Hello, the bugfixing period boringly continues, we got down to 159 active bug reports, so in few weeks we should be finally down with this burden. But at least the graphics department has something new to show:

Hello, some people spend St. Valentines with their wives, some people spend St. Valentines with their girlfriends and some people spend St. Valentines making the Factorio release. The last group is us. We have been preparing the 0.9 release for a while now. Originally it was planned for the end of January, but we took the two extra weeks. That seemed like a lot of time back then:) Last weekend all looked smooth and easy, all the features were finished, we started playtesting. No major issues, the oil industry felt like a refreshing addition to the game, blueprints were blueprinting and the sky was blue (literally). However somehow during the week it started falling apart - a lot of small bugs came up, some more balancing, half a day here, half a day there and BANG suddenly it was Friday morning. With the last graphical piece (the chemical plant) still on the way, some non-trivial reworks done yesterday and a staring list of bugs on the forum the outlook was bleak. But we put ourselves together and made the sprint necessary to deliver the 0.9.0 as promised. The 0.9.0 will probably be "very experimental" which is a diplomatic way to say that we expect a lot of bugs to come up:) Heck, we were fixing the bugs all day long. We considered to postpone the release for a couple of days but we promised to deliver it this Friday and a lot of people were waiting for it joking about cancelling their dates to play the game, etc. So it is out now, if you are brave enough then go ahead and try it. The oil industry brings the oil spills, the pumpjacks, the refineries and a recipe redesign. We took the opportunity to do some more significant changes to other existing recipes as well. We went after having more "meaningful" intermediate products than before. The car will require an engine, the robots will need a flying robot frame, the rocket is made from the explosives and the list goes on ... . The feeling from the internal playtesting was more interesting gameplay compared to before when everything was made from the iron plates and circuits. However the result will be that most of the existing factories will just stop working. You can either take it as a challenge to get it up the speed or just start the new game :) Albert hasn't slept that much in the past few days. Last night he hasn't slept at all while he was finishing the chemical plant. Even today instead of taking the rest he gathered his energy and prepared a special Valentine's composition. It is called "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre". Today is no exception, we are waiting for your comments at our forum.

A few bugs left... WoW classic has been released, which means several of our top men have taken time off to spend hours raiding and having fun in Azeroth. This isn't great timing, as a few new bugs related to train signals appeared. We want to get these bugs solved before we do another release (another stable candidate). As it turns out, the only person with the skillset to fix these specific train signal bugs is also deep into levelling his Priest... (Kov on Pyrewood Village) We are still making the rest of the preparations for the stable release. We have started writing up the stable annoucement blog post, and have produced a 0.17 postcard image. Other than the few more critical rail bugs, there doesn't look like there is much else to block the stable release, on the forum we are down to 27 bugs. Since there are so few bugs left to deal with, some of the team has starting working on 'post-stable' features. Wheybags is working on the new campaign, Oxyd is diving into some detailed pathfinder improvements, and Rseding has started work on some particle optimizations. We will delve deeper into these topics and more in future FFFs, as we always love to do.

Hello, another Friday means another Friday update. The main theme of the week has been again the bug fixing. The result of our efforts is the 0.7.2 release which came out yesterday. There were more than 25 bugs fixed in the release. As the experience have shown, releases often take 3-4 iterations to stabilize. Therefore we still sort of expect one more release to stabilize the 0.7:) Along with the coding, the works continue on the new terrain. Albert has finished with the dry dirt and he is now experimenting with patterns for other kinds of terrains like grass or snow. We are aiming for at least two "biomes" combining similar kinds of terrains. The terrain is quite a different task from modelling the machines or the enemies. Therefore there is a lot of researching and experiments involved. Kuba has provided a big help to Albert by generating various noises and tileable patterns for him to work with. There is some good news regarding our team as well. Albert has been staying with us in our apartment (which became an improvized office) for the past month and the half. His presence here in Prague has been really beneficial to our progress on the visuals of the game. Things are moving much faster than before. So the news is that this week Albert rented an apartment for himself and his girlfriend here in Prague. It is situated in the middle of the city close to the historical center. It looks really nice and cosy. They might stay for the whole winter:) After the 0.7 release we got some complaints that the game is using too much video memory. Some players couldn't even load the game for this reason. The 0.7.2 fixes this by providing the low resolution mode (in the graphics settings, needs a restart). In this mode, some of the sprites are scaled down before loading into the atlas. The resulting quality is lower, but the game will fit within 256MB video memory. You can compare how the game looks in low resolution (left) and normal mode below. The difference is naturally most visible when you zoom in. Enabling the multisampling will improve the quality and make the low resolution mode look real close to the regular one. Last but not least, we have started with the new trailer. So far we put together some basic ideas for the scenes and started preparing the map where the trailer will be created. Actually the trailer will be a regular Factorio scenario so after it is finished anyone can load it and "replay" it directly in the game (except for the music though). As usual you can post comments regarding this post at our forum.

