Hello hello, I hope that the powerful constellation of Friday the 13th has brought you good luck or at least good humour. We have seen quite sharp decline in some Factorio related statistics in the past days so it seems that the AAA titles invasion starts to be felt ... many of you playing Fallout 4?
Offshore pump redesign V453000, Albert As one of the last entities which do not have high resolution graphics, the time has come for the offshore pump. The offshore pump is practically a 1-tile entity, but they must have a 1 tile gap between each other. It is also the only entity placed on a water tile at the moment. When we changed the way how terrain to water transitions work, we moved the offshore pump to be placed on the water tile. This can result in the pump drawing over terrain in ugly ways. With the redesign, we took the oppourtunity to move the offshore back onto land, and additionally the pump checks a 2x3 tile water area in order to be buildable. The new placement rules only applies to newly built pumps. Offshore pumps on existing maps will keep functioning, they’ll just be shifted out from the shore. There is no blue colour for water integration at the tip of the offshore pump, so the offshore pump will look correct even with unexpected water types (not a big problem in vanilla). The water integration is split to an underwater layer which does not show when the pump gets landfilled over. In the basic concept, the offshore pump is another type of a pump, so it should be similar to the other pump entity Albert made a few years ago, including the animation and visible fluid in it. The obvious difference is the connection to water. However we felt that is not different enough and needs more visual balance, so we added a pair of supportive legs. We are planning to release the new offshore pump graphics with the next release, likely next week.
0.18 mods will be loadable in 1.0 Klonan With 1.0 approaching, we want to ensure that the day of the launch goes as smoothly as possible, and shows the game in the best light. Something that would really work against that would be if the update broke a bunch of mods and disgruntled all of our most dedicated players. So we are making efforts to ensure that mods that work in 0.18, will work without any update needed in 1.0. Theoretically this isn't so difficult, as the 0.18 release structure has meant that mods have maintained compatibility with all the latest changes, and in essence 1.0 will just be a small update of 0.18. However it does take a bit of special handling: 1.0 will allow mods marked for 0.18 to load. The mod portal will show 0.18 mods when browsing in 1.0. Avoiding breaking mods also means we need to be very careful with changing anything, even something as simple as renaming a sprite can break dozens of mods. I think we never realised how easy it is to break mods before we started this new release structure. Big apologies and big thanks to all the modders who stuck with us through these breakages. We hope that what this effort means, is that on the day of 1.0, players new and old alike can login to the mod portal and have a very large catalog of mods they can enjoy right away, and that the modders can relax and enjoy the game instead of worrying about updating all their work. However, we cannot say 100% that all mods will work, it is possible one of the features in 1.0 (like the new nuke or alien decoratives) will break some mods.
Hello... Part of the GUI rework for 0.17 is also tweaking the tooltips: They should be structured better. They should contain more useful information. They should be a better tool for new players to understand how things work. We will cover more of the tooltip changes in a future FFF, but the necessary preparation for this is to rethink the way we explain some basic properties of machines to avoid as much bloat as possible. One of the good ways to do that is also to remove the need to show some of the mechanics by simplifying them, or completely removing them if we figure out that they are not really important for the game.
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?
Hello factorio builders, I hope you enjoy lists and numbers, because you are going to be fed by these today :).
Hello, I'm going to cover a feature I only just finished. I was thinking about this idea for years already. I always thought the feature is too hardcore to be included, but I learned that it is usually a mistake to underestimate the players, so I gave it a go, and decided to share it right away.
Hello, trains are one of our most favorite parts of the game. We already talked about the ways we improved rails (FFF-377), so its time to talk about how we improved the way you can control the trains that ride on them.
Roadmap update (kovarex) A lot of people have been asking recently, when can they expect a new release and when is the game going to be finished. The original plan was to finish everything, and release the final version of Factorio ideally before the end of 2018. This was the plan at the beginning of the year. We worked in our usual way of "it is done when it is done" for quite some time, but then it started taking a little bit too long, and we weren't even sure what is a realistic timeframe to finish it in. To help this issue, we tried to become a little more organized in the past few weeks. We went through our list of all the development tasks, and tried to finalize it. We removed all the things that we decided to cut, and added all the missing things that we need to do before the game is finished. Then we tried to make some kind of time estimate for each task, to get a general idea of when everything will be finished. We started to be more conscious of who is working on what, and how much time each task is taking, to know how accurate the estimates are. The result was, that if it all goes well, we could be done in 6-9 months. This is probably not something you wanted to hear. After a few rounds of discussions, we decided split the releases of 0.17 and 0.18 in the following way: 0.17 plan It will contain all the things we have done up to this point, mainly: New render backend, which helps performance and solves a lot of issues (FFF-251) The graphical updates: walls, gates, turrets, belts, biters, spawners, electric poles (FFF-268, FFF-228, FFF-253) The GUI reskin (FFF-243) New map editor (FFF-252) Resource generation overhaul (FFF-258) Robot construction tools (FFF-255) Rich text (FFF-237, FFF-267) And more... It will also include some things we know we can finish soon enough, mainly: Redoing some of the most important GUIs (Action bar, character screen, main game GUI, train GUI, play GUI, tooltips) Fluid optimisations And several smaller things, which depends on how it goes We will release this during January 2019, we will announce it more precisely in advance. 0.18 plan It will become the final 1.0 version once it is stable. It will contain mainly: New tutorial New campaign Final mini tutorials Revision of rest of the GUI All remaining high res graphics graphics and final polish We obviously don't know exactly when is it going to be ready, but we hope it to be sooner than 9 months from now.
