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Friday Facts #338 - The (real) Character GUI

Posted by Twinsen, Bilka on 2020-03-13

The Character GUI Twinsen It was 11 months ago when we first mentioned the new Character GUI, in FFF-289. After all that time, it's finally getting ready. Since you can expect to see it released sometime in the next 1 or 2 weeks, we would like to present a quick recap of the features and changes, and some real in-game screenshots. ​ The Character window is now split into 3 tabs. Logisitcs and auto-trash were moved from the central frame into a tab and a new tab called Character was added. Using inventory/stack transfers in the player inventory will transfer the items either to weapons and armor slots or to trash slots depending on the selected tab, regardless of item type. Logistics and auto trash are now merged into 1 panel. Using a double slider you can set an interval. If you have less than the first value, robots will bring more, if you have more than the second value, extra items will be auto-trashed and taken away by the robots. The double pop-up and extra confirm might seem strange, but it's made this way to solve the problem of robots bringing you items before you finished setting up your request. With the merging of requests and auto-trash, we also made it so you can now set an unlimited number of requests, regardless of research. Furthermore, everything is unlocked in one research: unlimited logistic requests, auto trash, and 30 trash slots are all unlocked by the "Logistic robotics" research that is at blue science. Searching now not only searches the recipe GUI, but also the inventory and logistic requests. By popular demand, we also added a switch to quickly turn personal logics on or off. Turning off personal logistics will stop logistic robots from bringing requested items. It will also stop items from automatically being moved to the trash slots. Logistic robots will continue to empty the trash slots. Since the recipe GUI has a new style, we also updated the look of the filter, item, circuit signal, and upgrade selection GUI styles. Some of the other GUIs in the game will have some visual issues due to the mix of old and new styles. My next step will be to fix these issues as soon as the Character GUI is released. Looking back, this GUI took 13 months and 3 programmers (working alternatively) to implement. This is excluding mockups and UX design. It's a long story, but one thing that's obvious is that the GUI scope has grown far beyond what our codebase is capable of. For this reason, we won't be focusing obsessing that much on the GUI in the future. We will finalize the transition of styles, fix obvious issues and low hanging fruits, and try to get everything at a consistent level of quality for 1.0. This new Character GUI and changes will likely affect some mods, especially those relying on logistic technologies, logistic slot related APIs, old style definitions, etc. Thankfully a lot of mods will be unaffected, so we hope it won't be too much disruption. Still, we wanted to give some forewarning.