Hi everyone, wednesday (28th of October) was a national holiday here in Czech republic (commemorating the creation of standalone Czechoslowakian republic in the 1918). Still, quite a few of us came to the office. The atmosphere was relaxed (even more than usual) and in the afternoon some people played the recently popular Keep talking and nobody explodes game. It is amazing to see how creative people can get (talking about the creators)=) IMHO this project shows a bright side of indie games scene: good idea + good execution => good fun. Back to the Factorio reality=) In the past two weeks we have increased the frequency of the bugfixing releases. There were a few silly bugs that were created while fixing other things. Thanks for bearing with us. The general mood is to just finish the 0.12 so we can get it off our plate. Kovarex + 2 - 3 people are still focused on the 0.12 while others are either wrapping up other smaller tasks or have started working on some 0.13 stuff already.

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 everyone, The preparation for the next release (the 0.8) are in the full speed. Original expected release date was today, but we are not ready yet. It will take at least two to three more weeks. Especially the graphical work on the new terrain has proved to be more trickier than we expected. Last week we had some good sales driven mostly by the people from the US. That had a very positive effect both on our credit balance but more importantly on our moral strength. We have been working on Factorio for a long time with a lot of uncertainty regarding the outcome. We keep getting moral boost from people on our forums but actually selling the game feels great. The absolute numbers were not staggering (the peak was at around 50 sold copies per day) but for us they were still high above average (usually it is like 10 copies per day). So the mood is better now, we even went out for some social activities this week. Back to the programming. The repair robots mentioned in the last post are done. Michal is fast:) He spent past couple of days with smaller tasks we had on the list for a while. Now he is fiddling with "ghost" entities (transparent outlines of entities without bounding box). These will be used for reconstructing entities that has been completely destroyed and in the future also for the blueprints. I have spent most of the time from the past week improving the map editor. We have quite a few mods for Factorio, but very little maps / scenarios. The people on the forums asked for the better editor multiple times, so we listened to them. Also during the work on the trailer I confirmed just how big pain it is to use the map editor. Now on to the features. I have a list full of things that need to be done, but couple of most important ones are: Terrain painting - before only one tile at a time could have been changed. Now there is a brush with different sizes that can change the surface pretty fast. Laying out the resource fields - The biggest pain in the old editor. Resources had to be laid out one by one and then manually increased by holding a specified key. Now the brush or spray can be used to do that in matter of seconds. Creating forests - Not so common, but still time consuming. Creating big forests one tree at a time will be a history by using a brush to draw many trees at once. Copying entity strutures - Moving a part of the factory 10 tiles to the right is not possible now. The plan is to allow some sort of selection and copy-pasting that selection to other place on the map. Inventory manipulation - Chests can be filled only one stack at a time now. I still don't know how, but this will be improved. From the above list the first two tasks are finished already. The rest is work in progress but will be ready for 0.8:). The map editor early preview is below. The tabs at the top left represent different layers(terrain, tiles, entities, items). Below is the tool list. The active tool is the spray which I used to spray the coal field. The usual thread for comments is on our forum.

Hi there, after a hectical sprint, the 0.8.0 release is done. We have continuously reported on the progress, so the content of the release won't be a big surprise. Still, you can checkout the release notes on our forums. And if you are brave enough you can even try it out. The thing is that considering the circumstances the release will be "very" experimental. We have fixed all the major errors and crashes we came acrros. But still there were plenty of changes under the hood in non-trivial areas (namely the logistic system) so there are a lot of potential places for error. Just a reminder, you need to set "Enable experimental updates" in the "Other settings" for the builtin updater to update your version to 0.8.0. After a major release we usually take a day or two off. This time it will be no exception. Moreover it was Kovarex's birthday yesterday, so today in the evening we will have a party in our place. After the headaches are gone, the place is clean again and we recharge our batteries, we will be after the (supposedly found) bugs in 0.8 and planning the 0.9. It is kind of a never ending story:). The last bigger feature we worked on for the 0.8 was the Roboport. That is the "home" for the logistic and construction robots, where they can charge, station and which navigates them on the map. This neatly solves some issues there were with the logistic system before: Balancing - Roboport requires quite some energy to charge the robots. So the Logistic Robots will be less overpowered than they have been. Stationing - In the past robots without orders kept hanging at the place where they stopped. This was annoying and even caused robots to become a target for enemies after they delivered stuff to the player's inventory. Now every robot that has nothing to do goes to the roboport to station there. Area Separation - Before, all the logistic robots could fly all over the map. From the base to the expansion if necessary. Following the player fighting the enemy bases, etc. This was also less than desirable. Now the connections between the roboports define separate logistic networks which can't be mixed. This way, small independent systems can be setup in the expansions and one large network in the main base for instance. And on top of all that the roboports look really cool:D Albert happily took the break from the terrain and made a great machine in a short amount of time. You can checkout the "making of" animation below. Some of the instructional pictures in the demo were getting really outdated. So we replaced them with setups with the current graphics. Below is a side-by-side comparison for the instruction on how to use inserters from some months ago and from now. The last picture is the courtesy to Kovarex's grandmother, who made this wonderful cake for his birthday. The tradition is the commenting thread on our forum.

Hello, We had a lovely surprise waiting us this Monday, one of our fans had sent us a delicious cake: It didn't last very long... Thank you very much Conn! It certainly helped with the bug fixing push this week.

Hello, I will start today's Factorio friday facts with a famost quote: Only two things are infinite. The universe and the Factorio map. But i'm unsure about the Factorio map. Albert Einstein.