Friday Facts #294 - Blog thoughts & Lua documentation improvements

[Klonan]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-294

[Gergely]

I feel like this is the best place to put a suggestion.

How about a console command to enable the research queue without disabling achievements?

[ThaPear]

It's nice to see that not everyone zones out when there's no shiny new feature in the FFF for a few weeks!

[Maldor96]

Other times, such as when most of the team is on bugfixing, we can take the oppourtunity to explore other points of discussion, such as the marketing post last week.

Like this week as well?
Always a pleasure to read the facts every week, starts the weekend the right way every time. I've enjoyed reading about the...

• Communicating our progress and roadmap of the next releases.
• Showing new features and gathering community feedback on them.
• Diving into the technical side of game development and particular challenges we face.
• 'Meta-posts' about the company and the changes outside of the game.
• Community spotlights and interesting Factorio related news.

Loved the game and loved what you do. Keep building a great game and great people will come!
More Cracktorio!

[QGamer]

About the API Documentation: sometimes it's not obvious what a variable or value does just by looking at the name, and not all of them have descriptions.
Would you please consider adding a little more info to the documentation about what these variables are used for, what their default values are, and how they are represented ingame?

[Jonathan88]

The FFF is my favourite read of the week, no matter what it's about. Don't worry so much about weeks where you feel like you've haven't got as much to show, we appreciate them all!

[Bilka]

Would you please consider adding a little more info to the documentation about what these variables are used for, what their default values are, and how they are represented ingame?

Just tell me what specifically is lacking descriptions and I will expand the documentation of those variables.

[steinio]

I must say Factorio has the best documented API in the games department.

Had a glimpse at the Giants Developement Network which provide the Farming Simulator API docs and got a headache.

[dog80]

yes please lua documentation improvements plzzzzzzz

[fendy3002]

For me, FFF is a form of communication from devs to players. It makes me understand what kind of challenges you face for some improvement and / or balancing, and show how much care the devs got for their game. Forum discussion for each post also amp'ed the benefits.

Other than as a good form of marketing, it's also a good form for keeping track of your past works.

[eradicator]

'Meta-posts' about the company and the changes outside of the game.

And transcended meta posts about the nature of meta posts :p.
Haven't missed a single one since quite some time ago. Though i prefer the ones with pictures ;).

[Slackie]

The Lua API documentation is one of the most valuable resources for modders: It is generated directly from the game's source code, so it completely covers all scripting functionalities. Furthermore, additional pages cover some general concepts such as in what order mod files are loaded or how to store persistent data. However, a big issue with these pages was that they were linked at the very bottom of the main page, below two long lists of classes and events. This means that they were very easy to miss.

To remedy this, all additional pages are now linked at the top of the main page and accompanied by a short description of the structure of the API. To further support getting a quick overview, I added a page about general Lua libraries that Factorio changes. These changes could be frustrating traps where it would take users a very long time to find out that some functions, such as getting the current real time, were not available. The new main page organization should serve well to highlight this new page to make the discovery of these changes much easier.

Having a bit of trouble completely parsing this. What pages are you talking about? The Factorio website? The wiki? I looked around both and didn't see any API links. Might be useful to clarify what you mean by "main page" and where these new links are.

[danielbrauer]

Having a bit of trouble completely parsing this.

"Lua API Documentation" is a link to the documentation he's referencing:

https://lua-api.factorio.com/

[eradicator]

What pages are you talking about?

Looks like https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

@Bilka:
Ever since i've started caring about events, i've had to regularly look at my experimentally-deduced event order tables, because i can never quite wrap my head around why this happens (requires monospace font...), and the information in Data Lifecycle is too spread out (and possibly incomplete?) on the matter.

Code: Select all

  Available apis:
  INIT   : remote commands settings rcon rendering script game
  LOAD   : remote commands settings rcon           script
  CONFIG : remote commands settings rcon rendering script game

Code: Select all

  Base game order:
   1 InstallMod -> StartMap                         : on_init   -         -     
   2 InstallMod -> StartMap -> SaveMap    -> LoadMap:    -    on_load     -     
   3 InstallMod -> StartMap -> ChangeMod  -> LoadMap:    -    on_load on_config 
   4 StartMap   -> SaveMap  -> InstallMod -> LoadMap: on_init on_load on_config 

Just this week i noticed that in 0.17.x, Case 4 of that table has grown an extra on_load, which caused me quite some headache because my on_load was trying to access global data before on_config had a chance to update the data to the format that on_load was expecting. I do not understand why on_load is raised at all if on_config is coming afterwards, because it's much easier to manually call it in on_config according to what one needs. My for-now solution is to add a __version tag to global data and force on_load to bail out if it doesn't like the version.

[Bilka]

Thanks for the feedback eradicator. Updating the doc with "rendering" being unavailable in on_load is pretty straight-forward, but I will have to think about how to document the event order for a bit. Another interesting thing concerning event order is that no events are raised for your mod before on_init runs for you, even if those events do happen (e.g. another mod creates a surface in on_init and runs before your mod).

[y.petremann]

What is Factorio lacking about his Documentation is proper Prototype Documentation ... Would be great to have one

[Bilka]

What is Factorio lacking about his Documentation is proper Prototype Documentation ... Would be great to have one

https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype_definitions is up to date and nearly complete.

[eradicator]

Another interesting thing concerning event order is that no events are raised for your mod before on_init runs for you, even if those events do happen

I was in the thread when that change happend. Though i do not remember if it happend *because* of me .
RSO had a bug related to that the other day.

[gghf]

I remember the devs saying in a video years ago, that you didn't really want to keep releasing content for Factorio after 1.0, or at least not for very long. And neither did you intend to make a sequel, or something along those lines. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but basically, you decided that 1.0 was to be your end goal.

Is this still how you feel? If no, do you already have any actual plans you might share with us?

[nastyslave]

Hello devs!
Also get us full information and description of \config\config.ini file. Especially I mean those settings that can't be changed from ingame menu. Like "check-for-unused-pixels=" and others. We need expanded description.
Best regards!