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...

Electric mining drill redesign Ernestas & V453000

The electric mining drill is one of the older designs still in the game, and we have had our eye on it for a long time as a candidate for redesign.

We would have loved to rework the mining drill in 0.15 when we added high resolution graphics and the pipe patch for it, but we had many nuclear related graphics to do for 0.15, so we just did the necessary minimum and postponed the full redesign. Now was finally the time we could unleash Ernestas onto it.

The old design

The most problematic aspect we see is the weak radial animation that’s more like gently harvesting a field, rather than aggressively mining and destroying the planet.

The original mining drill is also very flat like a top-down square. In general we try to avoid square entities like the plague, as they tend to look disintegrated with the world because they don’t try to hide that their perspective isn’t correct.

The pipe patch for uranium ore mining makes...

Hello, today we have some big news.

The 1.0 plan Klonan

In FFF-321 we announced a release date for version 1.0. Given recent events we have decided to make an amendment to the date of 1.0. The new date we are aiming for is Friday August 14th 2020, which is 5 weeks earlier than the original date.

The main reason to change the release date is the release of Cyberpunk 2077. In January this year, CD Projekt Red announced a delay to the release of Cyberpunk 2077, to September 17th, 1 week before our Factorio 1.0 launch. We think any release close to such a monumental game is going to feel some negative effects, such as everybody playing and covering Cyberpunk and taking attention away from other games.

So we thought it was best to try release either before Cyberpunk or quite a while after it. Given the two choices, we opted to bring the release date forward. There are several reasons why we are choosing to release earlier:

Descoped goal

When we announced the date (FFF-321), w...

It's been over 4 years since we planned the infamous GUI update. If all goes well, next week the game will get the last big GUI update for 1.0. While the state of the GUI is not close to our crazy plans we recently had for the GUI, it's above what we initially planned 4 years ago.

The update you will see next week includes:

• A visual update to over 100 game GUIs
• New high resolution icons for all game items (visible both in GUI and in the world)
• New GUI sounds for most interactions

High resolution icons V453000

The plans

A bit more than a year ago Albert had posted twice (FFF-290 and FFF-291) about our thoughts, experiments, and plans of creating high resolution icons.

Factorio has a ridiculous amount of items and things that need icons, which by itself means it’s a lot of work to redo them. I did not work on the new icons non-stop for a year as there were other more pressing tasks to be done sometimes, but they still took a large amount of time to make.

As Albert mentio...

New hope demo levels Klonan

A few weeks ago we discussed the changes to the demo and tutorial in the game (FFF-342). One piece of feedback we received after publishing the news was about the old 'New hope' campaign levels, and specifically the 'Abandoned rail base/Broken rail map'.

It seems a lot of you in the community really really enjoyed the new hope campaign levels, and several of the team here share the same feelings. After we scrapped the plans for a new campaign and reverted to the old demo, we had initially dismissed the idea to revive the New hope campaign...

However due to popular demand... we have decided to bring back the favourites, the first 2 levels of the new hope campaign. This time though, they will also be included in the demo version of the game. This represents a very significant increase in scope for the demo, increasing the demo content to include research, red science, green science, trains, and much more.

These levels should be ready for release wi...

He who does nothing, breaks nothing posila

In the recent patch notes, there was a line "Fixed landfill spawning under player when building landfill elsewhere. More" and some people on Reddit were wondering how did this bug happen in the first place, and asked for the long version and even suggested we could even use it for Friday Facts, and I thought: "Yeah, if I am going to spend time writing this, we should consider using it in FFF so someone else doesn't have to spend time writing something else." ... but I am going to stretch it out.

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The landfill bug reported after the release of 0.18.21.

Disclaimer: I have not been around during the ancient parts of this story (speaking of which, it's my 5 year anniversary at Wube, yay!), and changes I have been around for, or even done myself, I might not remember correctly. So this might not be accurate. In fact, let's say the story is purely fictional and any resemblance to real world events...

Unit group collision mask

Last weekend, a bug report came in on our forum. The issue was that the groups of biters were trying to path over the water, but the bugs can't swim.

It seemed like something quite typical of a mod being funky. I looked into it, and it seems the Hovercraft mod was playing monkey business with water collision masks to make his vehicles ride over water. One thing involved setting water tiles to be walkable, and then adding an additional collision layer to all players and biters.

