Hello, it is me, posila, with another technical article. Sorry.
Good afternoon, the week in the office has been relatively quiet. The whole non-dev department is away, kovarex is flying his paraglide somewhere over Macedonia so in the end there is like 6 of us meeting here to make the game crash less often=)
Hello, It is exactly a year since we moved to the new office. I had also the Factorio presentation in the university for the third time already (third year), and I realized it is the third time I said there that Factorio will be finished in a year. I want to believe it to be true this time so we will try to really make it happen.
New website Sanqui Over the course of the past year, you have seen the team put a lot of effort into polishing the game to get it ready for a full release. There's no doubt this is the most important effort here: we're all here to play the game. At the same time, the website is often the first thing people encounter—and in for many, return to every week! Unfortunately, until this point the looks of our websites have been neglected. The current set of websites are a complete mishmash of styles that are not coherent and do not fit with the look of the game. Which website am I looking at again? We set out to rework the looks of our websites last year to make them harmonize with the final game. Albert and Aleš worked together to design the new website and make mockups in a process not too dissimilar to the GUI work in the game. Of course, web technology is a different beast from anything the game uses. My task was to take the mockups for each page and implement them as closely as possible (my own creative liberties notwithstanding). The process from original page to mockup to the new version My approach to creating websites is conservative, and in a way mirrors the philosophy we use when developing the game. The Factorio website doesn't use a fancy modern JavaScript framework. I'm not a JavaScript hater. There is no harm in using JavaScript to make parts of the website interactive, and of course many web applications wouldn't be possible with it. But for a website like ours, avoiding the use of bloated JavaScript frameworks helps keep everything load and render quickly, and of course the website can be browsed without JavaScript as well. To get the looks right, I set out to create a CSS framework to visually mimic the Factorio GUI style. Where possible, I avoided the use of images. This keeps the page fast and ensures it stays sharp on all resolutions and levels of zoom. For instance, the buttons match their game counterparts closely, but are made only using shadows. The only exception is the arrow facing to the right, which simply isn't possible to reproduce using CSS (I tried!). However, even then the performance is kept slick because the graphics for it are embedded in the stylesheet. The layout for new pages with sleek grids is enabled thanks to modern CSS technologies like Flexbox and CSS grid (no floats, no tables). At the same time, the mod portal also received the new design. I also took the effort to unify login sessions between the main website and the mod portal, so you no longer have to log in twice. This Friday Facts is the last time you're seeing the current (old) style, so enjoy it while it lasts! The new website will go live sometime next week. Once the new design is out, don't forget to click on the rocket!
Surprise! There are 5 new planets in the expansion. The first planet you arrive on is a strange new land, rich with iron, copper, coal, stone, oil, and uranium. Everything a starting factory needs and more. There's also water, fish, grass and trees. Yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... "This Land" "Nauvis". So yes, the new planet Nauvis is similar to the 1.1 version of the map, but there are some substantial updates. Hopefully this is a surprise for you, because updates to the base map weren't planned at all. It just got harder and harder to not make changes after getting more experience with the other planets and seeing things that were missing or broken. For clarity, these changes affect the 2.0 version in general and are not exclusive to the expansion. This has been a solo side project for me for a while and it's only just come to a conclusion. Anyway, here's the story:
Game Developers Session 2018 GDS 2018 will be taking place next week, running from Friday 7th to Saturday 8th. This year, like last year, we are silver sponsors of the event, which means you will see some Factorio branding around the event and in their official booklet. Part of the preparation on our side was to produce a nice graphical asset for their use, which you can see below: The image is an aesthetic composition to showcase the design and theme of the game and its elements (while not necessarily making logical sense), and also contains the first public display of our new official Wube Software logo. About half the office team here will be attending the event, so if you are also going you might bump into us.
Hello, So the last week has been very intense.
