Hello, long time no talk, we've got some catching up to do... Almost 1 year ago (FFF-365) we said "we don't think that [the expansion] will take less than a year to develop". Well it has been less than a year and it is not finished, so we kept our word on that :). But while it might not be finished, there is a still a lot we have done so far.
1.1 stable kovarex Hello, we have a stable version! When we were releasing the 1.0 FFF-360, we actually stated that there were "around 150 bugs on the forums and around 80 internal tasks to be solved". These were obviously minor issues, things hard to reproduce or very rare problems. In other words, it was quite reasonably stable, which normally goes without saying when it comes to Factorio stable versions. But it proved to be a mistake wording it this way, since some media picked up on it and presented it as a "fairly bugged release". So I'm pretty thrilled to finally get to the point, where we actually have 0 known issues and 0 active bug reports on the forums. Its like cleaning the kitchen properly, so you can start cooking something fresh. More about that next week! For now, we want to go over some of the features of the 1.1 that you might have missed until now if you've been sticking with stable 1.0.
1.1 is getting close kovarex I have been tracking the amount of tasks and forum bugs required to finish 1.1 since the 1.0 release. This allowed me to get quantifiable feedback whether we are actually keeping the timeframe of the 1.1 release reasonable, or digging too deep and expanding the scope too much. If we extrapolate the graph, the 1.1 experimental should be ready next week.
Hello, we finished with the regular Friday Facts series, and yet, there is still so much we want to talk about. I want to clarify, that we are not going to release FFF every week, but there are a few of them coming in the near future.
0.18 mods will be loadable in 1.0 Klonan With 1.0 approaching, we want to ensure that the day of the launch goes as smoothly as possible, and shows the game in the best light. Something that would really work against that would be if the update broke a bunch of mods and disgruntled all of our most dedicated players. So we are making efforts to ensure that mods that work in 0.18, will work without any update needed in 1.0. Theoretically this isn't so difficult, as the 0.18 release structure has meant that mods have maintained compatibility with all the latest changes, and in essence 1.0 will just be a small update of 0.18. However it does take a bit of special handling: 1.0 will allow mods marked for 0.18 to load. The mod portal will show 0.18 mods when browsing in 1.0. Avoiding breaking mods also means we need to be very careful with changing anything, even something as simple as renaming a sprite can break dozens of mods. I think we never realised how easy it is to break mods before we started this new release structure. Big apologies and big thanks to all the modders who stuck with us through these breakages. We hope that what this effort means, is that on the day of 1.0, players new and old alike can login to the mod portal and have a very large catalog of mods they can enjoy right away, and that the modders can relax and enjoy the game instead of worrying about updating all their work. However, we cannot say 100% that all mods will work, it is possible one of the features in 1.0 (like the new nuke or alien decoratives) will break some mods.
Launch party cancelled Jitka The COVID pandemic around the globe is making it really hard to plan any event these days, and we were pretty optimistic just a few weeks back. However the situation here is now changing for the worse it seems. The number of positively tested cases of COVID here in Czech has been increasing in relatively high numbers every day for the past two weeks, and the restrictions are again taking place. In Prague, face masks are required to be worn again where more than 100 people gather indoors, no events over 500 people are permitted as of last week, etc. The current uncertainty together with the fact that at least half of the invited guests will not be able to attend the party (including some members of our own team), have led us into making a tough decision: we have decided to cancel the Factorio 1.0 release party we were intending to throw on 4th September 2020. For those of you who already purchased a ticket(s) - the full ticket price will be refunded. We hope there will be another opportunity to meet you all in the foreseeable future, but for now, please accept our apologies for any inconveniences caused. This wasn't an easy decision for us to make, but we believe it is the right one.
The launch party Klonan To celebrate the launch of the game later this summer (only 6 more FFFs to go!), we have decided to throw a party! It is going to be at the same venue as our 1 million sale party (FFF-192). It will take place on Friday the 4th of September, 2020, at Žluté Lázně here in Prague. We are inviting a lot of people to the party, such as other Czech game developers, Youtubers, and of course we will be there. As we want you (the fans) to be able to come, we have some tickets for sale. The reason to sell them, rather than give them away, is so that we don't have 'messers' saying they will come when they don't intend to. You can buy a ticket here. While the COVID-19 pandemic might be 'over' here in Czechia (Czechs hold 'farewell party' for pandemic), the reality is, the situation could change with great speed. It is likely many won't be able to come due to travel restrictions, or we may even need to cancel the event. Please keep this in mind while you are considering whether to come. We hope everything lines up in our favour, and we look forwarding to meeting you.
Locale plan update Klonan Earlier this week I received the English proofreadings from Altagram, and overall I integrated over 500 suggestions into the game. Most were small, such as replacing "can't" with "cannot", things like that. It was the exact sort of external scrutiny we really needed, as it showed some areas where we were quite inconsistent. It feels like things are in a better place now, even if the majority of changes are relatively unnoticeable. However it was very noticeable to our great community translators on Crowdin. When we update the English strings, the translations have to be updated on Crowdin. For the last few days I've been working through the issues raised on Crowdin, and there was a lot of good input on that last 1% of the changes. So this concludes the 'English proofreading' phase. Starting on Monday, Altagram will start proofreading the target languages, and filling in any missing strings where needed. This should take about 3 weeks. Since Altagram has their own translation system for their team, it isn't really feasible to include Crowdin in this part of the work, they will just take the content from Crowdin at the start of the process, and after 3 weeks, push what they have back to Crowdin. So any translation work by volunteers on Crowdin for these 3 weeks would be wasted. So we ask that, if you want to volunteer your time, save it for a little while. Any work done on Crowdin this weekend will be included. We deliberately made this buffer between the English corrections and the Target proofreading so that the players on Crowdin have an opportunity to contribute before Altagram starts. After Altagram has pushed their corrections back to Crowdin, we will start the 'Community review' part of the process. This is when the work that Altagram's team has done is reviewed by players and feedback is given to Altagram via Crowdin issues. This helps us make sure the terms of the translations are consistent with the established community usage, and ensure there are no contextual issues or misunderstandings.
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!