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Friday Facts #217 - Just another Friday Facts

Posted by Twinsen & Rseding91 on 2017-11-17

Hello, most of the team is out of the office today attending the Game Developers Session here in Prague, if you're around you can look out for some people wearing Factorio t-shirts. As we were thinking about what to write in this Friday Facts, kovarex suggested "In the next Friday Facts we should write about how hard it is to write Friday Facts". Sometimes it is really difficult to find something interesting to write about. Thankfully we found some short things that that we thought you would like.

Friday Facts #325 - New Explosions and Particles

Posted by Albert, Dom, Klonan on 2019-12-13

Hello, The year is wrapping up, and we have been hard at work finishing off some topics before we take our Christmas break. As you can imagine, releasing any new version of the game without a few weeks to do bugfixing wouldn't be wise, so you can rest easy this holiday period without the worry of a surprise 0.18 release.

Friday Facts #322 - New Particle system

Posted by Klonan, Rseding on 2019-11-22

Release plans Klonan This week we released version 0.17.79, and marked it stable. Internally we have been calling this 'Stable 3', and the main feature was the new tooltips we showed in FFF-318. There is one constraint we put on ourselves when we started this more swift feature release schedule: We want to avoid breaking mods. This is easy enough in principle, don't start renaming things, don't remove API features, etc. However as we develop further, there are certain features and improvements that we can't realistically do in a way that won't break mods, such as the new Character GUI (FFF-289), and color correction (FFF-320). It is for this reason that we are going to accumulate some of these mod breaking changes, and release them all at once. Since it will definitely be breaking mods, we will bump the major version number, so it will be 0.18.0. We have already internally started merging in these 0.18 features into our master branch, so we will not be doing any more 0.17 releases (unless something absolutely catastrophic is discovered).

Friday Facts #314 - 0.17 stable

Posted by Klonan, kovarex on 2019-09-27

Hello, technically this post is the π Friday Facts, but unfortunately we can't think of anything special to do... maybe someone can make a Combinator cake... that can calculate π?

Friday Facts #318 - New Tooltips

Posted by Twinsen, Rseding on 2019-10-25

Hello, we just released 0.17.73, with 0.17.74 coming very soon. This is just some bug fixes and further pathfinding improvements, and we hope to be able to mark the release as Stable next week.

Friday Facts #323 - Animated water

Posted by Albert, Ernestas, posila on 2019-11-29

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.

Friday Facts #335 - Scenario changes, Damage effect filtering

Posted by Klonan on 2020-02-21

Team production changes Improving the Team production challenge was prompted by this Reddit post. Team production was made back in 2016 to test the multiplayer networking of the 0.14 update with a larger number of players without the overhead of having a large factory. Since then it has not really had much love. So after 4 years of accruing wisdom, I started making some general improvements.

Friday Facts #260 - New fluid system

Posted by Dominik on 2018-09-14

Hi Factorians, This is Dominik, and my first FFF post ever! I will use this opportunity to talk to you about the exciting subject of pipes. Yeah, I know, right? Spring came and with it Twinsen, saying "Pipes suck. Two people already tried to fix it and failed, who wants to be next?", and I’m like "Hey, that’s just pipes, you just make a simple simulation, simple AF. I’m in." The conditions were even quite lenient: Fluids get where they should. They should act in a predictable manner, with reasonable splitting/joining in junctions. Fluids can travel instantly, if need be. Respect the pipe throughput limitations. Flow can be viewed on the pipes. Don’t do f**** up stuff like running in a circle indefinitely, sloshing back and forth endlessly etc. Should be faster/more UPS efficient. I am mostly working on the new GUIs, but still, the fact that summer is over and pipes are not done, kinda shows how simple fixing them is. Very naive I was.

Friday Facts #201 - 0.15 Stable, but not really

Posted by kovarex & Rseding on 2017-07-28

Hello, the 0.15 has been declared stable. Unfortunately we found some smaller problems, so there is going to be at least one bugfix release. One of the problems we discovered yesterday, is a glitch in the blueprint transferring logic that results in the transfers stopping forever when a player that is just transferring his blueprint into the game leaves. I'm quite surprised that I found it out myself when I was testing something else, and we didn't have a single bug report regarding it.