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...

Hello,
We had a lovely surprise waiting us this Monday, one of our fans had sent us a delicious cake:

It didn't last very long...

Thank you very much Conn! It certainly helped with the bug fixing push this week.

0.17 Stable candidate Klonan

This last week we have made a big push to fix as many remaining bugs as we can, and we are down to only 36 reports on the forum. Since these remaining bugs aren't really hard crashes, save corruptions, or desyncs, we are looking to consider 0.17.64 (releasing today) as our 'Stable candidate'.

What this means is that, if all goes well over the weekend and nothing too serious comes up, we will mark it as the 0.17 stable next week. We will continue to fix bugs and issues after the stable, and we will also start our work on the features of the 'next stable', so the GUI improvements and all the rest we have mentioned in the past.

In the next few weeks a lot of the team is going to be on vacation, so things won't get up and ru...

Blog thoughts Klonan

As the time goes on, the nature of our weekly FFF post has changed. At the very beginning (FFF-1) it was to let people know that "we're still alive and working on the game", and over time we've grown into covering a range of different topics:

• Communicating our progress and roadmap of the next releases.
• Showing new features and gathering community feedback on them.
• Diving into the technical side of game development and particular challenges we face.
• 'Meta-posts' about the company and the changes outside of the game.
• Community spotlights and interesting Factorio related news.

It is always an interesting challenge each week to determine what topics we might be able to cover in the FFF. During the weeks of rapid development the FFF can feel like a triumphant reveal of what we have been working on, and we excitedly await the community response. Other times, such as when most of the team is on bugfixing, we can take the oppourtunity to explore other points of disc...