a short teaser for some of the new features: Technologies Build labs, create science packs and discover new recipes and improvements.Logistic Robots When your factory gets big use small flying robots to ease the transportation of material.Signals This has already been in 0.1.x, but now it has been tested and verified. Define conditions to switch on / off certain inserters based on number of items in your chests. This is perfect for controlling how many items are produced.Day night cycle Are you scared of the dark ? Well, too bad ...Graphic polish Character animations (mining, shooting, standing), light sources, mining particles, rocket smoke ...Freeplay There is a simple freeplay mode in the full version now. You play on the unlimited map full of enemy bases with scarce resources. Your task is to build a rocket defense for soon-to-land spaceships from the earth. The rocket defense is meant to protect the ships from potential allien attacks. However in order to build the rocket defense you need to research appropriate technologies first. And to spice it up a bit in order to research certain technologies you will need allien artefacts which you get when you destroy allien bases. So you will have to craft that shiny looking flamethrower and go out there get some artefacts. As usual the demo is downloadable without any restrictions and without signup. A lot of features that have been added are not available in the demo though (nor are the 2 extra missions). If you would like to play the full version, just send us an email at "factorio (at) factorio (dot) com" and we will give you a free download key for the full version.
Hello everyone, we have just released Factorio 0.3.0 ! We took quite some time and put a our effort into this release. There is a lot of internal refactoring and preparations which won't be visible to the player but they will make our live a lot easier in the future. We are "tying our laces before setting for a run". Apart from that we have put quite some effort into improving modding capabilities. Uptil now making and using mods was just for the hardcore fans of the game. We really see the importance of good modding system so we started building one. The mods are now standalone packages and allow for much easier and cleaner combination. Together with modding improvements we updated our Lua scripting API based on the feedback gathered from our forums. Apart from code changes there is some new graphics in the game. Our graphic Albert has spent more than two weeks here in the Prague. That allowed us to get a lot of work done. There are new inserters, turrets, walls, etc. Even though these all pieces are new graphic they might not be the final version. At the moment Albert is working on a high level artistic direction for the game. That might look like quite late (with the game already in the alpha). But better late than never :). The release is marked as experimental. This means that in order to download it you need to click the "experimental" link on our download page next to the "Download" title. After the release gets tested and no serious bugs are reported it will be marked as stable. Allright, enough of the talking. You can find more details about the changes on our forums. Now go and test the 0.3.0 out ;)
