Good afternoon, the week in the office has been relatively quiet. The whole non-dev department is away, kovarex is flying his paraglide somewhere over Macedonia so in the end there is like 6 of us meeting here to make the game crash less often=)

Hello, the current week was the time of merges. Different branches with functionalities were merged into the master branch: traingulations(finally), combinators, robot beams, personal roboport and others. Every other day the game/tests didn't work, because some merge broke something. But now it is starting to be stabilised again.

Hi there, we spent quite some time at the GDSession last weekend. The conference was fun, but a bit tiring. I think we are not used to meet many new people at the same time anymore. And there were tons of new people:) The talks were unsurprising but we enjoyed chatting to small indie studios sharing similar challenges we do. And they had great cakes for refreshement:)

Hi folks, so this has been one of those weeks when it is suddenly Friday afternoon and you are wondering where did the week go. Fortunately there are the Friday Facts to put myself together and retrace the events=)) The Grey Zone At the moment we are kind of in a grey zone. The 0.12 bugs are more or less solved (though there is still some "popping up" of new issues) and the full speed work on 0.13 hasn't started yet (actually not even slow speed work has started). We are finishing with little (often technical debt) tasks from our internal lists. There is just ton of issues like: fixing locale fonts, updating tips and tricks, writing tests for compilcated existing functionality, tweaking our automatic deployment and testing setup, auto-generating the Lua API documentation, fixing sound glitches, etc. The list goes on. One of the tasks has been related to our headless binary. This is the binary to run on linux servers without graphics card. This is now available in the downloads section alongside other releases. There is a small convenience difference where by clicking the download, the resulting download link (from one of our cdn servers) is valid for 10 minutes (instead of regular 10 seconds) so the server owner can conveniently copy this url and download the game directly from the server. In the future we plan to have the updater work for headless servers as well so that will make things even more convenient. The good news is that the list of these little tasks is getting shorter. Also we have already more or less agreed on distribution of big tasks for the 0.13. These have been discussed in the past and are also visible at our roadmap. Some work on these should start already next week. We will keep you up to date=)

Today's edition of the Friday Facts has been written by Blue Cube, enjoy! Hello fellow Factorians! I'm breaking away from our magnificent testing / team building session here at our office to bring you more babbling about the development of your favourite game. This time there will be less of the regular "fixing bugs, fixing multiplayer, designing spaceships" theme from the past weeks and the post will be a little more technical, focusing on the workings of our magical multiplayer code.

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.

Hey guys, here comes the weekly dose of Factorio-world information for you. We have crafted it just before we leave for a gdsession warm-up party. Gdsession is quite a big game development conference here in Prague. This is the first year we are going to participate. And actually tonight we will have a short (10 minutes) talk about what we do (well, about Factorio obviously).

Hi all, sometimes, writing FFF feels like spitting out blood - there is simply very little to write about. Yet the Factorio blog subscriber crowd is there and waiting ... Sometimes it is the opposite and there is abundance of interesting topics available. Today it is the latter case. Enjoy!

New sound design Val: Do you remember the smell of the fresh air near the seashore? Can you describe, a forest that rumbles its trees after a summer rain? All that you hear and see goes right into your mind. All of our senses are connected with each other in our memories. When we feel at least one of them, our imagination brings the others. Sometimes, and even often, we can't see the object, but we can hear it! You can't see the wind, but you feel it and hear it! The bird is singing. You can't see it hiding in a bush, but you hear a beautiful song and can define the direction it comes from. The forest, the sea, the desert... Night and day. Clanking of a loading cannon and snoring of unseen monsters. That is what we are planning to do. To put the unseen colors of sound and add some feeling of life to the planet of Factorio. Even the emptiness has it's own voice... Albert: As you probably know, we are in a stage of polishing all the possible aspects of the game. Last week we were cooperating with Val, our new sound designer, and we spent the entire week defining new concepts for environmental sounds and sound effects. Also we were working on the sound of the biter nests and the artillery cannon. This is definitely a huge subject full of details that can really improve the play experience of Factorio. Here I can show you a work in progress of the artillery cannon: We have to tweak some behaviour of the entity in order to make it act more mechanical, but overall, the possibilities that sound design can bring to the game are really interesting. Compare the simple shooting of the cannon in the actual version with this proof of concept with all those details in rotation and loading. Of course this level of detail complicates the work a little bit, but I'm convinced it's worth it.

The multiplayer megapacket Twinsen Last month I joined KatherineOfSky's MMO event as a player. I noticed that after we reached a certain number of players, every few minutes a bunch of them got dropped. Luckily for you (but unluckily for me), I was one of the players who got disconnected every, single. time, even though I had a decent connection. So I took the matter personally and started looking into the problem. After 3 weeks of debugging, testing and fixing, the issue is finally fixed, but the journey there was not that easy. Multiplayer issues are very hard to track down. Usually they only happen under very specific network conditions, in very specific game conditions (in this case having more than 200 players). Even when you can reproduce the issue it's impossible to properly debug, since placing a breakpoint stops the game, messes up the timers and usually times out the connection. But through some perseverance and thanks to an awesome tool called clumsy, I managed to figure out what was happening. The short version is: Because of a bug and an incomplete implementation of the latency state simulation, a client would sometimes end up in a situation where it would send a network package of about 400 entity selection input actions in one tick (what we called 'the megapacket'). The server then not only has to correctly receive those input actions but also send them to everyone else. That quickly becomes a problem when you have 200 clients. It quickly saturates the server upload, causes packet loss and causes a cascade of re-requested packets. Delayed input actions then cause more clients to send megapackets, cascading even further. The lucky clients manage to recover, the others end up being dropped. The issue was quite fundamental and took 2 weeks to fix. It's quite technical so I'll explain in juicy technical details below. But what you need to know is that since Version 0.17.54 released yesterday, multiplayer will be more stable and latency hiding will be much less glitchy (less rubber banding and teleporting) when experiencing temporary connection problems. I also changed how latency hiding is handled in combat, hopefully making it look a bit smoother.