Electric mining drill redesign Ernestas & V453000 The electric mining drill is one of the older designs still in the game, and we have had our eye on it for a long time as a candidate for redesign. We would have loved to rework the mining drill in 0.15 when we added high resolution graphics and the pipe patch for it, but we had many nuclear related graphics to do for 0.15, so we just did the necessary minimum and postponed the full redesign. Now was finally the time we could unleash Ernestas onto it.
The programmable speaker There has always been some talk around the office about a music box that can be used to make simple sounds, you could even connect it to the circuit network and make simple songs. I put it on my long list of circuit network ideas, and in the past few week it has been coming to life. So today I'll be talking about an exciting new entity coming in 0.15: the Programmable Speaker. It was designed to do two main things: Show configurable GUI alerts and play audio alerts based on circuit conditions. Play audio samples as controlled by the circuit network in a way that simple songs can be created. The entity graphics are placeholder programmer graphics. Let's start with the useful part, it's pretty straightforward. You set your circuit condition, set the sound you want it to make, set whether the sound should be heard in that part of the factory or across the entire map and add an optional GUI alert message. When the circuit condition is true, the speaker will play the selected sound and show the optional GUI alert. You can let the sound play continuously or use simple combinator logic to make the sound at custom intervals. And now that fun part. We knew we wanted the Programmable Speaker to be able to make simple songs. Crazy ideas started to pour in, and it was quickly becoming a full-blown music production DAW with custom synthesizers and control over everything. But this has to be easily controlled by the circuit network without having to build real-time computers with combinators. So in the end I made the Programmable Speaker work as a step sequencer. If you send a circuit network signal pulse, an audio sample will start playing, otherwise nothing will happen. There is no control over the sample length or any special effects, but this means it is quite easy to control it using the circuit network. Enough talk. Here is a demo of a song made using the samples already included. Everything you hear is created inside Factorio. I will leave it to you to analyze the video and figure out how the song is generated. Modders can easily add more audio samples to the entity, including custom alerts. I imagine there will be a voice pack mod that could be programmed using combinators to speak things like "Crude oil is low". I'm sure the Programmable Speaker will be part of some very interesting posts on the Factorio Reddit. There are some other circuit network improvements coming to 0.15, but I will talk more about them in some other FFF. The map download struggle (Technical) For as long as I can remember, our multiplayer map downloader had (among other problems) the problem that it would get stuck at 100%. It was an extremely rare problem some random person would report. We would keep ignoring the bug throwing it in "Pending" or "Duplicates" or "1/0 Magic", but after a few months some other person would report it again. I seem to have a habit of obsessing over these rare "unfixable" bugs (audio mixer crashing, vsync performance issues, non-pixel-perfect sprite drawing), so I started looking into this map downloader issue. First I was looking at the map downloader code itself, thinking surely there is something wrong there. This was a long process because I had no way of reproducing the issue, so it usually involved going back and forth with a person who was experiencing the issue. I would create an executable that would create detailed logs, that person would run the game using that, I would investigate the logs and see that our map downloader works correctly. The I would add more logging and so on. By the time I would reach some kind of conclusion that person would stop answering and probably stop playing Factorio. But near the end thanks to some helpful players, I was able to see what was happening. Looking at the wireshark capture for both the client and the server, it seems that a packet with a specific content or a specific checksum always gets filtered. Some cheeky firewall from the computer, router or ISP is looking inside the packet data and blocking the packets it does not like. No matter how many times I resend that packet, it never gets through, while all the other hundreds of thousands of game and map packets have no problem getting through. Correct me if I'm wrong, but something like this should not be happening. You can read all the details and see the packet data last posts of the forum topic. The issue seems to be resolved if I add one byte of random data to the packet, but I would like to know why is this happening in the first place. If you know what is happening or you know someone that might, please don't hesitate to enlighten us :) This shows how hard it is to make software that "just works" for everyone. There will always be that 0.1% of people who end up having problems that no one could have ever foreseen. Big thanks to admalledd, dadymax, Rippie and the other forum members who helped or are still helping me investigate this odd issue. In other good news, while Rseding91 was also looking at the map download code trying to investigate this problem, he found we had some slow code doing hard drive seeking, slowing down map uploads. He improved it and you should see better map transfer speeds on LAN and high speed connections. As usual, let us know what you think at the forums.
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!
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.
The GUI update (Part II) - Technology tree Today we will speak a bit about the work in progress of the Technology tree, and the main GUI style/philosophy evolution. The visual style is evolving and becoming more mature. The aim is to be as functional as possible, and also be pleasant to interact with, always having in mind the limitations of making it work in our engine. This is why we bet for a neutral and sober look that helps to focus on the relevant elements, without the distraction of possible decorative elements. This is not easy to decide, because the tradition of video-games is very rich in decorative GUI elements, and I'm sure that many of you would prefer having screws and rust in the corners of the metal panels and cables hanging everywhere in the GUI. Me too. Sometimes. I believe that once the GUI is completely functional, there will be some minimal decoration and this kind of fantasy, but this will be another chapter if it ever happens. We are paying a lot of attention to the readability in general, according to the AAA standards of the WCAG. So the contrast with the panels and the font is increased quite a lot compared to previous mock-ups by simply using a contrast checker. Also the font size is increased by 2pt so it is more comfortable to read. Anyway, the user will have control of the font size in the options menu. Bear in mind that the next mock-ups are a work in progress, and we still developing our standards, so some colours and solutions can vary through further iterations.
Hello, this is the last Friday of 2017, and as such, the last Friday facts of this year.
Removing RTL language translations Wheybags I'm sorry to say that we have removed the RTL language translations (Hebrew and Arabic) in 0.17.20. Until this point we've had a half implementation of RTL languages, where the text is simply flipped when we download it from Crowdin. This 'works' for a decent proportion of things, but not nearly 100%. In order to attain the level of polish we want for the 1.0 release, we would need to spend a lot of time implementing proper support for RTL layouts. This just doesn't make sense for us given our current goals, and the proportion of our player base which uses these languages (less than 0.1%). We decided that instead of completely gutting the translations, we could leave them in for those who enjoy them, but not to offer them in the GUI as defaults. The languages will remain up on Crowdin, and the locale files will still be present in game, but there will be no option in the in-game language options dialog to choose them. If you want to use an RTL language, you will have to manually edit your config file to set your locale. Detailed instructions are available on our forum. What this also means, is that we won't be investigating any bug reports about RTL issues.
Hello, I can't believe that we have been able to produce a post every Friday for 200 weeks without missing a single one. To be honest I'm not sure if this isn't the right time to pause for a while, to avoid being this kind of show that gets worse and worse over time until it is so bad that you want to take your intestines and strangle yourself with them. But people in the office convinced me with arguments like "FFF is the only good thing we have", so we probably have to continue for a little longer.
