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Factorio - Klonan
Hello, this is the last Friday of 2017, and as such, the last Friday facts of this
year.
0.16.8/9 is out
It almost seams that our team never stops. To be honest, even on the Christmas eve,
when everything was over and family went to sleep, I couldn't resist to stay up for
little while to fix a few things :)
The overall feeling we had was that fluid wagon capacity is too large, fluid trains
have to barely move around, and waiting for the wagon to be filled often takes too
much time.
We also wanted to make sure, that wagon with barrels just can't hold more fluids
compared to fluid wagon, because even when barrels are generally more work to
handle, it is not what you would intuitively expect.
With the fluid wagon separation gone, the main advantage of barrels is not
capacity, but versatility. They can be combined with other barrels of different
kind, or items in the train, they can be limited by the inventory limit, or easily
filtered by filter inserters, transported by robots, belts etc. This advantage
seems to be much more intuitive and I hope it makes sense now as whole with the
removal of the fluid wagon separation to you.
Requester chests always have priority over buffer chests, and by default request
chests don't even request from buffers chests, only player and construction. This
is what we feel is the most common use-case. But as we don't want to limit the
possibilities, so the behaviour can be manually changed.
We've said it before, that the game will be finished and released during this year
and we mean it this time. There is even the joke in the office that the game is
always to be released 'next summer', which never comes. But this time we really
really mean it, we want to finish the game in 2018. Finishing doesn't necessary
mean no new stuff for Factorio, it might even mean the opposite. Why? Because we
will have all of our technology/graphical/design debts paid.
Debts from the past we solved this year:
We stabilized 0.14, which meant the rewrite of the multiplayer internals based on
our experience form the first version, and we now have something that seems to work
quite reliably.
We went back and created high-resolution variants of the vast majority of the
graphics.
We revisited the terrain and decoratives for the last time to make an environment
we are content with
We integrated blueprint usage into network games by allowing them to be copied
between players, and allowed them to be moved between individual save games.
We have rewritten most of the internals of how GUI works for 0.16, which should
simplify additions related to GUI in the future.
Opened the subject of interactive mini tutorials, far from finished, but we are
getting the experience there as well.
Tightened the user integration of mods, once the new mod portal site (which
shouldn't be as unusably slow as the current one) is done, it will improve the
usability of mods a lot.
Improved programming productivity internally by getting rid of boost, improving
compile times, extending automated/heavy/valgrind tests on the server, and starting
more elaborate internal documentation. So many more problems are discovered early
on, and people spend less time figuring out what is wrong.
Improved Factorio link time in Visual studio. This was done by Rseding91, who
provided the visual studio guys with Factorio sources and kept bothering them until
they tested that and improved C++ link time in the 15.5 Visual studio release. The
final release of Factorio with all optimisations and link time code generation took
45 minutes to compile and link, and now it takes 3.5 minutes. This sped up our
release time quite a bit.
There are still some debts to be finished in 2018, mainly the GUI update, which is
actually a huge project. We have very large number of different windows in the
game, and if we really want to improve both the looks and the usability, we will
have to put a lot of time and thought into it. Also the mini tutorials will have to
be finished and few entities will probably be re-designed.
But once all these things are solved, it not only means that we could get out of
early access, but also, if we ever decide to add more content to Factorio, having
these things finished should pay off by letting us to focus on the new things only
instead of having to fix the old ones. Another possibility, is to use the Factorio
engine for completely different game or for fast prototyping of crazy ideas.
Whatever we decide to do in the future, having polished base seems like an
important thing to have.
I would also like provide the overall graph of commits frequency, some of the
releases are quite visible there :)