Factorio Forums

Hello fellow factory builders!
We are not making releases every week, like we used to, but this doesn't mean we are not working on Factorio.
In fact the amount of work we are doing is accelerating.

Date
We are planning to release the 0.3.0 on 29.3. 2013

Team updates

Albert
When the Indiegogo campaign ended, Albert (our graphic) came to our place in Prague, this is the first time we saw each other by the way. We found out that we can get along pretty well, and he proved to be as big hard worker as we are, if not even more, he is sleeping on our couch and working days and nights with us. This helps to solve lot of communication related issues of the cooperation much more fluently and his work and the integration into the game is becoming smoother and smoother. In fact, we are so content with Albert, that he is now our Graphics art director, we redirected all the communication with other freelancers to him so we have more time for programming and other tasks. You can look forward to see a lot of the sample graphics replaced by his work in 0.3.0, the laser turret is the most pretty thing in the game now

Kuba
Kuba, our friend finally quit the job and started to concentrate his programming skills solely on Factorio (Well he needs to finish his thesis, but who doesn't ^^), he is sitting here right now and preparing prerequisites for the automatic updater.

(Secret)
We are also considering accepting one more programmer to the core team, and I might go for the best colleague from the last job (Yes stealing the college from my last employer would be very symbolic for me).

Having 4 good programmers concentrating solely on Factorio would definitely mean a faster progress in the future.

Changes in progress
There are lot of small changes, these are the most important:

• New graphics (Inserter, trees, laser turret, solar panel ..)
• Modding support (mods have its own data structure, and can easily modify and add new stuff, removing mod is as easy)
• Scripting upgrades (manipulate custom gui in script, lot of small additions to the Lua interface)

Coding
We also made a lot of large refactorings of the code, we have been postponing for a long time. For example the player, it's character and the game view are different objects now, this will be partially usable in scripts now, as the player can be disconnected from his character (and the character gui disappears) and connected to it again (or to some other one), the game is partially prepared to contain more players, so it can be viewed as mupltiplayer preparation as well.

Selling launched
We also launched the payment system directly on our web page, it contains only bitcoin and paypal at this moment, but we would like to add some direct credit card payment in the future as well.

Great !!! Very good news

Woot! Yay!*clap* (other exclamations of glee and elation!)
Let's hear a few cheers for them!

ok, now that that is done YAY, I can't wait!

Really looking forward to this update. I also like that you are posting to show what the team is up to. Always interesting when you can see what a team is spending its time doing.

Alright, that was starting to get stressful... it would be great if you guys could at least give the tiniest of weekly updates, like what you're focusing on or harder problems that you're encountering. A little paragraph like this on your facebook page would do wonders as far as quenching my factorio hunger is concerned XD. But at least you're selling yay for us who missed the indiegogo campaign!

Will there be some new content as well?

congratulations i think this game is a great investment

When will this update be out? I'm really excited to see the new graphic design

the 29th (that's the current plan, i'd post quote/link to where it was said but I'm lazy)

Thank you for the update, I can't wait to try out the new build. Congratulations on this milestone, you all deserve to celebrate.

Awesome! Can't wait!

Great to see you're all making huge progress. If you guys keep it up like this, you could end up like another Introversion. Thank you all so much for keeping us updated on your progress, especially in regards to your team and overall hiring. It gives us all a great view into the back-end of game development as well as shows that you wont give up on this. Keep up the great work and we'll keep up our support of your amazing product!

Can't agree enough with Worldwaker there. It's really comforting seeing that you guys are interested in the project. Don't feel thwarted if sales don't pick up for the moment, I'm sure there will be a boom soon enough (right now there's Minecraft 1.5 and SimCity taking a lot of attention but that'll pass)!

Thank you for the wonderful game at an affordable price. Now as a proud owner of Factorio I can't wait to see this turn into a huge worldwide community!

I spend 5 days of non=stop playing and still have lot's ideas. This game is amazing and i'm waiting for next update to make some mods.

Thanks for the positive feedback, we are working all the time on the game, it is not possible to work more
We have big plans with the game, so we first want to have the core game established very well before adding a lot of content, it is always better to do cleanup and reorganise soon.
So the answer about the content, the new version will not contain new content (or just something very small).

Tomas is working mainly on the mod support, Kuba is preparing the auto updater prerequisites, I'm solving lot of issues, reorganising the core structures of the game, widening the scripting possibilities and I also started to work on the scenario mission pack.

Brilliant. It looks like you guys have everything planned out and ready to go. Can't wait to see how things will look in the near future.

I have a question though. With the addition of several coders to the team now, will you guys be working on optimization? I'm on a low-end laptop and when several thousand objects are moving about and when my factories get extremely big the game starts to slow down (not to unplayable levels) but its very noticeable. I think what will make this game a huge success is having it be able to run on basically any computer (like Terraria).

JohnTS wrote:With the addition of several coders to the team now

Actually there is addition of one coder now, and maybe one more in 2 months

Will you guys be working on optimization? I'm on a low-end laptop and when several thousand objects are moving about and when my factories get extremely big the game starts to slow down (not to unplayable levels) but its very noticeable. I think what will make this game a huge success is having it be able to run on basically any computer (like Terraria).

Yes, we definitely want to work on optimizations, we are pretty sure the game can run much faster, the biggest upgrade will be using of multithreading, and a lot of optimisations of the game update and rendering is planned as well.
The good news is, that I personally enjoy to do optimisations

The bad news is, that the game is performance dependent, we can make lot of optimisations, but you can hardly except, that having huge factory with tens of thousands of objects working at the same time will work on anything

Thank you all for the positive feedback.

@JohnTS well the team is not that big at the moment Basically it is me and Michal full time and Kuba part time (he is working on his master thesis atm). As Michal said we might get another member however that really depends on the cashflow - getting good programmers is not cheap:D

As for the speed optimization. Yes that is something we definitely have in mind. Making the app multithreaded (separating the render from the game logic updates) should have a reasonable big impact already. Further optimizations in the game update can be done by separating update to different threads based on the Chunk (position on the map), however this gets more tricky.

Already in the next release there will be a small improvement that should allow making multiple game updates for a single frame when neccessary. This means that even though the game will render only in let's say 30FPS it will still be able to do 60 updates per second and remain relatively smooth. Though this is just a temporary fix it should help already. And also it will allow the people with 120Hz monitors to play the game at the regular speed:)

LoL maybe we should start to coordinate our forum activity