Friday Facts #124 - Steam Status I

Posted by Tomas on 2016-02-05

Hi there, the Steam date is looming and we haven't been sitting with the hands in our lap just waiting. So here comes a report of what is going on and what will change with the Steam release on 25th of Feb 2016. The Price We have decided that the Steam release is a good opportunity to adjust the price of the game. The referential game price will be set to 20€ / 20$ (well 19.95$ because that is how Steam rolls). Steam has a feature of providing different pricing in different countries and we will probably follow their recommended pricing in this regard. Which means that in countries with generally lower purchasing power the game might be cheaper than that. The game price at the webpage will be set to 20€ as well to match the Steam referential price. There are couple of reasons for increasing the price. But the most important ones are: We feel the game is closing a stable and feature rich state that justifies such a price (judging by other games in the market). Scenario pack will become part of the basegame which adds more content (see details below). Naturally Steam will take their share from every copy sold for distributing the game (however this is expected to be more than offset by the amount of potential new players). We need $$$ for world domination=) And besides houses in the Hawaii have become more expensive lately ... So the bottom line is: if you have a friend who is still hesitant about buying the game now and the price difference would matter to him / her, let him / her know =) The Keys Every user who has bought some version of our membership will have a possibility to get a Steam key for the game. This will most probably be implemented via an interface at our website. What I have in mind is a simple form in the User profile page which will assign a Steam key upon request (clicking the request button=)). This functionality is not yet programmed but it will be done very soon and available together with the Steam launch. Steam doesn't have a web api to generate Steam keys, but we will prefetch a (hopefully) substantial amount of those and then assign them to users automatically from this batch. Our current approach is that the player's account at the website will co-exist with the Steam account (if requested). That means that player can download the game from our webpage or via the Steam. His / her choice. This is provided as a convenience for the existing players and the generated Steam keys are not meant to be distributed / given / sold to other people. We will put a clause about this into Terms & Conditions. In case that a significant portion of Steam keys would be given away / sold to other people then we reserve the right to alter the approach. One option would be that the game would be available via Steam or via our webpage but not both. Hopefully that won't be necessary=). We haven't made a decision yet, whether unpaid memberships will be able to get the steam key as well. This includes memberships given out for free in promotions (i.e. over the Youtube, Twitch) and testing in the early stages of development. If you are unsure what your membership is, you can check it out at your profile page when logged in. The Scenario Pack Starting with the game release on Steam, the Scenario Pack will be distributed together with the basic game itself. This is quite a big change=) Our motivations are following: We believe that Scenario pack contains some really interesting content that gives prominence to different aspects of the game than the Campaign and the Freeplay. Exposing this to wider audience feels right. Having the Scenario Pack in the base package (and not as a paid content) takes away some pressure for updating it. Though we still have ideas for additional scenarios / mini campaigns. Adding the Scenario Pack gives more justification to increased price. The Tiers & The Content There will be no tiers on Steam. There will simply be one package with the game itself, which will also include the content of the scenario pack. The wallpapers will be made public for download. The 0.12 features a new soundtrack. We plan to make this available for purchase as a standalone DLC. This is meant for users who want to support us and our music composer beyond the scope of the game. This is probably all there will be available to begin with. We might add a possibility to get the name in the game as DLC in the future, but that is not decided yet. On our webpage the tiers will be reduced to Transport Belt Repair Man (might lose the fancy name and become just "The Package"). This will be the game itself with the content of the scenario pack (same as on Steam). It is not clear yet if we sell the soundtrack as DLC on our webpage as well. These changes come partly from the incentive to have the same content available on the Steam as on our webpage. Also there has been little attention from our side to update the content in the Furnace Attendant and Mining Drill Operator tiers. For instance the wallpapers or the graphical handbook are ridiculously outdated. We really appreciate players who have supported us by purchasing these tiers, however we feel that most of that additional content has become obsolete and it is time for a goodbye or reintegration to the basic game (as in case of scenario pack). The Marketing Scott has moved to Prague and has been working with us in our office since the beginning of this week. He has been spending most of his time reaching out to youtubers / streamers / bloggers and other potential marketing sources. Basically we are trying to prepare a sort of a "general public hit" alongside the Steam release. Even though we are directly "pushing the game out there" we would still appreciate the help from you guys, the community. We will be sending out a "call to arms" email when the game has launched officially notifying existing players that the game is now available on Steam. When the game has launched, it would be great to see existing players come over to leave a review, help out new players from Steam or invite their friends to join them for a game of Multiplayer. However if there is something you feel you could do to help promote the game even before it launches on Steam (i.e. recommending it to your favorite youtuber) that would be of a great help too. The Trailers As announced earlier, to celebrate the Steam launch we have decided to make another trailer. This new trailer (we call it Trailer 3 or Gameplay Trailer) is a collection of mostly real scenes from the game giving the taste of how the game is actually played. After heroic effort coming mostly from Albert, this has been finished by now. It will be made public on the launch. Something for you guys to look forward=) The current trailer has been visually (and a bit in terms of content as well) improved and will also be made public with the game launch. We call this one Trailer 2 or the Teaser, because it gives a taste of what the game is about. And to add a bit of nostalgy, do many of you still remember the very first trailer (Trailer 1) which we made for the Indiegogo campaign? It was made in less than a week and then re-made within a few hours before the launch of the crowdfunding campaign (which happend at 8 a.m. after a sleepless night). Some of the phrases (voiceovered by a polish narrator) became kind of memes at a time (i.e. "fix fings"). Oh boy, that feels like in another life=) The Bonus Screen So to compensate for the wall of text below is a screenshot of one of the upcoming features in the 0.13. We have added a little side gui that will provide clickable shortcuts for couple of existing windows (i.e. Main Menu, Production Statistics) and couple of new windows. One of them is the Bonus Screen. This shows what Bonuses has the player researched / obtained. This is quite useful information which was not avaiable until now. Next week will be more focused on new features we are working for in 0.13. And it is imho quite interesting stuff, so stay tuned. To keep up with the tradition, if there is anything you would like us to know, join the discussion at the forums.

