Posts by Rseding

Friday Facts #248 - Not Saturday Facts

Posted by Twinsen, Rseding91 on 2018-06-22

Status report (Twinsen) On Monday June 18th, we marked the last version of 0.16 as stable. There were no major problems, so now we are almost exclusively working on 0.17. Work on 0.17 is progressing well: Regarding the new campaign, we are already internally playing a rough version of the new player experience. We are still trying to figure out the exact and final style and concepts for the improved GUI, but we have some GUI windows implemented in game already, plus many base widgets. We use those to get a feel of what works and what doesn't. The new graphics back-end rewrite is nearing finalization. A closed-beta branch was sent to a few players to test that rendering works correctly across different hardware. The rendering is faster and no major issues were reported so far. But there is still much to do, such as improvements to VRAM usage and many experiments with shaders. Since from the graphics department Albert is working on the GUI and V453000 is working on the new campaign, only Ernestas is left working exclusively on the entity graphics. He is reworking some more entities for high-resolution, so expect some teasers in the future. There are of course other small projects that are ongoing, such as improved pipe-fluid physics and improved map generation, but more on those when they are fleshed out. Oh, and our coding always goes as planned without any problems.

Friday Facts #235 - 0.16 stable

Posted by kovarex & Rseding on 2018-03-23

0.16 to be declared stable Rseding thinks that we have the least amount of bugs in the game we ever had. Mostly because of the automated reporting system and partly because of my pushing of everyone to fix everything before starting other tasks. The 0.16.35 (to be released soon) will be declared stable on Monday, if no critical problems are discovered. This naturally leads us to:

Friday Facts #232 - PAX, Bugs, Graphs

Posted by Twinsen, Rseding91 and Posila on 2018-03-02

Hello, it has been extremely cold these last weeks. It's one of those weeks when we can't think of anything to write about. So we will try to write some small parts.

Friday Facts #217 - Just another Friday Facts

Posted by Twinsen & Rseding91 on 2017-11-17

Hello, most of the team is out of the office today attending the Game Developers Session here in Prague, if you're around you can look out for some people wearing Factorio t-shirts. As we were thinking about what to write in this Friday Facts, kovarex suggested "In the next Friday Facts we should write about how hard it is to write Friday Facts". Sometimes it is really difficult to find something interesting to write about. Thankfully we found some short things that that we thought you would like.

Friday Facts #201 - 0.15 Stable, but not really

Posted by kovarex & Rseding on 2017-07-28

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.

Friday Facts #196 - Back on track

Posted by Rseding91, Twinsen & Klonan on 2017-06-23

Hello, after a lot of planning and preparation, the party on Saturday went very well. We really enjoyed spending time with some of our fans, and it has definitely sharpened our motivation to do right by our community and make the game as great as possible. With this festivity behind us, we started this week with some renewed focus.

Friday Facts #184 - Five years of Factorio

Posted by kovarex & Rseding on 2017-03-31

Today, it is exactly 5 years since the initial Factorio commit. As you may, or may not know, the first version was created in java, and it took me (kovarex) a whole 12 days to realize that it is not a good idea, and I switched to C++. As a small celebration I provide the Factorio pre-alpha version 0.1 . It is a good reminder of how much the game has moved forward in all directions. The controls are cumbersome, the graphics are funny and glitchy, the GUI is horrible. The campaign has 4 levels, where the last one is quite a challenging defense mission. There are also 2 savegames with one of the first Factorio Factories ever created.

Friday Facts #182 - Optimizations, always more optimizations

Posted by Rseding91 on 2017-03-17

I've done several optimizations around the game update over the past few game versions but in 0.15 I decided to also look at some of the game GUIs. In particular there are 3 GUIs which tend to take a large amount of time when visible: the production stats, the trains view, and blueprint tooltip previews.

Friday Facts #177 - Difficulty settings

Posted by Rseding91 on 2017-02-10

0.15 status Work has been going swiftly on 0.15, but there are still many major topics we have left to close. We mentioned previously that our estimate for release would be near the end of February, and while this has been our internal goal, we won't quite be able to make it. One of the main reasons for this delay is us underestimating how long it would take to stabilize 0.14 and the new multiplayer code. We thought that because it was a relatively small 'major' release, that it would not take much time to make it stable. However the great community members playing the experimental version kept finding bugs for us to fix, and even now there are still several 0.14 bugs being identified and fixed in 0.15. The extending bug fixing of 0.14 was no doubt necessary, but it has led us to be somewhat behind schedule on several features of 0.15. Our current optimistic estimate is that we will be able to release an experimental version of 0.15 at the end of March, and we will keep you all up to date on its progress.

Friday Facts #165 - Death by a thousand cuts

Posted by Rseding91 on 2016-11-18

Mod settings Right now when you want to customize a particular mod you have to: Know what folder the mods are stored on your computer Unzip the mod Figure out what line of which file has the thing you want to change Save and optionally re-zip the mod Hope what you changed is compatible with the way the rest of the mod works The game also forces everyone playing on the same multiplayer session to have identical mod files so any changes you've made make it impossible for you to join others unless they also have made those changes. This also makes it difficult for mod developers to troubleshoot bug reports because they don't know what you might have changed. This is obviously not so great and I want to address the main problem: there's no good way for mod developers to give users any portable way to configure their mods. To fix this we're going to add the ability for mods to define settings that will be presented like our in-game options menu now under a new section "options -> mods". This will let mods give some basic information about what kind of setting they have and we can present it to the player in a (hopefully) nice GUI with verification and feedback about why what they've entered isn't valid (if it's not valid) as well as the ability to change them runtime should the particular setting allow it. We can then sync these settings on joining multiplayer sessions (or not should you not want your settings to carry between games) and everything will just work.