Random Ramblings #6
Posted: Sun Oct 13, 2013 7:10 pm
So recently we figured out an interesting fact. There is almost always someone working on Factorio. I usually wake up around 9am and try to go to bed before midnight. Albert has a very different schedule. He wakes up around 5pm and goes to bed around 8am. And Kovarex is somewhere in between. The best part of the day is the evening when we all meet, discuss things and make plans.
The weekend has been rather relaxed. Yesterday, kovarex went to the swimming pool and sauna, while I went to visit a local board games festival. Today we were back on the bugs again. They seem like a never ending story:). A lot of them are coming from the changes in the enemy behavior. But the good thing is that a lot of them has been in the game for longer time and now start to show up. We think it is because the 0.7 release attracted some people to start playing the game again.
One of the bugs has been extremely resistant. It is related to the enemy unit thinking it is in a certain group, but the group doesn't know anything about it. We couldn't find the source of the bug so in the end we put into the code some checks that will throw an exception if the state becomes corrupted. We will see how it goes:)
Apart from the bugs we also improved the path caching mechanism a bit. The thing is that often there are big areas of water around the player spawning place now. And later in the game when pollution crosses the lakes and starts attracting the enemies, it becomes a heavy load for the pathfinder (path finding around the lakes is a difficult problem). The improvements in the path cache mechanism should keep the long paths in the cache much longer now for later reusal. This way the long path around the lake should be calculated only now and then and for the rest of the time the paths just reuse this cached path.
Finally, today I spent some time putting together download statistics from the website. Below are couple of numbers from the past month. They are by nature inaccurate because they don't take into account repeating downloads by the same users.
version ___ manual-alpha ___ manual-demo ___ updater ___ total
0.6.4 _____ 868 ______________ 1044 __________ 177 _______ 2089
0.7.0 _____ 428 ______________ 0 ______________ 499 _______ 927
0.7.1 _____ 241 ______________ 0 ______________ 275 _______ 516
The weekend has been rather relaxed. Yesterday, kovarex went to the swimming pool and sauna, while I went to visit a local board games festival. Today we were back on the bugs again. They seem like a never ending story:). A lot of them are coming from the changes in the enemy behavior. But the good thing is that a lot of them has been in the game for longer time and now start to show up. We think it is because the 0.7 release attracted some people to start playing the game again.
One of the bugs has been extremely resistant. It is related to the enemy unit thinking it is in a certain group, but the group doesn't know anything about it. We couldn't find the source of the bug so in the end we put into the code some checks that will throw an exception if the state becomes corrupted. We will see how it goes:)
Apart from the bugs we also improved the path caching mechanism a bit. The thing is that often there are big areas of water around the player spawning place now. And later in the game when pollution crosses the lakes and starts attracting the enemies, it becomes a heavy load for the pathfinder (path finding around the lakes is a difficult problem). The improvements in the path cache mechanism should keep the long paths in the cache much longer now for later reusal. This way the long path around the lake should be calculated only now and then and for the rest of the time the paths just reuse this cached path.
Finally, today I spent some time putting together download statistics from the website. Below are couple of numbers from the past month. They are by nature inaccurate because they don't take into account repeating downloads by the same users.
version ___ manual-alpha ___ manual-demo ___ updater ___ total
0.6.4 _____ 868 ______________ 1044 __________ 177 _______ 2089
0.7.0 _____ 428 ______________ 0 ______________ 499 _______ 927
0.7.1 _____ 241 ______________ 0 ______________ 275 _______ 516
