Posted by kovarex on 2014-08-22

Hello,

apart few bugfixes, there isn't much of a progress this week in the absolute terms. Most of the work done this week was mainly to save time in the long run, so we should be able move forward faster. There are still some bugs in the 0.10.8 but these are not so critical, so 0.10.9 (stable candidate I hope), will get more time to accumulate more bugfixes.

New solution for translations

The current translation system, where we had git repository for every translation started to be unbearable. Not only the merging with Factorio, but the fact that half of the people can't use git, so I had to commit the changes manually, drained more and more of my time gradually. And I didn't even mention the amount of work the translators had to do when adding new translation changes to existing translation files. So after some research that cube made, we decided to use the crowdin service. It provides easy to use interface for translators, and allows us to merge and apply the translation changes much more comfortably, so I'm quite sure that the monthly fee of 30Euro will pay off.

Interviews

I started to go through the candidates for the programming job position this week. I created small test that I go through with the candidates on Skype, so we can talk about the answers and topics. I interviewed 6 people so far, but didn't find anyone who could suit the position without further study. Maybe I'm too rough, but I really need the candidate to have very good (or excellent) knowledge of C++, to have very good algorithmical thinking, sense for good code base structure, experience with some larger projects, passion for optimising the code etc. You know, the usual stuff :) So, if you know someone like that, send him my way.

Help with Allegro

For those who don't know, Allegro is the graphics/sound library we use for Factorio. There are some unresolved issues regarding allegro that we would really like to get solved, but we don't have the time to dig into it. Luckily we found an Allegro developer, that is willing to help us with those issues as a contractor. On top of that, we are willing to push all the fixes and improvements, if they get approved, back into Allegro so others can be spared the trouble. I really hope that some of the very old and stinking Allegro related bugs will get resolved.

Míra is digging into the code

Míra is our new team addition. He may know him as qebrow on the forums. He finally installed and configured linux on his computer, so he could start fixing his first couple of bugs. He is working on the first task of the type: "It gets more difficult than we expected", the player should get visualisation of what was inserted to the inventory recently (crafted, picked up, given by robot etc.). From the progress I have seen, I believe he will help us to keep the code organised, so we can work effectively in the long run.

The work on the basic tank seems to be almost finished, we have 3 variants of the tank to choose from now.

The regular comment thread at our forums is ready.