Hello, the 1.1 release is the final release of the vanilla game. It will be maintained, so bugfixes, simple modding interface additions, or minor tweaks can happen, but that's about it.
The Beacon Redesign V453000 The Beacon is one of the last entities that don’t have high resolution graphics yet. In the rather recent FFF-339, Albert presented the updated and redesigned Beacon. After your responses we realized some issues we hadn’t seen with the Beacon before, and we have taken some time to think about it... The red tower design by itself is very impressive, which gave it so many plus points that we didn't focus enough on the fact that it is taking too much visual attention. In this case, this happens because of aggressive red colours, the big contrasty yellow eye-like circle, the entity being quite tall, and the electric beam animation. Random variations are usually helpful to make entities look nicer in clumps (like resources), but not in this case, especially as other built entities don’t have any variations. The options to take from here would be to either update the original design, adjust the red tower, or start a new redesign. The Beacon is a very special entity, either it doesn’t appear in a factory at all or very little, or it’s everywhere. It doesn’t really do anything by itself so it doesn’t really need to show much activity either. The original design has its own problems and also saturates the screen very quickly, as they are bright, also tall, and they always move, attracting attention to the movement constantly. As for the red tower, most of the top part would have to be removed which is almost a complete redesign already, but parts of the hole could be recycled for a new version... We chose to start a new redesign, with the design goal of the Beacon trying to take much less attention.
Water animation - Concept Albert Since the very beginning of the project, we have focused a lot in the side of the factory, providing better designs for the machines, and expressive animations that give a sense of life and credibility in this area. We put a lot of effort also in the environmental side, adding different tile sizes, improving textures, adding doodads, cliffs, trees, decals, and constantly improving the map generation for a better feeling. But apart from biters and the factory, nothing else moves in this Factorio planet. So the environment is nice looking but it feels somehow unreal due this lack of motion. Today we proudly present the first experiment in this area: Animated water. This animation doesn't try to grab your attention, it's just there. Slowly moving. I personally bet that this animation, with the proper sound design, will provide the natural feeling that the planet needs.
A week in the office This week is another week of typical bug fixing, so I thought we would make a one-time change of style and do a day-by-day account of what exactly that means for us.
Hello, We have another exciting batch of facts for you today.
It's been over 4 years since we planned the infamous GUI update. If all goes well, next week the game will get the last big GUI update for 1.0. While the state of the GUI is not close to our crazy plans we recently had for the GUI, it's above what we initially planned 4 years ago. The update you will see next week includes: A visual update to over 100 game GUIs New high resolution icons for all game items (visible both in GUI and in the world) New GUI sounds for most interactions
Playtesting kovarex We have been playtesting a few days this week. There were some things we had to fix on the fly, but we still were able to play quite a lot, so I would say that it went surprisingly well. We have been able to get 3 multiplayer bases into a late game stage.
The release (kovarex) So we finally released the 0.17 experimental this week. (patch notes) Hooray :) Fun fact: The release script failed to post the release announcement on Steam and Reddit and we were wondering why. The reason is that the patch notes were so big, that it exceeded the maximum post size (40k characters). If this isn't the indication that we should split our releases into smaller chunks, than nothing is :). Code wise, it is clearly the biggest release, and the amount of bugs we have to go through correlates with it. In other words, there are tons of bugs of all variety. We want to fix everything eventually, but it will take time, so we had to prioritize this week to aim for the most generally playable version before the first weekend after release. That means mainly unloadable saves, unavoidable crashes, game failing on startup, and the most frequently occurring problems. Our automatic bug reporting system is helping us a lot with the last one. It is uncommon, but sometimes the automatically uploaded crash report doesn't have enough information for us to be able to fix the bug right away, but the number of times we see a crash happening is still extremely useful for prioritizing. When we see a crash on the forum, we can cross reference it to our automatic reports, and if is one of our 'top-hits', we know to investigate it right away. The most prominent crash related to loading specific kind of save happened with pipe ghosts happened more than 200 times. It was fixed (obviously), but lets wait and see what our top hit of 0.17.4 will be after the weekend. Overall this means, that bugs that are not critical, require design discussions or are not that simple to fix are not being dealt with right now. Also, we got quite a surprising cake gift today. It is extremely delicious and we are extremely thankful for it :).
Let me show you around. That's our lab table and this is our work-stool. And over there is our interplanetary space-platform! And here's where we keep assorted lengths of wire. Whoa! A real live space-platform! We designed it ourselves. Let us show you some of the different lengths of wire we used.
