Hello, the summer is officially over soon. I have this tradition of denying it by wearing just a t-shirt as long as possible, so I'm getting less and less comfortable outside until I accept the defeat by the cold weather. The experience is, that the short days and ugly weather speeds up the work on Factorio as we tend to stay inside and code all the time.

Hello, Albert is back to Prague, so today we had 5 people in the same room working today. I can see that the team is growing, and the atmosphere is positive, as everyone is refreshed by the holidays and full of enthusiasm to make Factorio better. We are looking forward to be in the new office. I already feel the Factorio touch of the place in advance, the bigger the project is the more we feel the need to separate home and work. It might be a bad idea to say it here, but we have some kind of Factorio level up party prepared as well, so if you are in Prague that day and there are not 100 people coming already you are free to join:)

Hello, apart few bugfixes, there isn't much of a progress this week in the absolute terms. Most of the work done this week was mainly to save time in the long run, so we should be able move forward faster. There are still some bugs in the 0.10.8 but these are not so critical, so 0.10.9 (stable candidate I hope), will get more time to accumulate more bugfixes.

Hello, I'm alone here today, Tomas is on yoga camp. We will switch during the weekend, as he will get back, and I will start my paraglide course. I hope you wish me no injury so I can continue to develop Factorio without interruptions.

Hello, welcome to the weekly dose of information that proves that we are not slacking :)

Hello, the stabilising (hopefully) 0.10.1 release is here along with the regular news from the Factorio development.

Hello, the Friday is here much sooner than expected as always. Albert just arrived back in Czech republic yesterday, so the team is localised again. Albert met with Pavel, the graphics reinforcements of our team, for the first time and it seems that they could get along quite well, so we can call these two our graphics department from now on :)

Hello, you can sit tight, because the batch of insiders from the world of Factorio development are here.

Hello, as mentioned in the last update the word about Factorio started to spread much faster than we were used to. We are happy about that and we would like to thank to all the people who helped to spread the word. We have been contacted by several youtubers, and told all of them to wait for the release of their videos until the 1st of May so there is a good chance that we didn't even reach the peak so far. The reason why we want to wait for the 1st may is because it is the release date of our new trailer, we were ready to send Albert home to see his wife already, but his perfectionism didn't let him as he decided to remake the last entity for the trailer, the steam generator. It is already remodelled now, waiting to be retextured, so we are almost finished. Most of the work now is still related to the multiplayer. I keep fixing one desynchronisation bug a day, so I'm near to being able to replay the demo campaign. We are discussing the details of networking almost daily and it seems like our second model of network synchronisation is going to be more consistent than the first one. I hope that the Factorio dev proverb (The third version is usually good) will not apply to this. In the meantime, I started to do a little research of the problem with the growing video memory requirements. It is going to be more relevant in the future if we want to add different enemies or machines, so anyone who knows about game programming could give us a hint. Destroying and building stuff is always more fun with effects. We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.

The tradition is to open the friday facts by saying, that the new bugfix release is here, as well as saying that this one is definitely going to be the stable one. But this time we really think that 0.9.8 is going to be the one :). We spent very little time with the 0.9 branch as many things for 0.10 are in motion. As we already said we planned to start using the automated testing, and this week, Tomas finally achieved to revive the testing suite, so we will slowly cover the source code by tests while working. Not only this is needed for the reasons already said, but we need to test all the otherwise hard to test corner cases in network communication logic that is Kuba giving the basic shape to. I'm now doing the hard work of fixing the small errors in determinism. I play the game, while it is saved periodically, then I have to start the replay wait for diversion from the original and find out why it happened by inspecting the differences in the saves. This is cumbersome process, as some of the inconsistencies are very hard to find, but after a few days and several bugfixes, I was able to replay the first tutorial mission without errors while certainly making a new world record of the time to finish the mission :) I gave myself approximately 1.5 hours daily to play computer games, and when playing these and reading Ideas and suggestions on our forums, it gives me so many ideas of what could be done. It is depressing to know, that all of these ideas, even when considering just the good ones, are just not possible to be made. Fight mechanics, alien pets, water-heating/cooling circuits, other planets, supplying orbit, satellites, ending of the game, different vehicles, airplanes, late-game rts controls of building and combat robot minions, equipment (as in armor) based blueprints for combat robots, enemy/neutral/allied survivors, after-landing phase where you have to take care of the people, caves and underground mining, armored trains, 20 different additions to circuit network, nuclear energy that is not just boiler that runs on uranium, 10 different enemies with different types of behaviours and attacks, different types of enemy bases, forests on fire, working eco-system, other downsides of pollution, snow areas with snow particles on machines, rare random Fallout-like encounters, different energy sources, advanced train controls, disasters, flowing rivers, more complex mechanics of armor equipment, ... I could continue like this for a long time. We have already Ideas & suggestions section on our forums, but it might be nice to have something more organised, so people could add their ideas and vote/discuss what they think should have priority, or maybe there is a way how to do it directly on the forum, ideas? I was also thinking, that we might do some kind of technical development blog posts like this one about Starcraft 1 as we are certainly facing some interesting challenges or hard decisions from time to time, would anyone be interested in that? The following picture is the new version of basic electric pole. The main reason for the change was to make it less obstruct the view of the tiles behind and to avoid having the cable and the pole fall loosely when the cable has vertical direction. We are always eager to learn what you think at our forums.