Friday Facts #331 - 0.18.0 release & Train pathfinder changes

[Freddie Chopin]

It is a massive hassle for the mod developers to manually update the mods from 0.18 -> 0.19 -> 0.20
Rather than just a few mod developers have a fix a few things from say 0.18.10 -> 0.18.11

However note how strange will that be if a mod claims to be 0.18-compatible, yet doesn't work with the most recent 0.18.x release, because it is - in fact - compatible only with 0.18.(x-1) and earlier (;

[boskid]

It is a massive hassle for the mod developers to manually update the mods from 0.18 -> 0.19 -> 0.20
Rather than just a few mod developers have a fix a few things from say 0.18.10 -> 0.18.11

However note how strange will that be if a mod claims to be 0.18-compatible, yet doesn't work with the most recent 0.18.x release, because it is - in fact - compatible only with 0.18.(x-1) and earlier (;

This is why breaking changes (if any) are intended to happen only before first 0.18 stable

(btw, PL?)

[MisterDoctor]

I find it not appropriate to describe Dominik's departure in the way you did it.

How else should we handle it? I want to be as transparent and honest with you as I can be.

You very much implied that the decision to release without the character gui is the main reason why he left. This could be rephrase to make him seem less like a petulant child not getting his way.

From the sound of it, he botched the fluid optimizations and now botched the character GUI. (I had wondered about this back when the fluid stuff was pulled so suddenly and never spoken of again.) I interpreted it as that he's not working out as a good programmer for the company, so they agreed he should leave (which sucks). I don't see it as that he was so discouraged by not having his code used that he "rage quit" the company; it feels more like he was let go for not being able to produce. (I could see myself being in that situation and it makes me anxious just thinking about it.)

Either way it does kind of feel like "too much information".

[Ghoulish]

I find it not appropriate to describe Dominik's departure in the way you did it.

How else should we handle it? I want to be as transparent and honest with you as I can be.

A good manager will never chew out someone in front of others. You chewed Dominik out not only in front of other staff, but the internet! You did not have to make Dominik look bad in anyway shape or form, you could of gone through the character gui stuff and at the end of the post said "And by the way Dominik has decided to leave Wube, we wish him well".

Someone at Wube hired him, why did they if he wasn't up to it? Who at Wube failed in the recruitment process? Is this the treatment the next staff member whom you don't like will be treated? Barbed comments?

Immature.

[Ringkeeper]

Kinda agree, the wording could have been better. Then again it's not a PR guy writing them but someone that cares about the game and player and tried to explain without going too much into details but still explain it.
Know that feeling....

If he is still searching for a job he might want to shoot me a PM. Might have an interesting one.

[Klonan]

Then again it's not a PR guy writing them but someone that cares about the game and player and tried to explain without going too much into details but still explain it.

Well, I kinda am the PR guy,
I don't really want to go over the top with sugar coating

I think the way I wrote it is coming across different to what I intend it to say, (and its inclusion was something I was debating, but decided it would be disrespectful to not even mention him leaving at all).

I wasn't at the office last week when these decisions were made, and when Dominik said goodbye, so I only have the briefest facts to go by,
From what I understand it was a perfectly amicable decision, he was happy and relieved, optimistic about new projects for him to work on, and that mostly he feels bad about leaving us at the last minute, but that he decided it was the best for everyone

I am not trying to chew anybody out or throw fuel onto flames, or make some finger pointing to Dominik, I just want to factually get across the changes without getting too deep in detail in an already long FFF.

[invisus]

Yes, but let us not forget that the wording could always be better, and interpretations will be just that. Interpretations.

After this decision, Dominik, who was working on the Character GUI, decided to leave the Factorio team.

I see a lot of fuel on the fire... "petulant child," "rage quit," "he botched," "immature," etc. I don't see any of these from what was actually said. Claiming "too much information" and then throwing these kinds of phrases around seems counter productive to say the least.

How else should we handle it? I want to be as transparent and honest with you as I can be.

I for one am grateful that there is even an attempt being made to be so transparent and open with the community. Read into it what you will, but please, keep those interpretations to yourself, and leave the wild speculations out of it.