Friday Facts #212 - The GUI update (Part 1)

Posted by Twinsen on 2017-10-13

A long time ago, in FFF-191 I wrote about improving the GUI. Well, things are finally starting to move, so this week I'll bring you an update on that. We even have a GUI team: Twinsen(me): UX and programming Albert: UI, graphical design, layouts, mockups, UX Rseding91: main programming and GUI internals The plan is to go through the entire game's GUI (including main menu, all entity GUIs and all game windows) and improve it both visually and interaction wise. This is quite a huge undertaking because: Factorio's interactions are quite complex If you count all the entity windows and panels, we have about 120 windows to go through in the game. Mods can change many aspects of the game so we have to account for that to make sure windows still look good and are still easy to use: e.g. having 15+ recipe categories, having assembling machines with 20+ module slots, having recipes with 20+ ingredients, having players with 200+ inventory slots, etc. Many players are already used to interacting with the game in a specific way, so any major changes are hard to make. Our GUI back-end (heavily modified AGUI) is not exactly well written, programmer-friendly, or feature-rich. Many of the features and polishing we want to add were not done previously due to their programming complexity. At the moment we are still early in the project, just defining the style and the concepts. During the next months, I'll try to make a series of FFF talking about the improvements we are making (starting with this one) so you can see how the project progresses, and offer feedback along the way. Everything I mentioned in FFF-191 will be there, but we have even more cool improvements coming to the toolbar that we are working on, so today I'll talk about something else: the new train/locomotive GUI. Disclaimers: Everything you see are mockups made by Albert and are not from the game, but we will try to make it look almost identical in game. The style (colors and look) is not final. This is the 3rd iteration and Albert is still experimenting with making everything look nice. The purpose of these mockups are mostly to define the layout and interaction. This is how the new Locomotive GUI will look. As you notice, apart from the style changes, they way the stations and conditions are shown is very different, but I'd say much more intuitive, informative, and easy to use. Let's go through a short use case. You click add station and the list of stations appears. You can add a station by clicking on the station in the list or by clicking it in the small map. The map can be zoomed and moved around so you can easily find your station. Also, as you hover over stations in the list, the map will show their location. The stations marked differently are unreachable from the train's current position. This way you can more easily recognize and possibly ignore stations outside of the current network. Once you click a station, it is added to the schedule, along with a default condition. You can continue adding more stations, or add/edit the conditions for the new station. Finally a schedule can look something like this. The path of the train will be shown. We will try to paint the path the train is taking at the moment, it will change as the train takes different paths. The fuel can be accessed from the separate tab and the color of the locomotive can be changed using the color picker. The buttons in top of the map, from left to right are as follows: Turn station names on or off. Change the angle of the station names. Switch to map view. Switch to camera view. Center view on the train. The small 'info' button you see on the right side will be a help button we will use throughout the game to help explain how different GUI work and when their elements mean. We will write more about this in some of the next parts of the FFF GUI update series. We also want to add a neat tool for advanced players. Control-clicking on any point on the locomotive's map (or any station) will add a 'Temporary stop' to it's schedule. The train will try to go as close as it can to that point, wait a few seconds and finally automatically remove the 'Temporary stop' from it's schedule. This is very useful for quick transportation. It also allows you to quickly 'hijack' an existing train and use it to get somewhere, since the 'Temporary stop' will be deleted and the train's normal schedule will be resumed. Another quality of life improvement will be a game option to automatically add some fuel from the player inventory when building vehicles (car, tank or locomotive), making rail transportation as simple as placing a locomotive on a rail, entering it and control-clicking where you want to go. We hope you like the proposed changes. No doubt things will change as we implement and playtest these changes, but we thought it would be interesting to show you an early preview. Finally the million dollar question is when will this be in game? Because it's quite a bit of work we already pushed the GUI update to 0.17. On the bright side, this mean 0.16 will come a bit sooner. Let us know what you think by commenting in our usual topic at the forums.

