Version 0.17.23

[Two]

Yea, would have been nice to let modders know beforehand and leave time for feedback.

This. We luckily had a backup save, otherwise our 200+ hour game would have been destroyed by this patch. We are now stuck with v22 until this mess is fixed. Please don't do such things unannounced!

pretty sure you overestimate how fast Lua is compared to JS

No. I am an IT performance engineer, I have exact numbers down to the nanosecond. LuaJIT outperforms JavaScript on average by a factor of 3.5. This is the main reason why this scripting language is used in almost every game out there and JavaScript is not.

[Bilka]

LuaJIT outperforms JavaScript on average by a factor of 3.5.

We don't use LuaJIT. We use a modified version of Lua 5.2.1.

[barnaclebob]

0.17.23 os x installer is a 404. also while patching it runs into a file not found error and stops. 0.17.22 is a corrupted dmg.

edit: looks like 0.17.21 will install and then patch up to 17.23 fine. the 0.16x auto update was the one that ran into a file not found.

[thowardus]

I tried to download the 17.23 experimental release and only got a 404 error message...Is there a reason why the patch is not available?

[Shingen]

pretty sure you overestimate how fast Lua is compared to JS

No. I am an IT performance engineer, I have exact numbers down to the nanosecond. LuaJIT outperforms JavaScript on average by a factor of 3.5. This is the main reason why this scripting language is used in almost every game out there and JavaScript is not.

cool, so even ignoring what Bilka wrote, that means, using your words, that Lua is only 3.5x faster than a "very slow language" which makes it... only "slow" at best.
so why do people write in a this slow language? well, because it apparently doesn't matter that much compared to how long the rest of the game takes to render etc.
and that's what i meant in the part that you cut off:

and how much time do the mods' scripts take while a game is running.

and i wrote that because of your

So if you would write Factorio mods in JavaScript, you would inevitably slow down the game much more than if you would have written the same mod in Lua.

which simply seems to not be true

cheers

[MFZ]

I tried to download the 17.23 experimental release and only got a 404 error message...Is there a reason why the patch is not available?

0.17.23 os x installer is a 404. also while patching it runs into a file not found error and stops. 0.17.22 is a corrupted dmg.

edit: looks like 0.17.21 will install and then patch up to 17.23 fine. the 0.16x auto update was the one that ran into a file not found.

Right now all 0.17.23 downloads are working fine for me.

Edit: More discussion there: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=68716

[AkQ]

I'm playing angels+bobs+spacex.

After updating version to newest from x.21, and updateing some bobs mods (power, logistics and warfare), the server didn't want to start up again.

I tried to downgrade it, but it didn't work either.

I'm guessing it's something to do with the mods but i don't know for sure. I'm not that good with this stuff. I just like to play.

Picture related.

[SuperSandro2000]

Thanks for literally breaking half the mods on the mod portal, leaving a very not helpful warning and making my sunday a bug fixing tour.

[Nova]

Please stop crying. It's an experimental version, accept that if you want to play it.

I would like the devs to break more mods on each version so the players get used to it...

[_Attila_]

While the devs clearly put a lot of effort into migrating old saves and trying to maintain some semblance of backward compatibility, there are times when they screw the pooch. This is one of those times, another was the renaming of the science packs and not providing a migration for blueprints that contain science making assemblers - they just get removed.

The people who play the experimental branch are the ones that provide feedback and seem to be developing the mods. Alienate them and you'll have no mods and no feedback.

[coderpatsy]

To me, this is like if they fixed a typo in a function used by a bunch of mods. It's something that would need to be done sometime, and if not on a major release when all those mods would have to update anyway, than on a minor experimental release is the next best time.

Yeah the error message is not helpful, and it sucks waiting for mods to update, but they're trying to make the game better in the long term.

Also, since the majority of the packs had their recipes changed and factories would need to be redesigned anyway, not migrating recipes in machines is not the end of the world either.

[Pi-C]

While the devs clearly put a lot of effort into migrating old saves and trying to maintain some semblance of backward compatibility, there are times when they screw the pooch.

Completely OT: I was unfamiliar with the phrase "screw the pooch" (English is not my first language), so I searched around and found this article about its etymology. So, thanks for using it!

[5thHorseman]

Completely OT: I was unfamiliar with the phrase "screw the pooch" (English is not my first language), so I searched around and found this article about its etymology. So, thanks for using it!

Not to derail further but I saw this recently and found it funny. As can be expected on a comedy topic related to the phrase "screw the pooch" there is some swearing.

https://youtu.be/cpiP8IgZSWw?t=31

[dorthak]

Not sure if this is related to Steam not updating, but when I download the Windows zip file, I can't open it with Win10's built-in unzip tool. I get "Windows cannot open the folder. The Compressed (zipped) Folder: 'C:\...\Factorio_x64_0.17.23.zxip' is invalid."

