Hello everyone, another weekly Factorio update is here. The 0.7.0 release from the last Friday night has triggered a lot of discussions on the forum. It seems that in the end we didn't get the balancing quite right and the natives are now rather overpowered. People reported cases when they were overrun by the biters after less than half an hour of playing. Another issue would be that the biters in the enemy bases would level up too quickly and when the player arrives to conquer the base there were plenty of medium or big biters (which are quire resistant). Apart from that the release was relatively smooth. There are some minor bugs but no deal brakers. After recharging some energy during the weekend at a local wine festival:), we started working on the 0.7.1. Unlike in previous minor releases, the 0.7.1 will contain also couple of new features. Most notable of these is the addition of late game player following robots (aka "destroyers"). They are quire expensive, but they allow to conquer even large enemy bases. And they are a lot of fun to play with because of their acceleration based behavior. Apart from this and other small features the week has been spent mostly by bugfixing the issues reported by the community. This is now more or less finished and we have started with playtesting and further balancing. The 0.7.1 is expected to be released during the next week. As mentioned before afterwards we will focus some of our energy on making the new trailer and preparing for the Steam Greenlight campaign. Another thing that kept us busy for a while has been the wiki. Originally it has been spammed to a degree when any ressurection seemed hopeless. However after many tries (what do you do with a 4GB sql dump file?) Blue Cube has managed to prune the database and resurrect the wiki at its original location. For now we have restricted the access only to people who has been confirmed manually by us. So if you are interested in contributing to the wiki (which would be more than welcomed) then request an account on the wiki page . You will need a forum account for that as well. All this is to avoid further automated spamming of the wiki. Not only the wiki has been resurrected but also thanx to Kovarex it now contains up to date information on Factorio 0.7.1 scripting interface. Albert has been busy and productive as well. He has finished with the enemy spawner which we had to redo couple of times because of notable noise in the final animation. The resulting animation is imho worth it. You can see it below (animation for breathing) together with the gif capturing the process of making the spawner model. After this Albert has worked on other small issues that we have been putting off for a while. Things like: slowdown particles, underground objects indication (belts to ground, pipes to ground) and finally the remnants after destroyed objects. These are especially useful because as a player you can see what has been destroyed when your base has been attacked by the natives. And here is a fun fact for this episode. Technically it happened last week, but it so funny that it still qualifies. So the thing is that recently we looked up that there will be an indie game conference here in Prague. We were super excited and all three of us went there really enthusiastic to talk to the people from the indie game industry and maybe propagate Factorio or something. It took place in the local startup hub. We arrived and saw that a workshop was about to start soon. So we sat down and waited for a while. It was a little bit weird that nothing was happening but after a while a guy appeared who said he is coming for the workshop as well. He started explaining to us what he does and it was all about some very advanced server management stuff. We waited all the time when he will get to the indie game part but it never happened. And it turned out that the workshop is actually about some advanced server management stuff. The indie game conference happened a year ago on the same day. So we were one year late. The people at the reception had quite a good laugh. All right, back to the reality. Recently we have created a new "Updates" category on the forum where we will try to regularly post small updates. We will also create there a post for every friday facts episode where you can post comments.
Hello, Another trains FFF!
Roadmap update (kovarex) A lot of people have been asking recently, when can they expect a new release and when is the game going to be finished. The original plan was to finish everything, and release the final version of Factorio ideally before the end of 2018. This was the plan at the beginning of the year. We worked in our usual way of "it is done when it is done" for quite some time, but then it started taking a little bit too long, and we weren't even sure what is a realistic timeframe to finish it in. To help this issue, we tried to become a little more organized in the past few weeks. We went through our list of all the development tasks, and tried to finalize it. We removed all the things that we decided to cut, and added all the missing things that we need to do before the game is finished. Then we tried to make some kind of time estimate for each task, to get a general idea of when everything will be finished. We started to be more conscious of who is working on what, and how much time each task is taking, to know how accurate the estimates are. The result was, that if it all goes well, we could be done in 6-9 months. This is probably not something you wanted to hear. After a few rounds of discussions, we decided split the releases of 0.17 and 0.18 in the following way: 0.17 plan It will contain all the things we have done up to this point, mainly: New render backend, which helps performance and solves a lot of issues (FFF-251) The graphical updates: walls, gates, turrets, belts, biters, spawners, electric poles (FFF-268, FFF-228, FFF-253) The GUI reskin (FFF-243) New map editor (FFF-252) Resource generation overhaul (FFF-258) Robot construction tools (FFF-255) Rich text (FFF-237, FFF-267) And more... It will also include some things we know we can finish soon enough, mainly: Redoing some of the most important GUIs (Action bar, character screen, main game GUI, train GUI, play GUI, tooltips) Fluid optimisations And several smaller things, which depends on how it goes We will release this during January 2019, we will announce it more precisely in advance. 0.18 plan It will become the final 1.0 version once it is stable. It will contain mainly: New tutorial New campaign Final mini tutorials Revision of rest of the GUI All remaining high res graphics graphics and final polish We obviously don't know exactly when is it going to be ready, but we hope it to be sooner than 9 months from now.
