Posts by Rseding

Friday Facts #402 - Lightspeed circuits

Posted by kovarex, Rseding on 2024-03-15

Hello, if we have any circuit lovers reading, this is another dose of facts for you.

Friday Facts #364 - 1.1 stable

Posted by kovarex, Klonan, boskid, Rseding on 2021-01-29

1.1 stable kovarex Hello, we have a stable version! When we were releasing the 1.0 FFF-360, we actually stated that there were "around 150 bugs on the forums and around 80 internal tasks to be solved". These were obviously minor issues, things hard to reproduce or very rare problems. In other words, it was quite reasonably stable, which normally goes without saying when it comes to Factorio stable versions. But it proved to be a mistake wording it this way, since some media picked up on it and presented it as a "fairly bugged release". So I'm pretty thrilled to finally get to the point, where we actually have 0 known issues and 0 active bug reports on the forums. Its like cleaning the kitchen properly, so you can start cooking something fresh. More about that next week! For now, we want to go over some of the features of the 1.1 that you might have missed until now if you've been sticking with stable 1.0.

Friday Facts #351 - Beacon re-redesign & Simplified fluid mixing

Posted by V453000, Rseding on 2020-06-12

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.

Friday Facts #349 - The 1.0 plan

Posted by Klonan, Rseding, Boskid on 2020-05-29

Hello, today we have some big news.

Friday Facts #326 - Particle emitter & Data cache

Posted by Allaizn, Rseding, Klonan on 2019-12-20

More particle optimisations Allaizn Rseding's recent optimisations of the particle system (FFF-322) made particles much more lightweight than they were before, but it still left particles as rather complex beasts. A quick summary of the possible actions a particle can make during it's update: Move their own position. Advance their animation to another frame. Land in water and apply a trigger. Apply another trigger with a certain frequency. Remove themselves from the game world once their life time ends. What makes this complex is that triggers are general purpose systems that can do all kinds of things, including creating and destroying entities, fire, smoke and other particles as well as playing sounds or recursively applying even more triggers. In other words: applying a trigger is an "anything can happen" situation and thus totally unpredictable, which in turn makes optimisations extremely hard.

Friday Facts #324 - Sound design, Animated trees, Optimizations

Posted by Jitka, Ian, Albert, Allaizn, Rseding on 2019-12-06

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.

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 #319 - New T-shirts & Lua event filtering

Posted by Jitka, Albert, Aleš, Klonan, Rseding on 2019-11-01

Hello, There is a bit of a cold/flu going around the office, but it isn't severe enough to dampen our spirits (I don't like the daylight savings though).

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 #309 - Controversial opinions

Posted by Twinsen, wheybags, TOGoS, posila, Rseding on 2019-08-23

The boring phase of bug-fixing is still going, slowly but surely. Stable should be released next week, but with some people on vacation (Ben, Jitka, kovarex, Klonan, Sanqui) and with the release of WoW Classic, it might get slowed down a bit. (By the way, some of us will be playing on Pyrewood Village, Alliance, so if you want to have the chance of meeting Twinsen, kovarex or dominik while leveling, you can join that server). So since there's not much happening, this week we decided to explore some unpopular or controversial opinions about the game from within the team. In Wube we don't have a very strict management structure, everyone is free to have ideas and opinions about almost all aspects of the game. This means that with almost every change we argue and discuss a lot before making a final decision. Sometimes we argue about everything, from the smallest GUI change, to how a major feature should work. This is probably not a bad thing since this means changes are usually well thought out and unpopular ideas or changes don't make it to the game very often. Some people feel quite strongly about their opinions or sometimes the team is very divided on what should we do. Today we'll share some of those opinions and controversies. Keep in mind that these are simply opinions and none of them will actually make it into the game, we are simply sharing them to have an interesting discussion.