Hello, recently we had a lot of discussions on our forum about interaction with the community. You can have a look at the details . The result is that we have realized, we have done a poor job in providing updates about our progress. And we have decided to change it. This is a first blog post from the "Factorio Friday Facts" series. Every friday we will sum up our weekly progress here. This will include insights into what we have been working on, what is planned, sometimes art sneak peeks of course occasional fun facts from Indie game developers live. All right, let's have a look at what we have been up to in the past week. The single point of focus for the whole team has been finishing the 0.7.0 release. This release has taken the most development time so far. Partly because we were getting our attention together after the holidays and partly because there was a LOT of work to be done:) Actually most of the changes are under the hood (combat framework, AI routines, pollution modelling, etc.) but their results will be well visible in the game. Just a taste of what is coming. The biggest change is probably the overall shift in enemy logic. Before they were simply controlled by the lua script behind the scenario. Now they are more autonomous and integrated in the game. This is because of a new concept we have introduced - the pollution. Pollution is produced by the factory (mining drills, furnaces, etc.) and then spreads in the world. Some objects can actually lower pollution (for now only trees). After a while the deadly pollution clouds arrive to the enemy spawners. The spawners "clear" the pollution but in turn produce an "angry" biters (new name for our basic class of enemies). After certain period of time, all the angry biters from the local neighborhood are sent together to the closest local optimal pollution source to destroy everything that they find there. This follows a simple logic: you destroy their environment - they get angry - they attack you / your machines. For now there is no way to deal with the pollution in the "peaceful" way, but there will be in the future. You can imagine pollution clearing machines or even making pacts with enemies to tolerate pollution in exchange for providing them with supply of resources. Anyway this changes the game significantly. It is not enough to fortify the labs / radars now. You need to protect your whole factory / keep checking the pollution levels and examine from which direction the attack will come (the pollution is visible on the map after pressing the alt key). For Albert (our graphic) the release has been especially challenging because after months of working on machine design he had to completely shift his style and model the enemy units and structures. The result are three new biters and three worms taking up a lot of MBs in the package:) Last week Albert spent with the most difficult structure - the enemy spawner. In the end we didn't put it into the release, because it still needs to be tweaked and better integrated, but it is definitely coming in one of the following bugfix releases. Apart from that Albert also spent some time preparing a new set of selection boxes and arrows. He was correct that the old ones "were hurting the eyes". You can check an example of new boxes in the screenshot below (personally I am really fond of them, that is why I share them here). Since the release is rather big we have spent the last week mostly by fixing bugs and solving small remaining issues. AI behaviors are especially tricky to test because they are often not exact or easily reproducible. The final count of solved issues in the 0.7.0 has stopped at symbolic 111. Couple of them done at the very last moment:) After this sprint we will now take some rest over the weekend and start preparing the plans for the next update. Next month will be especially interesting because we will start actively preparing for the Steam greenlight campaign. This will require further graphical polishing in the game (namely player animation) and most importantly a new trailer. We already have couple of ideas and for sure we will discuss them with the community on the forums. And finally the fun fact. During release compilation on our Linux virtual machine we got an error: "Virtual memory exhaust, cannot allocate more memory". Factorio code is getting really big. So there is no Linux build until we fix this:| Well that would be it for now. The 0.7.0 release is actually out already, you can read more details on our forum . It is still experimental and it will probably take some time before it stabilizes, but if you don't mind the bugs then go ahead and give it a spin.
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.
Hello, Robert here again. It's time for the information I teased about in the previous Friday Facts edition.
Hello old time Factorio players and steam newcomers as well!
Click to view full resolution It has been 6 months and nearly 70 releases since we first launched 0.17 to the world. Now is the time to let it be enjoyed by all the players of the game. We are going to be continuing our work on 0.17 over the next few months, with small experimental releases of new features, and finishing all the GUI reworks.
Hello fellow builders, There is this commotion about the paid mods on Steam. (It had been cancelled already). I understand that the implementation was far from optimal, as people would be suddenly expected to pay for mods that were free until now. It was also sad, that the modders were to get only 25% percent of the money. But I personally think, that there is nothing wrong about the idea generally. If a reasonable price tag on a great mod allows the creator to develop the mod full time, create professional content, and people are willing to pay for it, everyone wins. Free mods would still exist so it would be up to the players to choose. I'm NOT saying we are going to allow paid mods for Factorio anytime soon. But I'm not denying this possibility in the far future.
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:
Color correction Albert, V453000 Factorio is in a state that even though is not yet finished, it is very close to its 1.0 version. That means that most of the work is done and we are polishing the game in order to make it bright. That's what we've been doing for the past 2 weeks. Literally making it bright. Since years I wanted to do this post-production work. But I didn't dare to do it until most of the graphics were finished. I was afraid of breaking the consistency of the look and our production pipeline. Now it's different. There's only a couple of entities to re-design and some other stuff to do, but in general this missing details are not affecting the possibility of working in the post-production. Factorio is a dark game. I mean conceptually. All these things about industrializing a planet, polluting an entire world just for the sake of the factory, and killing all its inhabitants are not precisely happy concepts full of light. This old article could explain better my thoughts regarding this concept. But the look of the game was dark, too dark. So we cleaned it up without betraying its spirit. Like restoring an old painting. The difference can be subtle, but very effective. We added more light, and a little bit of color saturation. Adding these general changes to the entire sprites collection is not an easy task. Many sprites were badly affected by this general correction. V453000 was fixing individually the broken sprites and icons in order to keep the consistency with the new context. We took the chance to work on the terrain a bit further. Not only this color correction was applied, but the contrast and integration with other terrains was also improved. Also experimenting with the color of the trees, trying to achieve a more colorful feeling with the excuse of an alien planet. I have to say the Alien Biomes mod was opening my mind - a little - to experiment with the color a bit further. In order to break this general brown feeling, we added a more orange tonality to the sand biome. Here is where you can see the difference more. Going further to too saturated colors is dangerous, after all, the terrain is a background that should provide a good and comfortable contrast with the entities and the icons. Touching terrain colours means touching map colors also. We were very keen to keep the visibility of the map information and the similarity with the terrain. The result is a more vibrant look in the entire game. We tweaked the night also. Thanks to posila and Wheybags, we can use LUTs (Look up tables) to dynamically modify the colors. Instead of playing with the alpha channel of a solid black layer on top of the game. Now we can gradually move to a different color palette for night with more control. So the colors are losing their saturation and becoming more blue and cold. This is important, because part of the annoying darkness of the game comes from this black layer. We are still experimenting with this LUT, and the transitions of day/night cycles. I'm pretty sure also that I will have to touch the map colors for some missing details and fine tuning. Possibly there is some entity that is not in its best shape with these new color palettes, and maybe we keep tweaking the terrain. But I feel very confident with these additions and I'm very sure that these changes will improve the experience of playing Factorio. After playing with these colors, the feeling is good. I hope you see it the same way.
Hello again Factorians! The GFX department is back today for covering the process of making graphics for Factorio. I'll get a bit technical, but not too much in order to don't be absolutely boring. Next comes a resumed description of the actual process, so if you are a Factorio modder this might be interesting for you.
