Posted by kovarex on 2014-06-20

Hello,

Bugs

the stabilising (hopefully) 0.10.1 release is here along with the regular news from the Factorio development.We diminished the count of unresolved bug reports from 112 to 59 so we are probably halfway to stable release, it is quite clear that this is not a stable candidate. But our OCD is severe enough to give us energy to clean the rest of it soon.

Digging too deep

We have no idea how it goes in different gaming projects, but sometimes I feel like we are solving things way too low-level. In this release we were solving a problem with too big buffer sizes in save/load streams, which resulted in not enough memory on 32bit systems. I had to manually integrate the scrollpane gui element and spend 1-2 days by solving all the technical details related with the gui library to make it work correctly. We are going to optimise and check the opengl and d3d low level code in allegro to solve several problems and performance issues. When things like this are done for that time, we can concentrate on the engine itself, and when that is done, we can finally put some little effort into the game features as well. Sometimes I feel like the things that are visible to the player are just the top of an iceberg. Now it seems like we would prefer if we used some engine that would spare us all this. Every game developer insists that you should't do it like this when making your first project for sure. But we still believe this is the right way, because the limitations of the big engines wouldn't allow us to go so far in some directions. There could never be 1000000 items on belts in Unity I guess.

Looking for programmer

The graphics department is satisfied for now, but with the amount of technical work we need to have finished we are quite sure now that we could use another hand. We are looking for a programmer with a lot of experience with C++ and a great sense for well structured code. Czech language isn't a condition, but he/she would have to move to Prague as at least 2-3 days weekly in the office are required.

Peak to the gate creation process.

The regular comment thread at our forums is ready.