[invisus]

Making so many mini-tutorials would be a ton of work, and I'm sure that you have more important things to do before 1.0. So perhaps the workload could be somewhat offloaded to the community? I like the idea of the community working together to come up with mini-tutorials that both adequately and concisely explain various topics.

Thoughts?

Personally, I love the idea of crowd sourcing the tutorials, or at least a good body of the work. Something about it just seems right, and I would jump at the opportunity to help out in any way I could. I'm sure others feel the same.

[Guilwin]

Aren't the pictures for issues 3 and 4 of train pathfinding switched around - pictures for issue 3 are displayed in issue 4 and vice versa?

[Ringkeeper]

ok, now i'm on PC.. what i wanted to write else in last post:

don't hang on that one sentence in a long FFF.

Back to the topics:

i like the pathfinder changes, might improve some of my problems i have and explain some wired behaviour like trains waiting for a free spot when next to the train are 10 free ones and similar.

GUI i don't care much, i like the simple one we have... then again i always set Windows to look like the old 95/XP one, grey+simple windows and not the colour full ones with round and shinny....

Fluid not in 0.18 or 1.0 makes me sad i have so many oil pipes, raffineries and 40GW on nuclear (without heatpipes), i might get some improvements in UPS with the optimization.
Does that optimization also include the removal of fluid density/viscosity/temp difference etc? Because as "normal" player i care only that stuff gets from a to b in reasonable amount and don't want to handle all the "might not flow because of density/etc stuff" ... finding out why at beginning of the same pipe i have 100 and at the end 15 is meeeeh.

[Brambor]

I very much enjoyed the pathfinding discussion and I made sure I understood every issue and solution before moving on. From a FIT (or CTU in English) uni, where we discussed Dijkstra, binary heap, Linked lists and all that stuff, it is always nice to see them used and inspires you to learn them. And they are being used by the best game developers! (Btw. what are Binominal trees and AVL trees for? I wish I cared about them and learned them for an upcoming test... Gonna Google that...)
Oh, I wish you just came to the developers of the game Astroneer and showed them the way to go, just to reduce the lag spikes. I mean they might know, but they don't prioritise it as much as you guys do! And that is very important!
I am always so excited about the performance improvements. That said, on my 400 to 600 EUR value notebook, I never had much of performance issues with Factorio when not using mods. The only exception being on truly massive multiplayer servers staring at the steam engine production. Yep, settings > steam > off was necessary.

[Jap2.0]

Best wishes for Dominik.

I'm excited to hear more about potential future scenerios.

News of the fluid system is sad but somewhat understandable with the news of Dominik's departure.

[Optera]

Too bad you didn't also "fix" that trains waiting at signals can accumulate infinite penalties.
A simple cap on the waiting penalty would make trains path into stackers a lot more reliable.

[TheMax]

So someone made the new fluid system, this person is no longer with wube.. and the state of the new fluid system is... unknown...?
Sad to here.

[ske]

Dominik has been with Wube for quite some time (2017-09-08):
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-207

We mentioned earlier we have had Dominik in for a testing week, and we are happy to say that he is quite qualified for a position here, so will be remaining with us

The character GUI and Dominik were mentioned here:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-282 (Progress in the table)
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-289 (Dominik is in the picture)

Keep the good things.

[ske]

Initially we planned for the Character GUI to be in the first 0.18 release. However the task was proving quite difficult the way it was written, and when the release date came it was not ready, so we delayed the entire 0.18.0 release (twice). After a tough and thorough review, we decided to discard most of the work, and start fresh with a different team member. With programming, you've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.

With this change, we decided to release 0.18 without the Character GUI, the alternative was an additional 4-6 week delay, which with only 8 months left, is a big chunk of time. We also don't want to get back into the old habit of always delaying the release for another and another reason, and the things we present in Friday Facts not being seen in-game for months and months.

After this decision, Dominik, who was working on the Character GUI, decided to leave the Factorio team.

This sounds a bit hot and sour on the writers part. It contains hints of justifications and even the smell of accusations. I like it, because it feels real. It has the smell of "sh*t has gone down".

