Hello,
It has been a month since the Space Age release and things are settling into a steady state. It is a good time to wrap things up, and discuss our future plans.
The Factorio: Space Age - Original Soundtrack Album has been greatly updated on Steam. Soon it will be in the game also.
The addition consists of a second Disk, labelled Original Game Soundtrack, and it contains all the soundtrack found in the game properly mastered. 50 tracks in total. Finally you will find your favourite track in the album, for sure : ) The interludes are not included, these are composed just for the game to properly jump from a track to another without breaking anything. Not convenient for the album.
When starting the project we had a deal with Petr of covering 1h of music per planet. 5h in total seemed, at that time, like a lot of music. Now that the soundtrack is completed we can proudly say that each planet length is finally:
In total we have 08h:27m of ultra-fine-Factorio-music, perfectly mastered to enjoy it in the game and outside also.
Have in mind that 10 of the tracks are mixed procedurally in the engine, making the composition variable each time that plays in the game. For the album we have rendered an average version of each variable track in order to complete the album experience. The time length in the game can easily surpass by far the total time of the album. Especially if we count the interludes also mixed directly in the game.
If we count the first Disk labelled Factorio: Space Age - Soundtrack - Composer's Mixes, which consists of Petr's selection of his 17 favourite tracks, and remixed by himself in an album format with a total length of 02h:04m and we add the total length of the second folder, we have 10h:31m:49s of Factorio music. Such a piece of an album isn't it?
I still remember us saying something about 150 bugs in the forums in FFF-360, and some media taking it as "Factorio 1.0 is still a bit on the buggy side". While obviously, when we allowed the release, it was because almost all of the bugs were tiny corner case inconsistencies, or something that almost never happens, which we take a look at anyway, but doesn't make the game really bad.
This experience doesn't stop us from being transparent, at this moment have 800+ bug reports on the forums, but again, not many are serious bugs, there are a lot of duplicates, many are even features... When looking at our resolved bugs forum, we fixed more than 625 bug reports since release, and since we prioritize the more critical ones, the game should be pretty okay for the vast majority of people.
We will continue clearing the bug reports until even the smallest things are sorted out, or tiny things discarded, which will take around 2 months at least.
Once this phase is done, we want to start preparing the last major release (for the foreseeable future at least) for Factorio: 2.1
We don't know exactly what it will be, but some of the more risky changes related to mod interface, quality of life, graphical tweaks... basically changes too big for putting into 2.0 stable. But don't expect anything too huge like a big content additions, it will be mainly just finishing touches and/or cool little widgets allowing more contraptions.
After more than a year of continual weekly FFFs, we feel that it is a good time to stop now. Fixing bugs doesn't really emit that interesting topics, and we prefer to focus on the work now.
I can imagine publishing some FFFs once 2.1 development is underway, if we have some interesting things to show, or whenever we have something important to say.
Factorio players collectively played over 88 000 years (on Steam only), which is more than double since the last time we checked in (FFF-365).
I wont bother with all the statistics this time, but we moved from 0.34 lines of code per one buyer, to 0.24 lines of code per one buyer, so we are getting more efficient I guess :)
I want to restate, that without our almost 6,000 automated tests, we would never be able to avoid reintroducing old bugs by fixing new bugs, and we hope, that it gets more recognized, and gaming companies, will recognize this approach as the gold standard.
Here is our updated video showing all the current tests we have in 4x4 parallel grid, enjoy:
This is one of the most frequent questions I'm getting.
Well, I'm not really sure, but we are playing with different kinds of ideas for the next game. Will we figure out something worth doing? Maybe.
To clear my head, and gather a little bit of inspiration, I decided to experience the Fresh World of Warcraft world for a while, you can find me in the Fresh server in the guild called Factory must grow (discord).
The game I'm thinking about is related to WoW in a similar way as to how Factorio is related to Minecraft.
As always, let us know what you think at the usual places.
