0.15 release I would be surprised if you are reading this blog and didn't know that we released the 0.15 experimental this Monday. After more than 6 months of work and effort put in, we are really happy to finally see everyone playing and enjoying it so much. We'd like to thank you all for the feedback and suggestions we've received, and for being patient with us when we couldn't keep to our plans. The whole team here is committed first and foremost to making as great a game as possible. While the delays were not insignificant, we really hope we have met your expectations and delivered on what we have promised. Initially we had a small issue with our new config system and a script we use for Steam cloud syncing, leading to the game looking for a value which was no longer there. Thankfully HanziQ solved the problem in short time, and we released 0.15.1 just 3 hours later. The rest of the week ran pretty smoothly with the typical bugfixing, while the majority of the GFX department takes a well deserved break. If you are interested in seeing an overview of all the new features, you have a choice of British or American flavour, provided by MangledPork and Xterminator respectively:
Cars/Tanks remember their color Klonan This really is a tiny feature, the car and tank will now save the color of the passengers when they exit the vehicle. So now you won't forget which vehicle you were driving, and can warn everyone else on the server: "Pink tank is mine".
New test servers We recently bought and assembled some high-end PCs, with the hope to gauge performance, speed up running tests, and potentially consolidate the number of servers we are maintaining internally. The two lucky CPUs were a i9-9980XE 18-core and a Ryzen 3900X 12-core. We are using the time to complete our test suite in 'heavy mode' as a benchmark. Heavy mode basically saves and reloads the game each tick, and compares a CRC of the map from before and after. It is super slow to run, but the heavy test is critical to help find any possible determinism issues. There is some more info on 'heavy mode' in FFF-63. As a baseline, the 'standard' CPU in the office for developers is the i9-7900x 10-core, which runs heavy tests in about 530 seconds. In real time this is 8 minutes and 50 seconds, a long time for a team member to sit around for results before they can push. We can do better! As you would expect, the new 18-core was blazing fast, with a test time of about 400 seconds, shaving off over 2 minutes. However the Ryzen was a different story, with a test time of about 600 seconds. This goes against what we predicted, where more cores and higher frequency mean lower test times. The initial results from the 12-core Ryzen were worse than from the 10-core Intel; not a good start. So I did some digging and some research, and the answer I arrived at was RAM. When we ordered the parts, not much thought was given to the selection of RAM, just some standard 16GB 2666MHz sticks to fill all the slots. Luckily, I looked on a local Czech website, and they had some stock of the brand new G.SKILL 3600MHz Trident RGB Neo, a high performance RAM stick made exactly to suit our new Ryzen CPU. After installing the new RAM, we had a test result that better matched our expectations: 450 seconds. We knew beforehand that Ryzen liked fast RAM, but we didn't realize how significant of a difference it could make. So now we have set up both these new machines to run tests automatically after each commit, and we are very happy with the result. The new i9-9980XE can compile and run heavy tests faster than our old i7-4790K can compile and run just normal tests. Having it run automatically also frees up individual developers from the responsibility of running heavy tests locally, so they can just push as normal and continue working.
Release plans Klonan This week we released version 0.17.79, and marked it stable. Internally we have been calling this 'Stable 3', and the main feature was the new tooltips we showed in FFF-318. There is one constraint we put on ourselves when we started this more swift feature release schedule: We want to avoid breaking mods. This is easy enough in principle, don't start renaming things, don't remove API features, etc. However as we develop further, there are certain features and improvements that we can't realistically do in a way that won't break mods, such as the new Character GUI (FFF-289), and color correction (FFF-320). It is for this reason that we are going to accumulate some of these mod breaking changes, and release them all at once. Since it will definitely be breaking mods, we will bump the major version number, so it will be 0.18.0. We have already internally started merging in these 0.18 features into our master branch, so we will not be doing any more 0.17 releases (unless something absolutely catastrophic is discovered).
Rail building changes kovarex The problem with rail building is that it has too many states. It depends whether you start building the rail with shift, to use the ghost mode or not, and then it also matters whether you still hold shift, to ignore trees or not. Moving from manual building to ghost rail building means cancelling the whole rail building and starting it again with the correct modifier. The problems were reaching the surface from time to time, and Twinsen even drew a nice little state diagram of the rail building system. It kind of peaked with this bug report. After some time, it became clear that we should simplify it. This is a nice example, where we can talk about change we just released (0.17.29) in a FFF. From now on, instead of 3 modes (building manually, ghost building, ghost building + tree/rock removal), we have only 2 modes, where the ghost building without obstacle deconstruction is not available anymore. So it doesn't matter anymore how you start the building, it just matters whether you are holding shift or not at the moment, which makes it consistent with the normal entity building and the ghost icon. Once the topic is opened, it is hard to leave it so easily, so we agreed that the rail building could be streamlined even more. The current model is, that you have to build one straight piece of rail first, and then you can use the rail builder on the edge of that rail. It is annoying generally, and especially for the new players, because he might miss the way how it is being used, as the straight rails are built exactly the same way as other entities. The reason we did it this way was mainly, because when we first introduced the (new at that time) rail builder, we weren't confident enough that it could replace even the basic straight rail building. But since the rail building is stable enough, we might go one more step forward. The plan is that the rail won't be used to build straight rails normally the way you can now. The rail item would be always used to build by the rail planner only. Instead of having to snap to an existing rail, you could just start building anywhere on the ground. Instead of showing the rail preview when holding the item, you would see the arrow as when starting the rail building, and you could rotate it with the R key. It would make sense, to make the arrow color/size different for starting a rail planner on the ground versus snapping to an existing rail, but other than that, it would be the same.
Hello, Pretty much half of the office has been sick in the past week, but that still hasn't stopped us from progressing in the development of your favourite pollution-generating game (though I have been playing some Cities skyline recently and there you can screw the nature around quite creatively as well).
You would expect that we wouldn't have anything new during christmas, but you couldn't be more wrong, as the Factorio development never stops.
For a few frames more Previously on Factorio Friday Facts (#264): "No wonder, scenes heavy on smoke or trees can tank FPS, especially in 4K. Maybe we should do something about that..."
Hello, We have another exciting batch of facts for you today.
