Factorio Friday Facts #221 - 0.16 is out


Friday Facts #221 - 0.16 is out

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 01:40 PM PST

Hello there. As you probably know, we released the experimental version of 0.16[forums.factorio.com] this week. As usual after such a big release, we are working as best as we can to fix the bugs to make the game reasonably playable as soon as possible. Our current goal is to have semi-stable version before Christmas.

Temporary buffer chest simplification
Buffer chests, that were introduced in fff-203[www.factorio.com] are now in the game, but they are now usable only for personal logistics and construction, but not for requester chests. We changed it before the release, as we noticed during the play-testing, that a lot of the the items are moved to buffer chests which could be on the other part of the factory, just to be immediately moved to requester chests, which could be all the way on the other side. It was basically broken and we did not foresee it.

We have some different things in mind to solve the problem. If it works out, we would like to enable buffer chests for requesters during the stabilisation of 0.16
  • Give requester chests priority over buffer chests. This means, that nothing would go to buffer chest request unless that item is already satisfied for all requester chests
  • We were also considering, that the player could have a checkbox in the requester, that could allow to specify whether the requester should get things from buffer chest or not. We prefer if the game doesn't have too many settings like this to get lost in, but it might be useful to give the player more options.
Part of the testing revealed to us, that buffer chests are not fully replacing the possible feature of having dedicated storage chests. As this feature seems to be easy to do, we might do it as well. It always seems easy to do, until we actually make it :)

Belt compression mechanics
The belt internal mechanics have been changed a lot in this release, as a side effect of the belt optimisations. Some of the things don't work as before. Some of the changes are intentional, such as using underground belts to compress belts[forums.factorio.com], no longer works. Some of the side-loading tricks were not intentional, and some of the usages of side-loading were tricks that I didn't even know about.

We are going to have some discussions in the office about how should the belt compressing work, and what techniques should work and what shouldn't. I would personally prefer, to make the only way to compress two uncompressed belts by using a splitter, as all the other tricks are kind of unintuitive usages of bugs in the previous belt internals. Others think differently, as they want to make inserters and side-loading to compress automatically. I think that it would actually remove part of the emergent-gameplay and something for the player to learn as he/she explores the mechanics of the game, but I have to agree, that the game would be more comfortable to play. You are free to say your opinions in the comments :)

Bug hunting
These is only a single place we handle bug reports, the bug report forum[forums.factorio.com]. If you make a post somewhere else, or PM one of the developers, we might not see it, and these reports can get lost. So if you find an issue, crash, glitch etc. go to the forum first.

Okay hold up, don't just make a topic just yet, first search or browse around to see if someone has reported it already. If you don't see anything similar in the main bug report section, please use the forum search to see if a report was moved to one of the subforums (Assigned, pending, resolved etc.). As a bonus, this is like a sneak peek into the bug fixing process, and you will be able to directly talk with the team and help us make the game better.

Some things however, are not bugs. We don't want to be ungrateful, but reporting things you dislike as a bug doesn't help us. We are happy to receive this feedback in the Ideas & Suggestions[forums.factorio.com] forum.

Some things though, are bugs. But we can't fix everything instantly, they need some deeper work, or maybe they just aren't a priority. Game crashes, corruptions and similar issues are the most important things to fix. We are sorry we cannot get to the things that are bugging you right away, but with a little patience we will have everything sorted out before you know it. We don't ignore things in bug reports, but we do leave them alone sometimes. Don't worry if it seems we have overlooked your report, there are just other things to do right now.

T-shirts shipped
So Monday afternoon we received 28 boxes of T-shirts.



Soon after, we opened our store[factorio.com] to orders. Frankly we were not expecting this many orders... but only 24 hours later, we had received over 700 orders. So then begins the process of packaging and shipping these.

It took 3 of us (Jitka, HanziQ, and myself) over 12 hours to pack all of them, but we did it.





The first shipment of 786 packages was sent Wednesday morning, which included all the orders places before midnight on Tuesday. As of this morning, we only have 800 T-shirts left, we ordered a batch of 3,000 more, but they wont' arrive till the new year.

As you can expect, this week has been quite hectic for us, but nonetheless, we are looking forward to reading your thoughts and comments on our forum[forums.factorio.com].

Factorio 0.16.3 released

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 07:21 AM PST

Changes
  • When mining normal entities ghost entity selection is disabled until the mining key is released.
Optimisations
  • Train stop penalty is applied when exiting the block with it instead of entering which should prevent searching for long paths just before destination train stop.
Bugfixes
  • Fixed changelog GUI displaying no version when launching the game more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed crashes and desyncs related to circuit controlled lamps in more electric networks. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed advanced rail tutorial no path error. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed inventory transfer tutorial furnaces couldn't smelt ore. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed unknown locale key in train station tutorial. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed new hope level-02 script error. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that the player would die when mining an enclosed vehicle while driving it. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed achievement progress bars rendering that caused misalignment of tracked achievements. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that achievement title was sometimes not visible.
  • Fixed spacing of effect icons in technology detail. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that the player could teleport over things to get into a vehicle. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed the achievement progress bars rendering.
  • Fixed that achievements not obtainable with peaceful mode were obtainable with enemy settings lower then default. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that exiting the car whilst shooting could lead to a crash. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that you could not submit a console message if you mapped it to ENTER. more[redd.it]
  • Fixed that the value of "bottom" of vertical align was not parsed properly. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed crash related to scenario message dialog.
  • Fixed very low performance of drawing decoratives on medium or lower video memory usage setting. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that window to select signal wasn't working when sub-groups were enabled but groups disabled. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that LuaGame::take_screenshot would ignore the given surface. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed the tank being hurt by its own flamethrower. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed updater not properly setting permission bits more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that hazard concrete didn't have a walking sound in one rotation. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed force-building blueprint rails would build multiple rails on the same location. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that you could copy-paste enemy structure settings. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that double clicking the scroll bar in the save-game GUI would save the game. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that exiting the car with a passenger would leave the car driving in some cases. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that the read stopped train output signal wouldn't show unless the enable/disable checkbox was checked. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed amount in resource entity tooltip might be displayed as negative number. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Attempted to fix hangs or crashes when using single channel textures for alpha masks on some PCs. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed that the deconstruction marker on diagonal rails was off-center.
  • Fixed wrong order of buttons in Direct connection password dialogue. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Reactor pipes now render correctly, without rotation. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Browse games GUI now shows active filter text after reopening the GUI. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed incorrect number of rails being used when building with rail planner. more[forums.factorio.com]
  • Fixed priting of errors in Browse games GUI. more[forums.factorio.com]
Modding
  • Fixed JSON parser did not fail on comma at the end of list or dictionary. more[forums.factorio.com]

You can get experimental releases by selecting the 'experimental' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

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