Posted by Klonan on 2017-06-30

Hello, not much at all has happened this week. It has been rather quiet with the Art department out of office the last few days. However there has been some additional success on our recruitment drive, so there will be an additional 3-4 bodies (live) in the office within the next month.

Almost stable 0.15

I was surprised this week when I saw on our forum that we are down to only a single page on our bug forum. Of course this is only half the story, as we still have whole other page in 'Assigned', as well as many which may be moved from pending - but at last it is feeling under control. We hoped that the release on Thursday would be our stable candidate, but due to some introduced bugs, we have had to do some additional releases.

The Gui is not so simple

When development on Factorio started, a lot of thought went into the design and implementation of the entities, prototypes, and other key elements of the game. Always the GUI code was written with "Its just GUI, it is not so hard..." as the mindset. The following picture has been generated by doxygen, which shows all the class inheritance of the GUI code.

As you see, over the time it has grown to be quite a large and complex area of the project. For our next development, we would definitely like to take more time in the beginning to think about our GUI system. Recently there has been more discussion in the office about the GUI, and the problems inherent with it. For 0.16 Twinsen has assigned himself a lot of these 'Fix the GUI' tasks, so no doubt there will be some interesting FFF material from him coming soon.

Community spotlight

A while ago there was quite some craze about 'Micro-factories' by players, to fit some production setup in as small an area as possible. The bar has been set very high by this recent creation by Dave McW. By using the Recursive blueprints mod, he has managed to program a complete science production facility in only a 9x14 area.

So if you have any comments or feedback for us, please let us know over on our forum.