Friday Facts #139 - Wrapping Up MP UI

Posted by Tomas on 2016-05-20

Hello everybody, the work on the 0.13 is slowly getting to the final phase and hence it feels like a good time to give an overview of actual multiplayer changes that have been implemented over past couple of weeks. This is a recap and extension of a FFF post that mentioned the Multiplayer improvements while there were in progress.

Friday Facts #176 - Belts optimization for 0.15

Posted by Harkonnen on 2017-02-03

Hi everyone. About half a year ago whenever I was sitting deeply in Factorio and when I needed to spend time in my phone, I was reading FFF or Factorio forum. Later when I decided to move - I suddenly realized that Wube is the most logical target to apply my crazy mind. All thanks to those FFF and you guys. Now I am writing another FFF myself which, looking back at those times, gives me ripping apart feelings (which I believe is a good thing :)).

Friday Facts #220 - The best Friday Facts ever

Posted by Twinsen on 2017-12-08

Christmas is coming early for Factorio fans. We have a lot of exciting things to show you and announce this week, so hold on tight.

Friday Facts #303 - Under 100 bugs (but still not stable)

Posted by Klonan on 2019-07-12

Under 100 bugs We have a record low in our bug report forum, of only 55 active bug reports. I don't think in the history of Factorio the bug forum has been so clean. No doubt once we mark 0.17 as stable the count will shoot up again. For this weeks graph I added the count of players on Steam as the left axis. We thought it would be somewhat interesting to see if there is any correlation between the two. Note: The axis have different scales. I also prepared the same graph but for the duration of the 0.17 release. You can see our player numbers are dropping quite a lot, from the all time peak of 22,457 on the 3rd of March 2019. While bug reports might be at an all time low, we are not going to call the game stable yet. We still have an important milestone to reach, that is, implementing the new Introduction campaign graphics (FFF-301). A lot of the team has been on vacation these last few weeks, including the whole campaign team and most of the art department. What this means is that we expect it will be a few more weeks before we can call the current version stable. We have been asked a few times when stable will be released, but my question is, why does it matter exactly which version we call stable? Are you waiting for stable to play a new playthrough? The thing is, this stable is only going to be the 'first' stable. Our plan is to have a number of short experimental phases after the first stable, where we will add new GUI's and such, which will add bugs and technical debt. After fixing the bugs in a 'small' experimental content release, we will then mark that as the 'new' 0.17 stable. Besides, there are still a few edge cases with signals that kovarex is busy fixing: For instance the setup above took him 3 hours to fix. The cause of the issue was that the segment has both an incoming and outgoing signal at the same position.

Friday Facts #88 - Combinators

Posted by Robert on 2015-05-29

This week's Friday Facts is brought to you by Robert, also known as that guy from Romania. I'll be talking a bit about the feature I've been working on: the Combinators. The post is very fresh: Albert worked overnight to bring you the awesome combinator graphics and I integrated them in the game just minutes ago.

Friday Facts #289 - Character GUI

Posted by Albert, Aleš, twinsen, kovarex, Klonan on 2019-04-05

Hello, we are still focusing most of our resources towards fixing as many bugs as possible so we have stable release in reasonable time. In the meantime, the preparation for the continuation of the work on the GUI rewrite is still happening:

Friday Facts #414 - Spoils of Agriculture

Posted by V453000 on 2024-06-07

Hello, last week you've seen how Gleba looks, it's time to get a glimpse of what you can do there. With the idea of being a biological planet full of life, it seems reasonable to expect our engineer is about to harvest some of that. We already have ways of harvesting nature, specifically trees. On Nauvis we either just hit them with an axe enough times, or later our construction robots take care of that friendly forest devastation. These tools aren't quite up to speed to be a part of a mass-production chain in our factories, though... Both of the Nauvis methods are initiated manually so not the best for automation, and the trees don't grow back - so once an area has been harvested, you need to move your operation further.