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.

Hi everyone, Two months went pass like that and I am back from south India to the winterish Prague. I had a great time full of Yoga, relaxation, new experiences and of course occasional remote work on Factorio over frustratingly bad internet connection. Now my (and whole teams) focus is clear: stabilize the multiplayer, finish the endgame content and prepare the game for Steam release.

Hello, This past weekend we beat our previous record of most simultaneous players with a peak player count on Steam of 22,457 players, and no doubt another couple thousand playing the non-Steam version.

Good evening everyone, it is almost 1 year since the end of our Indiegogo campaign. The beginning of the campaing was kind of gloomy and hopeless, after one week we were ready to resign the whole project and we both even had a programming job in reserve. But eventually things turned around and thanks to many awesome people supporting us, we managed to finish the campaign sucessfully and continue working on Factorio fulltime. That is the "well known history" and you can read more about it in the older blog posts. What is less known is what happened after the campaign. The end of the campaign made us actually over confident at the time. We felt that all is going to be easy peasy since then. We were wrong once again. We had to go through some rough times, often balancing close to the zero on our bank account with the game being not more than "an interesting proof of concept". The original estimate was that the game would be finished by the summer of 2013, simply because the summer seemed like far enough in the future back then in February. Now we believe that if we try hard enough, the game could be "finished" by summer 2015 (because that DOES look like far enough in the future :)), but better not to make any estimates ... So these days it is a bit of balancing time for us, comparing to where we were a year ago. The "now" is definitely winning (except for the compilation times). The efforts to stabilize the 0.9 release have continued this week as well. We want the 0.9.2 to be a "stable release candidate", that means it should have all the major reported bugs fixed and the campaings and scenario pack must be working. This is not ready at the moment, therefore we will wait with the 0.9.2 release till sometimes in the next week. Also recently we have spent quite some time on administrative tasks - namely working out the taxes and also going through the application process for accepting credit cards on our website (let's keep the fingers crossed that paymill will give us a green light in the end). Albert has been busy (as usual) and productive (as usual as well). We decided to spend some time repairing our graphical debts and redo the most common entities that were done before our artistic direction has been established. First in the row was the assembling machine. You can say goodbye to "tint abuse" that was used to produce two extra levels from a single assembling machine animation. Now there are three separate animations with different movement mechanisms in the top part. The preview of animations is shown below. The problem is that the less "old style" (and non-fitting) objects there are in the game, the more visible they are compared to the rest. This makes the inserters and transport belts next candidates for re-skinning ... If you like the new assembling machines (and even if you don't), then tell us about it on our forum.