Hello, as you could expect this Friday facts is mainly about our fight with the avalanche of bug reports, which is actually not as huge as we expected it to be to be honest. We released 0.16.7 yesterday, and this will probably be the last update for a while. Most of us now are taking a break, enjoying the festivities, and visiting our friends and family.
Hello, let me show you another dose of things we just can't stop ourselves from doing.
Hello, it's been a rather quiet week here in the office, with all of the teams attention towards fixing bugs and other minor issues.
Good evening Factorians, today we had a presentation about the game at one of the universities here in Prague for the subject called "Video game development". It was focused on what is it like to develop an indie game. So yesterday we spent some time reflecting the past year and a half to come up with topics to talk about. We were thinking a lot about the period about a year ago before the Indiegogo campaign started, when the game was completely unknown to the public and we were close to burning out. The positive finding wat that as opposed to that period the work is now much less stressful and generally enjoyable. Maybe we (and people in general) should think about our down moments more often to better appreciate what we have ... Last Friday Facts promised a stable 0.8 release in the beginning of this week. Well, that was a false promise because couple of more bugs have been found that resulted in the new record for number of bugfix releases. Now we have the 0.8.8 in the experimental stage. If there are no serious issues found this will be made stable during the weekend. Having so many bugfix releases is rather annoying (and we plan to improve here by starting with automated testing) but it doesn't slow us down in the regular development. We have multiple development branches and the work on the 0.9 has been going for a while in the master branch, while the bugfixes are collected in the current release branch (the 0.8.x) and then merged back into the master. Talking about the 0.9, the work has been progressing well. Quite some internal rework of concepts is required for the oil industry and fluids in general. However, yesterday we already had an assembling machine that makes a recipe from some items and water supplied by the pipe. For this to work the recipe mechanism has been generalized and in the end (not yet done) following will be possible: The recipe ingredient can be a fluid. The recipe can have multiple results (both items and fluids). The results of the recipe can be randomized (there will be a probability of getting the result and a min - max range for the amount of the result). There might not be much more fluid content aside from the oil (and its variations) in the 0.9, however the mechanisms will be there for the modders to play with and take advantage of them. And we are curious what they come up with:) Kovarex has been working on the native blueprints for some time and he has the core functionality more or less finished. Of course that is just a small portion of the total work required (polishing, bugfixing, integration with other concepts, etc.) but it is something that can already be played with in the 0.9 branch. And it is actually quite fun to play with. The system is relatively straightforward now: You make the blueprint item. You select what to store in it (you get the blueprint preview on the item afterwards). You place it and the construction robots build it. You can check it out on the mini picture series below, where blueprints have been used to build the standard furnace line. If you would like to share your thoughts or ideas about this post, you can do so on our forum.
Click to view full resolution It has been 6 months and nearly 70 releases since we first launched 0.17 to the world. Now is the time to let it be enjoyed by all the players of the game. We are going to be continuing our work on 0.17 over the next few months, with small experimental releases of new features, and finishing all the GUI reworks.
Hello, Bugfixing for 0.14 has been going quite well this week, and while its still in experimental we've been adding some supplementary features before programming work begins properly on 0.15. With the summer ending, things have been settling back into a nice rhythm here in the office.
It's finally here (Twinsen) The proposal was first mentioned more than 1 and a half years ago, in FFF-191. Since then, we kept mentioning it in our blog posts and players kept asking about it. After a lot of back and forth within the team on whether we should implement it or not, and how it should work, we finally have it almost finished for 0.17.
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.
Factorio logo patches Jitka We would like to introduce our new fabric Factorio logo patches, which are now available at our e-shop. These sew-on embroidered patches are ideal for clothing, hats, backpacks, etc. The dimensions are 2.5 x 12 cm. As we are uncertain how large the demand for these patches is going to be, we have only limited stock available at the moment. Please note that our online store ships only once a week every Wednesday, and it is highly possible that the orders placed now will not be delivered before the 25th or December, this applies especially for orders shipped outside of Europe.
Sound design update Ian One advantage of switching to home working during the COVID-19 crisis is the ability to listen to the game using speakers rather than headphones, and this has proved useful in balancing the relative levels of the game. Val has also been getting to grips with Lua, and this has led him to working on attenuations, which have been proving problematic. For instance, we noticed that sounds such as the radar were getting cut off when you walked away from them, rather than fading out cleanly. I investigated and discovered we had a maximum environment sound limit of 15, by raising this to 50 we have eliminated many of these problems. But then the downside is that there are now more sounds playing and therefore more clutter to mix and balance. Pink squares indicate which sounds are active. Left: limit of 15 nearby sounds; Right: limit of 50 nearby sounds. Rseding has been working through the list of sound design programming tasks, for instance we finally have the sound for the artillery turret rotation integrated into the game (which was featured in FFF-252 quite a while ago). Real in-game footage of the new artillery sounds In other news, we have an updated concept for the transport belts. We listened to feedback from the community that they were still a bit too present and annoying. The idea of the new sounds is that they will drift into the distance a bit more and become unnoticed (until you try to fall asleep). More fun sounds include water splashes, electric and laser beams, more powerful weapons such as the gun turret and vehicle machine gun. And our old robot sounds have come back as additions. If all goes to plan, we will merge the sound changes into master very soon, and once we've done all our pre-release checks, release it to the 0.18 experimental. After that, I plan to spend time on UI sounds, and also balancing the overall levels to get them more in line with other games, which is trickier than normal given the lack of audio middleware. However we have also made some changes to the default sound settings that move us in the right direction.
