It’s been several weeks since we showed you the graphics for new high resolution circuit connector modules (FFF-202). However now is finally the time when we have them in the game. In this article I will briefly show you what was done both in the graphics and code, and what new benefits are there for you as players and modders. I find the 0.15 version of the circuit connector module has following “problems”: The wire connectors are different from the combinators. Wires sometimes completely overlap, making only one of them properly visible. Modularity - you can somewhat tell what is happening based on the LED states, but it could be much nicer. Connecting a belt always looks weird, while the yellow structure which holds the connector box could be made more specific. Some of the rotations are utterly useless. The Lua definitions are spread over every single entity, so revisiting them all is a big pain.
I need to make a confession. I'm addicted. Addicted to optimisation.
Hello, it's another Friday, so time for another Friday Facts.
Hello, it seems the summer heat has finally subsided, and we have not had to run our AC units the whole week. We mentioned earlier we have had Dominik in for a testing week, and we are happy to say that he is quite qualified for a position here, so will be remaining with us. Tom has also joined us, moving here from the Republic of Ireland, and has been getting settled in working through a lot of the small unassigned tasks. It also seems most of us are back from our vacations, so the pace is picking up again. Most of the work this week has been on the unentertaining spectrum, with a lot of internal reworking and refactoring going on. A lot commits related to fixing our compilation after the move to C++17. Many of the GUI and input action functions were broken (such as rebinding keys, switch map editor tabs, setting combinator filters), so its been a team effort to fix these as they are found. Hopefully not many will slip through the cracks and into release.
Hello Factorio players, lets start our developer to player interaction right now! :)
Hello, it's vacation season here in the office, with a lot of the team taking some time off. We just released what will probably be the last version of 0.15, so now is the best time for everyone to take a breather.
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.
Further optimisations I finished the item stack optimisations mentioned in FFF-198, and was able to do some performance tests. First I tested how many stacks on a big map actually need to use an externally allocated object (Item), and how many of them are plain. On the huge map I tested, it turned out that only 36K out of 1M stacks need the Item object. These were mainly science packs, as they need it for the progress of how used-up they are (and now when I think about it, it could also be omitted by only using the objects for science packs that are partially used up already). Overall factory performance was increased approximately 2% by this. It is nothing huge, but every bit matters. One of the programmer that has read access to the code (Zulan), came up with a pull request that improves performance in Factorio by prefetching memory in the update loops ahead. The problem when normally updating objects is, that CPU asks for memory representing the object. The memory is slow, at least compared to the CPU cache or the CPU speed. The memory transfer speed itself is not that slow, but the waiting (latency) time between ordering and receiving it is. This means, that what very often happens is, that CPU orders data of next entity from the memory, then it waits for quite a long time to get it, and then it does its logic. The memory prefetching partially solves it by doing this: Order data of the next entity from memory (prefetch) Do the logic of the current entity in the meantime Go back to start The overall measured performance improvements vary between 9-12%, which is certainly a nice addition.
I decided to write about the results of the item stack optimisations explained in the FFF-198, so I rushed today to finish its implementation, just to find out that the task affects an even bigger part of the code than I expected, Items are related to many things in Factorio :) After many hours of rewriting and fixing, I can compile it and even start a game, but most of the things are broken. It is quite funny to see some of the basic item interactions to be broken. Now I'm making commits like "Now I can split stacks", "Now I can merge stacks", etc. It reminds me the old days. In conclusion, the details of the optimization will have to wait for next week, and since it is after 10pm, this Friday facts will be somewhat shorter :)
Hello, the 0.15 has been declared stable. Unfortunately we found some smaller problems, so there is going to be at least one bugfix release. One of the problems we discovered yesterday, is a glitch in the blueprint transferring logic that results in the transfers stopping forever when a player that is just transferring his blueprint into the game leaves. I'm quite surprised that I found it out myself when I was testing something else, and we didn't have a single bug report regarding it.