It's also only about half a GB, whereas version 0.17.20 was 1.2GB.

7-Zip does open it, but I can immediately see that not all the files that were there in prior versions are there.

I've tried downloading it twice, same results.

Given the problem with mods, I'm going to hold off on trying again, but figured someone might want to know.

[Jürgen Erhard]

Thanks for literally breaking half the mods on the mod portal, leaving a very not helpful warning and making my sunday a bug fixing tour.

That's hyperbole. None of the mods (I use a ton) broke with .23.

[starxplor]

Neither mod that I currently maintain were broken by this update, but I am getting regular crashes when saving causing corrupt save files. Hopefully the crash report uploads are helping.

[gaelyte]

Thanks for literally breaking half the mods on the mod portal, leaving a very not helpful warning and making my sunday a bug fixing tour.

That's hyperbole. None of the mods (I use a ton) broke with .23.

Maybe were they fixed in 3 days ?

[robot256]

Some were done within minutes, most of the big ones were done within hours.

I heard someone complain about their hosting provider not letting them choose when to upgrade experimental versions. Updates like this one upset those users, but it's a problem with the hoster not the devs.

[Gatticas]

[offtopic hot sports opinion]

Can we please stop pushing Javscript. It is one of the worse languages in use, along with Ruby and PHP.

True Story: developers started using Javascript for server-side programming in the late 90s and it took less than a year to figure out it was a terrible idea and decide to never do it again. I guess nobody told the NodeJS guys.

[bobingabout]

Oh look, another fluidbox issue.
I'd suggest editing some settings, but, you can't do that outside of the game anymore. (actually, might be a tool in the tools section) but looking at the issue, you're using a mod that changes the size of a fluidbox, and my latest versions change it again. you may need to add a zero to the end of my setting that changes them.

Not sure if this is related to Steam not updating, but when I download the Windows zip file, I can't open it with Win10's built-in unzip tool. I get "Windows cannot open the folder. The Compressed (zipped) Folder: 'C:\...\Factorio_x64_0.17.23.zxip' is invalid."

It's also only about half a GB, whereas version 0.17.20 was 1.2GB.

7-Zip does open it, but I can immediately see that not all the files that were there in prior versions are there.

I've tried downloading it twice, same results.

Given the problem with mods, I'm going to hold off on trying again, but figured someone might want to know.

I've had a similar issue, I tried to download it twice in firefox with no success and ended up with a small file, then tried in chrome and it downloaded fine. so, I recommend you either try a different browser, or flush the cache. Also it might not be that specific version.

Some were done within minutes, most of the big ones were done within hours.

I heard someone complain about their hosting provider not letting them choose when to upgrade experimental versions. Updates like this one upset those users, but it's a problem with the hoster not the devs.

I was annoyed that due to a simple error, the release of my mods were delayed by an hour. (I had to go out, I thought I was finished with about 5 minutes to go, the error knocked me back so I had to wait until after my journey to fix it)
but yeah, about 3 or 4 hours after release, all of bob's mods were updated. there was another mod compatibility issue fixed within the 3 day window.

[offtopic hot sports opinion]

Can we please stop pushing Javscript. It is one of the worse languages in use, along with Ruby and PHP.

True Story: developers started using Javascript for server-side programming in the late 90s and it took less than a year to figure out it was a terrible idea and decide to never do it again. I guess nobody told the NodeJS guys.

Honestly, I don't know LUA myself, I just muddle through. I have this sort of coding language intuition, where most of the time what I write, as long as it follows the style of language I'm looking at, seems to work. I do have to ocassionally look something up, or try a couple of variations and test on the game before they work without looking them up, but. I don't know LUA

Having the game be JavaScript would effectively change nothing for me, I'd still just fall into something that worked, and any code I had to look up would be on JS instead of LUA.

Personally, when I was working on my own game, and needed to input data, I went with what I knew from modding previous games. I call it ini, others just call it config, I looked up standards to find that effectively, many implementations were barely to the definition, a lot of made up stuff. So I wrote my own ini parser and went from there.
Actually, I wrote a program I'd been wanting myself for years, and never found. INITool.exe was a command line program that was a truncater, it stripped all useless data out of a file and output it. it basically did this by parsing the file, then writing back out what it had read in. I also added the ability to make an ini diff, which was of my own design. Lines to add were just added in, so there was no real order to it (but for a non-ordered list data table system, doesn't matter. if you did want an ordered list, you usually had a numbered table anyway, in which case order didn't matter anyway) but any line starting with a - was removed from the file. it worked quite well for what I was using it for.
Of course I then basically used the same classes I had written as part of my game code.

My point is, if I were writing my own game, and I had to choose a language, I'd probably just make something up that worked for me. but then I've never actually written a scripting language reader before, only a data table reader. (And INI was quite limited with that too as every table only had values, foo=bar, there was no types to it, and therefore couldn't have a table in a table)