What this modder didn't realise though, is that unit groups have a fixed collision mask. It used to be hardcoded, but a while ago it was added to the utility constants. So we just say "hey its a mod problem, here's a quarter, call someone who cares"... right?

Well it didn't sit right with me, because deep inside I knew that the unit groups shouldn't have a fixed collision mask, it doesn't make sense really. Lets say you add flying units to the game. If you give individual ...

Tile transition collisions Klonan

We first mentioned a change to our tile transition logic back in FFF-199, and not long after in FFF-214. These two posts focused more on the visual side, and how it makes the game terrain look so much better.

In short, the tile transition logic overlays an additional sprite over adjacent tiles, so that where the two tiles meet has a much more natural look.

Left: Tile transitions on; Right: Tile transitions off.

So while the looks were taken care of, we also had to deal with the 'feel' of the tiles. The easiest example of this is the 1x1 landfill 'stepping stones'. It really looks like you should be able to walk/drive across the 1 tile of water. So we added in an additional layer of collision checks, which will consider the transitions when performing the logic of what can go where.

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Now some of the cheesier among you will know that biters don't know how to get across these 1 t...

Environmental particle effects Dom

Since the particle optimization we did for 0.18 (FFF-322) and the introduction of new explosions (FFF-325), we were able to push our vision even more.

It always bothered me that the grenade and other explosions would emit the same type of particles regardless of the context. In most cases it isn't that bad, and somewhat okay, but when you throw a grenade into water, it will still emit stone particles, which breaks the illusion.

Another problem is that we have the nice decoratives on the ground, but they don't really 'interact' with anything that goes on, and can feel like fake flat stickers instead of something 'real'. You would expect that when there is a massive explosion 2ft away, the bushes might have some reaction to that.

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The explosion effect currently in 0.18

Specific tile effects

One thing we wanted was some way for tiles to respond to the explosions in different ways. The way Posil...

As stated in previous FFF's we will be making some changes to the demo and tutorial content in the game. I wanted to clarify exactly what is being removed and what it is being replaced with, as this content is almost ready for release. If you would like to catch up on the topic, you can read Kovarex's piece in FFF-327, but I will also summarize it here.

Right now the NPE/Introduction is the scenario that is used as the demo (0.17) and as the tutorial in the full game (0.17 stable, 0.18 experimental). If anyone has played the tutorial in the last 12 months, this is probably what you have played.

The First steps campaign was a series of three levels which used to make up the demo and tutorial in 0.16 and earlier. They were introduced in 2014. We have been working on revamping these levels to bring them up to 0.18 standards.

Very soon the NPE/Introduction will be removed and the First Steps campaign will be reinstated, both as the full game tutorial and the demo.

What has been...

Sound design update Ian

One advantage of switching to home working during the COVID-19 crisis is the ability to listen to the game using speakers rather than headphones, and this has proved useful in balancing the relative levels of the game. Val has also been getting to grips with Lua, and this has led him to working on attenuations, which have been proving problematic. For instance, we noticed that sounds such as the radar were getting cut off when you walked away from them, rather than fading out cleanly.

I investigated and discovered we had a maximum environment sound limit of 15, by raising this to 50 we have eliminated many of these problems. But then the downside is that there are now more sounds playing and therefore more clutter to mix and balance.

Pink squares indicate which sounds are active.
Left: limit of 15 nearby sounds; Right: limit of 50 nearby sounds.

Rseding has been working through the list of sound design programming tasks, for instanc...

Not mentioning it would be weird

I really think everybody has heard all about this and nothing else over the last few weeks, but yes, the Coronavirus.

For now, with Factorio, everything seems okay. We are all working from home, the team is still going, and so far we are following our plan quite well. We released the Character GUI and Statistics GUI last week, and some improvements such as new water splashes and leaf animations this week. Things are still moving along.

However it is still early days, we haven't really had any experience having the whole team work remotely, so there may be some challenges we need to tackle as time goes on. At the moment we don't know whether this will affect our 1.0 release date, I guess it will one way or the other, but for now we aren't announcing any changes.

