Factorio Roadmap for 1.0.

[weaknespase]

I've tracked three games (Minecraft, KSP, Factorio) through early access dev cycles and it's always this pattern: early versions cycle through quickly with relatively small changes (that seem huge because the game is small) and then slow down as the game grows up, and each x.X.x change cycle gets bigger. I'm pretty sure it's organic, and I understand why, but I'm not in the mood to produce that wall of text at the moment.

Software development usually constructive - development moves in small steps with many intermediate milestones. No one writes the thing you write for half a year at once and then starts to test - it's almost guaranteed that you end up with bulky mess of unmaintainable spaghetti code and most of the thing would require a complete rewrite before even beginning to be salvageable.

I don't even doubt that devs could release an unstable working version at least every week, they've just chosen to not do so. I suppose they didn't want to be bothered with endless stream of bug reports for experimental rewrite, or maybe wanted to update product with substantial changes at once without torturing the users with half-finished features, or maybe both and something else entirely.

It's not organic. It's a choice. It's up to developer if he wants to publish unfinished work for users to browser or not. Commercial projects usually avoid to do that because complaining about something that doesn't work way more loud than complaining about something that missing and can't be solved by telling "we would release it SOON­™"

[featherwinglove]

I don't even doubt that devs could release an unstable working version at least every week, they've just chosen to not do so.

Minecraft does this, or used to, lemme check, brb ...yup, they still do. You missed a very important qualification in my original post, however:

...then slow down as the game grows up, and each x.X.x change cycle gets bigger.

See where I added the emphasis? The previous emphasis (capitalized in original) is on the second version number, the "major revision" as it's usually called. The third one is generally at the level of public release build. The fourth one (x.x.x.X usually not shown in public releases, or you have to look at some really obscure place in an Options or Settings menu to see it (in Factorio and KSP respectively)) is the individual build (or commit?) number. I don't know what it increments on, but it routinely runs into the four and five figures, i.e. thousands and tens of thousands. Assuming 100,000 builds spread over three years (as an example), the average is just over 91 builds per day, and probably does not include builds which fail due to syntax errors. I don't know where that fourth number is in Factorio these days (the oldest downloadable version of Factorio, aside from some Java prototype that was made before Kovarex realized that Java is an incredibly awful language to program games in (e.g. Minecraft uses an incredible amount of memory for what it does, and hacks through or around Java's issues to the point where Java's "virtual engine" advantage is lost and the Java Edition runs only on x86 computers) is 5945. The reason it's withheld is probably due to the fact that changes in the Lua side of the game don't need new builds (although I expect that a lot of those changes highlight undocumented deficiencies in the Lua API that need new builds to fix) and the Lua side of Factorio has increased in relative importance.

I think a decent layman's analogy for that second version number is "feature island" in a sea of instability. The dev is standing on his current feature island and grabs his sextant and finds his next feature island somewhere off in the direction "forward" (arguably may have been somewhat orthogonal to that direction in the glimpses the rest of us have had which are numbered 224 and 266.) He jumps into the sea and starts swimming off in that direction. And the waves crash and the wind blows, and eventually he finds himself scrabbing onto the new island with something (OC) resembling a stable build. (/OC) He climbs up the shore, reaches the grass, dries himself off, climbs the little mountain (OC: of stability) in the middle, and with his feet planted firmly enough on its peak for him and the rest of us, again pulls out his sextant to look for the next island. As these islands get bigger, they also get further apart...

That's as much of that wall of text as I'm in the mood to write

[Bilka]

The fourth one (x.x.x.X usually not shown in public releases, or you have to look at some really obscure place in an Options or Settings menu to see it (in Factorio and KSP respectively)) is the individual build (or commit?) number. I don't know what it increments on, but it routinely runs into the four and five figures, i.e. thousands and tens of thousands. Assuming 100,000 builds spread over three years (as an example), the average is just over 91 builds per day, and probably does not include builds which fail due to syntax errors. I don't know where that fourth number is in Factorio these days (the oldest downloadable version of Factorio, aside from some Java prototype that was made before Kovarex realized that Java is an incredibly awful language to program games in (e.g. Minecraft uses an incredible amount of memory for what it does, and hacks through or around Java's issues to the point where Java's "virtual engine" advantage is lost and the Java Edition runs only on x86 computers) is 5945.

