Friday Facts #141 - Mod Portal

[slindenau]

Update is not posted on Steam store again guys . Maybe automate the process, hmmm...

Its automated if you bought from the developers site thought...

He's talking about the blog post. It's not available on the steam news feed yet, they forget to post it there every time

Correct. But i would not say "every" time, for me its just the 2nd time i've noticed .

Thxs for posting it .

[LazyLoneLion]

Isn't it already possible to register on Factorio site without buying the game? So that pirates will have access to mod-portal? Not ingame, probably, but anyway...

[xng]

I am a big fan of Factorio almost since the very beginning, and I spent countless hours in this game a long time ago.

That said though, it has taken almost 1 whole year to fix bugs for alpha 0.12 (and we're maybe not done yet), it is a loooong long wait for between major updates especially so early in development. When this reaches beta and the real bugfixes and polishing work starts instead of adding major features I fear we might have to wait decades before we reach release-ready product.

I hope you guys will find a way to work on bugs, polishing and new features in parallel so we dont have to wait a year between major updates during the alpha phase. No one expects a game in pre-release status to be without any bugs or edge cases. My experience in development have taught me that most bugs gets fixed during development of new features because that is when they surface, and patching on code that will get old during development is premature optimizations, at least in most cases.

Anyway, this is one of the best creative games made, and however long it takes to reach the finish line the result will be awesome.

Good luck!

[DOSorDIE]

The new Train looks cool ... but missing something.
Something like a "biter plow"

[slindenau]

The new Train looks cool ... but missing something.
Something like a "biter plow"

http://sf.co.ua/13/12/wallpaper-829392.jpg

Nice graphics, what mod is that?

[Phillip_Lynx]

I am a big fan of Factorio almost since the very beginning, and I spent countless hours in this game a long time ago.

That said though, it has taken almost 1 whole year to fix bugs for alpha 0.12 (and we're maybe not done yet), it is a loooong long wait for between major updates especially so early in development. When this reaches beta and the real bugfixes and polishing work starts instead of adding major features I fear we might have to wait decades before we reach release-ready product.

I hope you guys will find a way to work on bugs, polishing and new features in parallel so we dont have to wait a year between major updates during the alpha phase. No one expects a game in pre-release status to be without any bugs or edge cases. My experience in development have taught me that most bugs gets fixed during development of new features because that is when they surface, and patching on code that will get old during development is premature optimizations, at least in most cases.

Anyway, this is one of the best creative games made, and however long it takes to reach the finish line the result will be awesome.

Good luck!

I think Wube does so much bugfixing between the Major versions, that the stable version of every branch could called a finished product (kovarex stable >>>> AAA title release state). And they have not done only bugfixing in the year since 0.12.0 but also developed the 0.13 branch. If it was not so, then they would start with the development of 0.13 now and we would have to wait approximatly half a year from now on for the 0.13.0

[doc]

most bugs gets fixed created during development of new features

Fixed that for you.

Anyway regarding FF:

The plan is to enhance the script serialization in a way, that modder basically can't make a faulty mod, as all values will be always saved. This requires some low level hacking, so the lua functions, closures and other internal stuff is saved as a byte code as part of the script.

Wow! That's seriously impressive if it gets pulled off

[xng]

most bugs gets fixed created during development of new features

Fixed that for you.

Haha, true. Old bugs gets fixed or disappear with replacement of new better code paths and new bugs emerge, to be even more precise.

[Divran]

Why save all values in the lua script? What's the advantage of that over having a function that is called when the game is saved? The game would simply save all values that are returned by the function, and then it would call a different function on load.

[Zeblote]

Why save all values in the lua script? What's the advantage of that over having a function that is called when the game is saved? The game would simply save all values that are returned by the function, and then it would call a different function on load.

Appearantly too many modders do things wrong (because it's not explained how to do it correctly, or they just don't care) and the only solution is to force everyone onto a more restrictive system so it can't be done wrong.

[Divran]

Why save all values in the lua script? What's the advantage of that over having a function that is called when the game is saved? The game would simply save all values that are returned by the function, and then it would call a different function on load.

Appearantly too many modders do things wrong (because it's not explained how to do it correctly, or they just don't care) and the only solution is to force everyone onto a more restrictive system so it can't be done wrong.

as I feared

EDIT: incredibly ironic as well

[Darkhogg]

Has anyone else noticed that http://mods.factorio.com is already up?

[steinio]

potato mod yeah

[Ojelle]

Has anyone else noticed that http://mods.factorio.com is already up?

Looks nice! Just make it secure enough zo you cant edit other peoples mods, atm I can get in weird stuff. (but cant update it) And as you said: its not the final version.
I like the look btw.

[GewaltSam]

No 0.13 today

Savage!

[Mengmoshu]

To anybody complaining about the Wube/Kovarex bug fixing cycle: Everything I've read about large software projects says that leaving known bugs to be fixed later is dangerous. Each bug is a piece of technical debt and with so many unpaid testers there is a lot of re-reporting of known bugs. The way they handled the multiplayer updates is a good example of their system doing the job, all the desync bugs they could detect needed to be fixed for multiplayer to be reliable enough to begin adding new features again or the desyncs would have ruined their signal to noise ratio.

And besides all the software wisdom: I bought the game specifically because of "Kovarex Stable." I've spent too much of my life trying to enjoy games that were buggy, or undergoing radical changes every couple versions. Minecraft or any Bethesda Game are good examples of games that take a long time to reach the consistency of Factorio.

[vedrit]

The mod portal can be viewed by anyone, but you will have to log in with your factorio account to download mods, same goes for the in-game version.

So, just to confirm: you want to lock people with pirated copies (who may become customers at some point or recommend/PR the game to their friends) out of using mod portal? What if some mod authors are willing to serve their mods via their direct links (e.g., .zip's from github) to them?

I'm sure that any mod can be manually installed and updated, like they can be currently, but I respect their stance not wanting to making things easy and convenient for pirates. Besides, it's not exactly common for pirates to go legit.

Has anyone else noticed that http://mods.factorio.com is already up?

Woo! I was going to ask about it

Edit: And now it seems to be down.

[Ojelle]

The mod portal can be viewed by anyone, but you will have to log in with your factorio account to download mods, same goes for the in-game version.

So, just to confirm: you want to lock people with pirated copies (who may become customers at some point or recommend/PR the game to their friends) out of using mod portal? What if some mod authors are willing to serve their mods via their direct links (e.g., .zip's from github) to them?

I'm sure that any mod can be manually installed and updated, like they can be currently, but I respect their stance not wanting to making things easy and convenient for pirates. Besides, it's not exactly common for pirates to go legit.

Has anyone else noticed that http://mods.factorio.com is already up?

Woo! I was going to ask about it

Edit: And now it seems to be down.

Guess It wasnt ready yet And whats the potato mod?

[AlexAegis]

It's cool that you have a website for mods but wouldn't it be easier to enable steam workshop for this? Or at least alongside with this.

[searker]

It's cool that you have a website for mods but wouldn't it be easier to enable steam workshop for this? Or at least alongside with this.

The Workshop isnt really necessary since you can access the website a.k.a. Mod-Browser from within Factorio.
Just using Workshop wouldnt allow people using the direct-downloaded version to access the mods.
Using both systems would just lead to confusion within the community since some mods might get only released on one of both platforms (if that is the Workshop, apply the previous sentence).