Business as usual

Apart from the development side still running, our e-shop is also remaining operational, and we have just restocked on all variants of our t-shirts. While we can't g...

The beacon is one of the last entities left to convert to HR. As always, before 'just re-rendering' we take the chance to re-think the concept and modernize it. This post will try to go a bit deeper in the process of redesigning such an entity.

The old beacon

At the beginning of the project, the style of the game was less or more clear: nothing looks brand new. Everything looks dirty and DIY. The machines need to be full of details, if possible trying to explain its mechanics. The colors are provided by the raw materials. The bounding box is everything. And some other rules that I don't even remember now.

The main handicap at that time was that we didn't have the experience of how the average player is composing the factories. So we produce a nice looking model but once it is placed in the factory, it doesn't look that nice due to the lack of context.

The process for the new beacon

The beacon is a very advanced late game entity. Usually placed very close to each other ...

The Character GUI Twinsen

It was 11 months ago when we first mentioned the new Character GUI, in FFF-289. After all that time, it's finally getting ready. Since you can expect to see it released sometime in the next 1 or 2 weeks, we would like to present a quick recap of the features and changes, and some real in-game screenshots.

The Character window is now split into 3 tabs. Logisitcs and auto-trash were moved from the central frame into a tab and a new tab called Character was added. Using inventory/stack transfers in the player inventory will transfer the items either to weapons and armor slots or to trash slots depending on the selected tab, regardless of item type.

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Logistics and auto trash are now merged into 1 panel. Using a double slider you can set an interval. If you have less than the first value, robots will bring more, if you have more than the second value, extra items will be auto-trashed and taken away by the robo...

Statistics GUI Klonan, Oxyd

The statistics GUI (electric network stats, production stats, etc.) is one of the GUIs that has been in the game for a very long time, and has had its functionality fleshed out reasonably over the years. It was not long ago when Twinsen added hovering and highlighting to the graphs.

Given that, and the relatively short timeframe for 1.0 release, the update of the statistics GUI has really just been a style update, no new features or heavy logic rewriting. Oxyd has most of the work done, so we are happy to show some real in-game screenshots of how it looks:

A notable change with the electric stats is that the Satisfaction/Production/Accumulator charge are next to each other in a single row, as opposed to each in a separate row. The label for the exact amount has also been moved to inside of the progress bar, which itself is much thicker.

The production stats are pretty much the same functionality wise. One new button you might spot is ...

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...

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.

Choose your teams

I think this is one of the main suggestions people had for team production. The scenario just shuffled the players and assigned people randomly, and you could end up all alone playing against your two best friends.

Now I believe anybodies first choice would be to add a GUI to handle this. I will go on about GUIs later, but short story is, I didn't want to add a GUI. They add a lot of complexity, and my development mood these days is to keep things simple and small in scope.

So I added little colored launchpads!

I think it is quite intuitive, you will instant...

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.

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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.

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The smoke capsule itself spawns ...

Hello,
We released 0.18.4 this week, same old same old, more bugfixes, more bugs, more changes. At this stage of development, not many interesting things are happening, we are just polishing what we have.

Minor terrain render optimization posila

Just a couple days before the release of 0.18.0 I had an epiphany about a terrain rendering problem that was bugging me for a really long time. When rendering terrain, we reuse the texture from the previous frame. How this was always done, is that we would render the texture shifted to the new position, fill up the gap, and then copy the final result back into the texture for reuse in next frame. So what was bugging me about this? This simple operation would result in rasterizing 2 screens worth of pixels. While that is not a problem for at least half decent GPUs from the past decade, it's a significant work load for integrated GPUs, which in general have an order of magnitude lower memory bandwidth than dedicated GPUs. It could also be e...

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.

New Sounds Ian

In the sound design department we have been hard at work to bring you a better gaming experience with the help of some new and improved sound effects. It struck me that the whole sound track used to have a lo-fi, almost 'dirty' feel, by which I mean the sounds were unclear, had a low resolution and possibly used recordings made with the wrong microphone positioning. So with Val's help we have set about improving some of these sounds. For example, there are new sounds for all the transport belts, they don't sound very different but they are smoother sounding and less annoying.

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Similar to the transport belts, we also have sounds for the combat robots that are designed to harmonise with one another. Val made a bunch of synth tones fo...