Ok→Cancel versus Cancel→Ok (kovarex) A really strange debate started as a continuation of FFF-238. I insisted that the button order should obviously always be OK Cancel, as in any UI I see around. But little I knew, that this is actually specific to windows, and on Linux or macOS, the order is reversed: Eventually, we figured out, that we are not the first one trying to solve the problem. The solution we are now experimenting it sounds like a bad idea: "Make it so much different and Factorio specific, that the way it is done in your specific system will not interfere with your muscle memory". Which brings me to the load game dialog mockup:
Hello, I was peacefully writing the code when suddenly, I heard the sound of gun being reloaded. I gave a quick glance at my own gun. Yes, it is not loaded, of course. So I took cover under the table to search for some lost ammo. I needed to be able to return fire soon. Long story short, our nerf guns package arrived this week, and the office looks as a battlefield these days.
As you are probably already aware, some of our team members are going to attend PAX East in Boston next week. We figured we need some representative prints for our booth, but what to put there? We could have just made a big mega high resolution render of the player character or some other entity, but that would not tell the viewer much about what the game is about. So we thought it would be much better to "just" take a giant screenshot of a working factory, print it, and done! Now of course it’s much more complicated than that… The first obvious hurdle is that you need a savegame to take this screenshot of. So you go and try to take a bunch of random saves on your disk, you open them and find that it’s not so easy to just find a factory which would look nice. Such a factory needs to show enough of the various things to represent the game, can fit the logo somewhere, and must be large enough to fill about 275x185 tiles (3x2 meters at 150dpi taken at game zoom 2)... one square in the following picture is a chunk (32x32 tiles) Luckily I just had a savegame which was easy to adapt to those requirements, but I would like to ask the question, how does one build such a factory in general? That’s what I have been trying to figure out for a long time now. As some of you may have already noticed, I enjoy constructing very organic factories, a part of which eventually turns into a crazy mess. A mess as crazy as Factorio itself, representing what your will brain look like after playing Factorio. I find this to be a good opportunity to be a bit more specific and see a few examples to put it into more context...
Blueprint library finishing touches kovarex At the time of writing the Friday Facts last week, not all of the planned changes were finished, here is the finalisation, so here we go.
Hello! The code refactor of rails presented last week is great, but the motivation for such a task wasn't quite just some shape changes for rails. As explained last week, we can now define any kind of rail shape, and we had some very specific shapes in mind all along...
Hello, Today is actually the 6 year anniversary of Factorio launching on Steam, and just recently too we passed 3 million total sales (and we're even past 3.1 million at this point), so it is quite a milestone. It is great for us that the game is still selling consistently year on year, even though we never take part in sales or bundles.
Inching closer to stable Klonan The last 2 weeks have been less productive than we would like on the bug fixing front. The Easter festivities along with a wave of illness have dampened our efforts. We have still managed to push out 2 more experimental releases, and fixed a few desyncs. We encountered one specific desync in the mass MP stress test last weekend, caused by a characters inventory size changing (such as researching the toolbelt technology) while the player is respawning. The graph of crashes paints a similar story to how the office atmosphere feels. It is natural though, most of the major crashes affecting most players are resolved, so all that remains are the more difficult issues that only affect a handful of players. This means that each bug fix is less effective at reducing the overall crash count. This last weekend, we had over 500 total crashes reported, which is a slight improvement over the prior weekend's ~650. One thing that makes our progress hard to evaluate is that we don't know how many people are actually playing experimental. Most people play through Steam, and so far we have found no way of determining how many people are opted-in to the 0.17 experimental through Steam. It could be that the game is more stable, or it could be that less people are playing. There are still over 250 open bug reports on our forum, so it seems it will be a few more weeks until the first stable 0.17. Some people have been asking when we will release the new GUI and GFX updates that we promised before 0.17 release. The plan is that after the first 0.17 stable version, some of the team will be moved from fixing bugs to working on features. At the point where we have a meaningful amount of new content ready (A few GUIs, some new GFX, etc.), we will release it as a new experimental 0.17 version. We plan to give some explanation and notice about these 'mini-content releases' in a FFF before they are each released.
Hello guys, the winter is not yet completely over in here. Even though we had a few days that felt like real spring still now it is cold and unwelcoming outside. One more reason to stay in the office with a cup of tea and a screen full of Factorio code.
Hello, 0.12 will be stable soon, so is a good time to start making you want things from 0.13 right? :)
We are aware that we don't add so much content to Factorio these days. The reason we always state is that we are focusing on polishing and finishing the game. There are a lot of little things and details (some call it quality of life improvements), that don't look that awesome when reviewed one by one, but once they accumulate together they should make a big difference in the game experience. I'm going to talk about some of them now, but don't be afraid that we won't add anything new in the 0.16, as the work on the artillery train has already started and it is probably going to be epic :).
