Posted by Tomas on 2015-05-22

Good afternoon,

On the way to 0.12

this week we have finished assembling last pieces of furniture for our office. It took us more than half a year. Albert also put up a big poster in the graphics department room. I guess it is time for an office-warming party ...

The week has been spent patiently working through our list of Trello tasks. The effect of having larger development team is definitely felt. Kovarex keeps saying that 0.12 will be by far the biggest release so far. It will definitely be big. Not only because of the amount of development work done (including a lot of new functionality) but also because of quite some new graphical content and polishment and finally also due to updates for sounds in the game and hopefully the new ambient music tracks. We want to go to Steam with well prepared product=)

The long-awaited combinators branch has been merged into our master repository. Robert cannot wait to write about it in Friday Facts, but we still don't have the graphics for that so we decided to wait till that is done to show some realistically looking setups. In the meantime Michal has finished with a long postponed issue with Roboports displaying way too many connections when hovering over them. A long time ago we have announced that this will be fixed, but only now it actually has been. We ended up building a Voronoi diagram with a handy algorithms from the Boost library. Based on the Voronoi diagram we then contstruct the triangulation. In effect, the result is (except for special cases) analogous to the Delaunay triangulation.

Ssilk visiting

Ssilk is the most active forum user. If you have ever been to the forums there is a good chance you came into discussion with him. He is from Germany (which is just next to Czech republic - or vice versa=)) and happened to have some free time so he decided to come over for a few days. We talked quite a bit about how to improve the forums, wiki and community interaction in general. Another hot topic we discussed was the Factorio Mod Portal that would replace the current setup when modss are managed as forum threads. Oddly enough on Tuesday there came another Factorio fan from France to our office. He was in Prague for vacation and basically came to say hi. We all went to lunch together. It starts to be hard to find a restaurant with a sufficiently big table=))

Paths

In the last edition of FFF kovarex introduced one of the new mechanics for the 0.12 - placing custom tiles (namely for making paths). This is a good example when we are taking an inpsiration from an existing mod and putting its functionality into the core game. In the beginning there will be two path levels. The stone path and the concrete path. The difference will be in the walking speed. Also building the paths will reduce the natural property of the chunk to absorb the pollution. Just like in the nature - replacing forests and meadows with roads and parking lots harms the ecosystem. The idea is to make a tradeoff for completely tiling the factory. Below is a preview of the stone path in the game. As usual, graphics credits go to Albert=)

The thread at our forums is ready for your comments.