GUI progress update (kovarex) This is a continuation of the last status report from FFF-269. As it might not be a surprise, the biggest bottleneck of the 0.17 release is the GUI. I like to believe, that we have learned a lot from the pitfalls of the collaborative creative process of GUI. This is the typical way we were redesigning the GUI: Two to three people started discussing what could be cool to change in the particular GUI. Some people randomly joined and left the ongoing discussion. Arguments to discard certain ideas have to be repeated over and over. Then the discussion is ended because of something. A week later people start talking again, most of them forgot most of the stuff, or were discussing it with different people, so they assume some details of the changes to be understood by everyone, while they aren't. They come to an agreement how it should be done. They have a random discussion about it a week later and figure out, they had completely different ideas about how it should be done, they just didn't articulate them precisely. Both are kind of angry to have to reopen and re-negotiate the subject again. Someone starts to implement the GUI, but half-way through it is uncovered, that there was another layer of misunderstanding when specifying how should the work be done, and we need to go to step 1 again and repeat. Since many GUIs are thought and worked on in parallel, these situations overlapped and amplified the problems of mixing things up in our heads about what we agreed on in which GUI. Luckily, we eventually figured out, that it can't be done like this, and since there is a lot of work in the GUI, we need to make a process. It goes like this: First, there is some general discussion about the GUI, all team members can share their ideas. kovarex + Twinsen sit alone in the office, and discuss for some time (can be hours), all the pros and cons of how things should be done, and make some agreement. Twinsen writes a detailed UX document about the GUI containing the structure, and more importantly the behaviour, in a detailed manner. Twinsen + kovarex discuss the UX document and propose changes until they agree on the final version. Albert + Aleš take the UX document and create a UI mockup based on it. kovarex + Twinsen + Albert agree on the UI mockup or propose changes. Someone is assigned to implement the GUI based on the UX document and UI mockup kovarex reviews that the implementation is correct and points out some inconsistencies that he can see. Part of this step is making sure, that we share as many GUI styles and code as possible across different GUIs. kovarex + Albert have a final look on the implementation and fix final details until they both agree that the screen is fully finished. Having the UX documents/UI mockups always available proved to be a huge time saver. Not only it helps us to solve the communication problems, we also don't have to remember and re-articulate decisions from some time ago as we can just open the document and see what we agreed on and instantly continue where we left off. A good part of this strict pipeline is that we now have better knowledge of the state of the work progress. These are the GUI screens that we hope to deliver for 0.17: .header_cell { text-align:center; font-weight: bold; } .finished { text-align:center; font-weight: bold; } .not_finished { text-align:center; font-weight: bold; } .finished_gui_table { border-spacing: 10px; } .finished_gui_table td { border: 1px; border-style:solid; padding: 5px; } General UX UX draft UX review UI mockup UI review Implementation draft Implementation review Final review Load map Save map Graphics settings Control settings Sound settings Interface settings Other settings Map generator Technology GUI Technology tooltip Recipe/item/entity tooltip Action bar Shortcut bar Train GUI Manage/Install mods Main screen chat Recipe explorer Character screen Menu structure New game Help overlay Chat icon selector Blueprint library You can see, that there is still a lot of to do, but the work tends to accelerate as more and more of the GUI layouts/tilesets/standards are being finalized and reused. The conclusion is that 0.17 experimental in January is possible, but it might be February as well :).
Hello, as the team is getting slowly bigger and we still don't have any dedicated project manager, we had to start looking for tools to help us manage the team. We are testing software that allows our team members to track time spent on individual tasks, so right now my timer on "Friday facts related work" is running. I hope it to give me better insight into what kind of tasks our time goes to, where are we losing most of it, or what were the people doing when I was not here. People tend to not like these kind of changes, but we just have to admit that we are not the 4 people punk development team working from our living room and we need to invest more time into working efficiently.
It's finally here (Twinsen) The proposal was first mentioned more than 1 and a half years ago, in FFF-191. Since then, we kept mentioning it in our blog posts and players kept asking about it. After a lot of back and forth within the team on whether we should implement it or not, and how it should work, we finally have it almost finished for 0.17.
Hello, Today we are going to talk a little bit about a big feature in the expansion, Quality!
Team production changes Improving the Team production challenge was prompted by this Reddit post. Team production was made back in 2016 to test the multiplayer networking of the 0.14 update with a larger number of players without the overhead of having a large factory. Since then it has not really had much love. So after 4 years of accruing wisdom, I started making some general improvements.
Playtesting kovarex We have been playtesting a few days this week. There were some things we had to fix on the fly, but we still were able to play quite a lot, so I would say that it went surprisingly well. We have been able to get 3 multiplayer bases into a late game stage.
