Taipei Game Show 2018 (Twinsen) After a long 14 hour flight back, Albert, kovarex and I arrived back from Taipei, after our attendance at the Taipei Game Show. Jitka started her vacation by staying there to visit the Taiwan island. We stayed there for 7 days (2 days in the business area, 3 days in the convention area and 2 days of free time where we visited the city). In the business area we met many potential business partners and got way too many business cards. We made some friends among the other indie developers and tried all kinds of fun, weird, interesting and some bad indie games. The convention area was very crowded, with 350,000 visitors slowly trying to make their way through the fairly small convention hall. I can't speak for the others, but I still enjoyed myself. Even though it was crowded, most of the games were in Chinese, and I only got to try one AAA game, there is something about being surrounded by games, gamers, and game developers that makes me feel great. Our booth was in the indie area. We had many people coming to try the game but also many fans wanting to speak with us and congratulate us for making a great game. AndrewIRL who lived there for a few years, invited us for dinner to "the best restaurant in the city", and we were not disappointed. Factorio is not an easy game to demo, since it takes at least 30 minutes to kind of understand what the game is about. But having the trailers looping on the screen, and having subtitles for the gameplay trailer meant that the people got a fair idea about what the game is about and how complex it is. While not the best, we had people start by playing the campaign. Most of them were leaving after the first level but some of them were also getting addicted and playing for multiple hours. We gave free Steam keys to some of the people who were more engaged with the game. It was a learning experience to see people play the game for the first time and to see the most common problems with the campaign, the interaction, the UI and the Traditional Chinese translation. The days were super exhausting though, many of us collapsing at the accommodation and sleeping for 10 hours. Luckily we had 2 more days to relax and enjoy the city before flying back. We mostly split up and each of us visited what they were most interested in, with me going through the electronics markets and riding a rented bike through the rainy streets. To give credit where credit is due, I'd like to thank the game show for inviting us and sponsoring our booths, and Razer for conveniently lending us the laptops we used to demo the game. Financially there is no point in us going to a game show, our attendance did not bring us any extra sales in Asia, as expected. The point of going there, for us, is to visit the show floor, play and see random games, make gamer friends, meet fellow developers, meet big fans of the game and maybe make some business partners. Since many of you mentioned PAX and some of us are interested in going there, we are trying to see if we can attend PAX East this year (April 5-8th). So you might have another opportunity to come and take selfies with some of the Factorio devs. From left to right: Jitka, Albert, Twinsen, kovarex.
Hello, another week has passed here, with part of the team still out in Taiwan. They should be back next week, with some news of their great adventure.
Hello, this week has been a week of typical bug fixing of 0.16, so development news wise, there is not much to write about. However we have some updates on some other goings on in the company.
Hello there. As you probably know, we released the experimental version of 0.16 this week. As usual after such a big release, we are working as best as we can to fix the bugs to make the game reasonably playable as soon as possible. Our current goal is to have semi-stable version before Christmas.
Hello, we are still here, working on the game.
Hello, it's another Friday, so time for another Friday Facts.
Hello, it's vacation season here in the office, with a lot of the team taking some time off. We just released what will probably be the last version of 0.15, so now is the best time for everyone to take a breather.
Further optimisations I finished the item stack optimisations mentioned in FFF-198, and was able to do some performance tests. First I tested how many stacks on a big map actually need to use an externally allocated object (Item), and how many of them are plain. On the huge map I tested, it turned out that only 36K out of 1M stacks need the Item object. These were mainly science packs, as they need it for the progress of how used-up they are (and now when I think about it, it could also be omitted by only using the objects for science packs that are partially used up already). Overall factory performance was increased approximately 2% by this. It is nothing huge, but every bit matters. One of the programmer that has read access to the code (Zulan), came up with a pull request that improves performance in Factorio by prefetching memory in the update loops ahead. The problem when normally updating objects is, that CPU asks for memory representing the object. The memory is slow, at least compared to the CPU cache or the CPU speed. The memory transfer speed itself is not that slow, but the waiting (latency) time between ordering and receiving it is. This means, that what very often happens is, that CPU orders data of next entity from the memory, then it waits for quite a long time to get it, and then it does its logic. The memory prefetching partially solves it by doing this: Order data of the next entity from memory (prefetch) Do the logic of the current entity in the meantime Go back to start The overall measured performance improvements vary between 9-12%, which is certainly a nice addition.
Hello, not much at all has happened this week. It has been rather quiet with the Art department out of office the last few days. However there has been some additional success on our recruitment drive, so there will be an additional 3-4 bodies (live) in the office within the next month.
