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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