On one hand, the organization as a whole has failed. On the other hand, some things got sorted out and it succeeded in moving forward. With teams, you've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. It seems that the person handling the project cared A LOT about it (and probably still does) and I wish them all the best. Usually in life we learn the most through failures.

Will you internally do a honest retrospective/post-mortem on what went wrong and where the leaders and team members could have acted better to prevent getting into such a big mess?

[deepdriller]

If you're giving a tutorial mode to Freeplay, I propose a minimalist approach.
First, a little arrow pointing at stone, saying "Hold [LMB]: Mine", then "Press [E]" to then point at the furnace and say "[LMB] Make"
Or when introducing how to place power poles, you just say "Hold [LMB]" and when the player does, say "<- Run"
There's really no need to give one huge walls of text, if the same information can be conveyed with a little "Hey, do this, see what happens".
It would also fit in with the otherwise not very talkative nature of freeplay.

[malventano]

I see no mention of fluid dynamics. So has that redesign been axed officially?

Right now it isn't included in our plans for 1.0.

Things in this regard could change, especially if things go smoothly and one of the team has some spare time.

I made a mod that helps with higher volume flow rates over longer distances. It's a bit of a workaround given the current flow system limits, but it does work.

It's pretty easy to push belts to max possible throughput.

The same applies here. It's possible to scale up fluids as you do with belts, the only catch being that given how fluids work, splitting off of a fast source (pump) would require a cumbersome network of tanks. The aforementioned mod can help you there.

[Illiou]

Then again it's not a PR guy writing them but someone that cares about the game and player and tried to explain without going too much into details but still explain it.

Well, I kinda am the PR guy,
I don't really want to go over the top with sugar coating

I think the way I wrote it is coming across different to what I intend it to say, (and its inclusion was something I was debating, but decided it would be disrespectful to not even mention him leaving at all).

I wasn't at the office last week when these decisions were made, and when Dominik said goodbye, so I only have the briefest facts to go by,
From what I understand it was a perfectly amicable decision, he was happy and relieved, optimistic about new projects for him to work on, and that mostly he feels bad about leaving us at the last minute, but that he decided it was the best for everyone

I am not trying to chew anybody out or throw fuel onto flames, or make some finger pointing to Dominik, I just want to factually get across the changes without getting too deep in detail in an already long FFF.

Contrary to people claiming it was too much information I actually think the brevity and context with which you mentioned it gave way to the speculations already made so far. The additional context which you provide here leaves much less room for speculation and ends on a more positive note.

I wish Dominik all the best as well.

[gyorokpeter]

For me the campaign is the only thing missing thing from the game. I really need that "official hand" to show me an objective to do. I always end freeplay immediately after the first rocket because there is nothing left to do. I also never play mods because they are not "official".
Achievements are "official" and therefore they are another way to add objectives but those work only once.
The campaign should not try to mimic freeplay. It should seize the opportunity to give the player different starting conditions, different objectives and different restrictions. Introduce some campaign-only elements that blend with the rest of the game but still force players to come up with designs that are different from freeplay just due to the presence of those elements. Also take the opportunity to create some lore and story to justify why the player needs to do the current objective.
See how most RTS's handle campaign versus skirmish mode. I don't remember seeing a RTS carry over a whole base between maps. Also you don't have to go through the entire tech tree in every mission. You are given some starting tech and resources, and as you progress, every mission gives you more advanced tech and more resources. For example in Starcraft 2, campaign is vastly different from multiplayer, almost like two separate games that share the basic game mechanics, so the two provide a complementary experience.
Also city building games (like Zeus and Pharaoh) had campaigns and they could make them interesting by varying the map geography, the available buildings and resources, the intensity of combat and throwing in monument building, which is, well, a monumental task.
Of course this model would need to be adopted to Factorio because of the difference in the mechanics and the scale of each playthrough.
For example the "supply challenge" could be turned into one of the missions after tweaking its difficulty and putting in some story for justification.

"Dominik's Next Project" from lats week's FFF makes more sense now.