Our "forth number" is increased whenever we make a change that affects saving and loading in such a way that we need to handle it. This is always when something new is saved, when the format of something that we save is changed or when something is no longer saved. Basically, those things are then conditionally loaded based on the current map version (see https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-270). So, every time a dev introduces such a migration, the dev also increases the map version. The fourth number is of course reset to 0 with every new minor version :)
You can find the version when you load a game:


The "5945" that you quote is the total number of commits. You can see it in main menu -> about:

[featherwinglove]

Chalk that up to me getting so used to them that my brain has filtered it out as background noise

[lordaeron1]

stated as January 2019... what date exactly? can't wait to get back to factorio.

[porcupine]

stated as January 2019... what date exactly? can't wait to get back to factorio.

Likely some date before 01-Feb-2019 .

[Ojelle]

You guys forgot the Golden rule

"Everything takes longer then expected"

Might as well be march, I sincerely hope not ofcourse.

[altrik]

it's cool to see how factorio became a totally complete game
11.22 didn't have logistic trash fields and chain signals?!
(idk why im too surprised, i didn't used even the normal signals xd)
*train explosions flashback*

[Mr. Tact]

You guys forgot the Golden rule

"Everything takes longer then expected"

I thought the golden rule was, "More, Faster".

[Amarula]

Rules of software estimating, learned back in my first job as a software developer in 1982:
1) Figure out how long you (the dev) think it is going to take: e.g., 3 weeks.
2) Multiply by 2: 6 weeks
3) Add one: 7 weeks
4) Shift to the next higher unit: 7 months

[Oktokolo]

Rules of software estimating, learned back in my first job as a software developer in 1982:
1) Figure out how long you (the dev) think it is going to take: e.g., 3 weeks.
2) Multiply by 2: 6 weeks
3) Add one: 7 weeks
4) Shift to the next higher unit: 7 months

I can confirm that for my projects.

[Klonan]

Rules of software estimating, learned back in my first job as a software developer in 1982:
1) Figure out how long you (the dev) think it is going to take: e.g., 3 weeks.
2) Multiply by 2: 6 weeks
3) Add one: 7 weeks
4) Shift to the next higher unit: 7 months

2022 here we come!

[Serenity]

More software companies should apply the Scotty Principle: greatly inflate your time estimate and then release ahead of schedule so you look like a miracle worker

[Jap2.0]

Rules of software estimating, learned back in my first job as a software developer in 1982:
1) Figure out how long you (the dev) think it is going to take: e.g., 3 weeks.
2) Multiply by 2: 6 weeks
3) Add one: 7 weeks
4) Shift to the next higher unit: 7 months

2022 here we come!

Okay, let's reverse this.
3 years -> 3 months
3 months - 1 = 2 months
2 months /2 = 1 month.

I thought you said 0.17 was going to be in January, not Febraury :'(

[Merssedes]

Rules of software estimating, learned back in my first job as a software developer in 1982:
1) Figure out how long you (the dev) think it is going to take: e.g., 3 weeks.
2) Multiply by 2: 6 weeks
3) Add one: 7 weeks
4) Shift to the next higher unit: 7 months

2022 here we come!

Okay, let's reverse this.
3 years -> 3 months
3 months - 1 = 2 months
2 months /2 = 1 month.

I thought you said 0.17 was going to be in January, not Febraury :'(

It was January in November (FF269 came out 16.11)

[Oktokolo]

2022 here we come!

Perfectly fine. Take all the time you need and release when it is done.

[Klonan]

Rules of software estimating, learned back in my first job as a software developer in 1982:
1) Figure out how long you (the dev) think it is going to take: e.g., 3 weeks.
2) Multiply by 2: 6 weeks
3) Add one: 7 weeks
4) Shift to the next higher unit: 7 months

2022 here we come!

Okay, let's reverse this.
3 years -> 3 months
3 months - 1 = 2 months
2 months /2 = 1 month.

I thought you said 0.17 was going to be in January, not Febraury :'(

It was January in November (FF269 came out 16.11)

I thought, after months, the next unit is quarters

[Nova]

You just want to cover your ass after giving us such a precise release date!

[Adi32]

@Klonan Say something more about the date of release if you can, so that I do not have to check every day...

[Koub]

@Klonan Say something more about the date of release if you can, so that I do not have to check every day...

Come back only once a week, and read the FFF