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.
Poison cloud Ernestas, posila The poison cloud animation is a placeholder spritesheet (that kovarex found somewhere on the internet), we have wanted to improve it for a long time, but since it was always such a small detail other things took priority. Well now is the time to finish everything, big and small. Some of the problems we see with the old placeholder animation: The edge (where damage will apply) is not clearly defined The center strongly obstructs vision underneath the animation It breaks the perspective/height illusion with its very circular shape The new animation was done quickly and without the need of any large changes to the Factorio engine. This is the mindset we are in these days, use the engine features we already have to finish things quickly and without trouble, and we try to stop ourselves going crazy with more detail. The smoke capsule itself spawns a bunch of smaller dummy entities which do the smoke drawing, while the damage is kept consistent by only using the central smoke cloud to apply damage.
Hello, We released 0.18.2 and 0.18.3 this week. In terms of major releases, this one has very few bugs, so we haven't had a lot of pressure to crank out the releases at lightning speed.
0.18.0 release Klonan Early this week we pushed the deploy button on 0.18.0 (patch notes). This was quite a surprise to many of our players, as more typically the time between major releases and the scope of the release is greater. However this isn't like the old days, we are trying to keep the size of releases as small as possible (FFF-314). What this means, is that what is currently in 0.18 is only really a small part of the work needed to be done on 0.18, and releases in the coming months will continue finishing off our 0.18 task list. Once everything on the 0.18 list is completed and the time is right, we will turn 0.18 into 1.0. What we have accomplished with 0.18.0: GUI Main menu redesign GFX Water animation Tree animation Color correction (LUTs) New explosions and damage effects Other Optimizations New Particle system First work on new sound design Steam login What we have left to do in 0.18: GUI Character GUI Blueprint library Statistics GUIs (production, electric network stats, etc.) Entity GUIs (Inserter, Assembling machine, chests, etc.) Main screen GUIs (Chat, minimap, etc.) Many more... GFX Offshore pump redesign Assembling machine redesign Beacon redesign High-res icons Final tweaks and polish Other Further sound design improvements Mini-tutorials Replace NPE with old tutorial Final game balancing and tweaks Finalised locale and proofreading With this in mind, it wouldn't make sense to mark 0.18 stable before most of the above is finished. We made 0.18 a major version because it will break mods with all the changes we are making, and while initially it hasn't broken that much, many things to come will have a bigger impact, such as the Character GUI.
Merch store open again Klonan Our e-shop is now open again after taking a break over the holidays and new year. We have also restocked our new Factorio sew-on patches, so if you didn't manage to pick one up over the last weeks, now is your chance to order one.
Hello, The office here in Prague is still 'closed' until next week, so not much is happening (so our team can rightfully rest). Things will get cracking again on Monday, and our first task is to get 0.18 done! For that reason, the FFF today is a little on the short side.
2020 Vision Albert, Klonan 2020 is going to be quite an exciting year for us. We have our 1.0 date set to the 25th of September, and there is a lot of preparation to do. It is no doubt to any of us that we would not be able to have any success without the great community that has developed for the game over the last years, and the support of all our players and fans. As is almost tradition, Albert has prepared a commemorative postcard/wallpaper to celebrate the last FFF of the year. Click to view full resolution Here's to a great year to come!
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.
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.
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).
