As you probably all know by now, a new squad is going to be added to Tannenberg in the next update, along with a new map and more weapons - if you missed it, we showed off some new grenades in this Frontline News post from a few weeks ago.

Today we’re looking at the human element of the coming expansion...


It’s important to keep your head warm, even under threat of gas attack.


For this image, we’ve censored his collar patches - we wouldn’t want to make things too easy for you all!

If you couldn’t tell from the above images, the new squad will join the Entente faction. They will be a support squad making generous use of imported rifles and a rather famous pistol. As a fighting unit, they didn’t exist at the start of the war, but formed quickly once given permission to do so.

Combined with teasers on our Twitter and Facebook pages, we’re sure you can figure out the squad.

For this new patch we had 4 news localizations ! Portuguese, German, Russian and Chinese !!!

We also correct some bugs on the Linux build.

Have fun :)

Hello my beloved ones! Build 3007 is out!

It's been a while...

So first of all give a warm welcome to @Vamist who has joined THD Team to help out with Engine related fixes (modders hype)! And now onto the usual:

Summary of changes:

• Added knight and archer cursor animations.
  
• Drill heat indicator.
  
• Kills, deaths and assists only count when the round is on.
  
• During warm-up suicides aren't shown on kill feed and no longer reduce coins.
  
• Held/inventory items give back half their value when TDM round ends.
  
• Updated accolades and translations.
  
• 2 new functions available for modders (usesSteam() and hasStandardGUIFocus()).
  
• Fixed emote binder.

Cheers,
Furai

EDIT:

Hotfix

Ever wanted to know more about how the soundtrack of Total War: THREE KINGDOMS was made?

Check out our interview with Xiao Annie, the erhu player of Total War: THREE KINGDOMS, here: https://www.totalwar.com/blog/from-story-to-strings-meet-the-erhu-player-of-total-war-three-kingdoms/

Is your desire for challenges uncontainable? Then you will be happy to discover one of the newest features that you will find in the next MXGPvideogame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH-pWZld_uE

This year, MXGP 2019 will feature a brand-new Track Editor, so the players will be able to create their favorite track fully customized with specific Motocross modules.

All players will be able to share the tracks created with the Track Editor with the community and compete with them!
Players can also select 4 different environments where to set the track, all with different features: forest, beach, desert, and jungle. Tracks created by players can be shared with the other players to challenge them.

Hello Circadian City Citizen!

Here we are, and this time we would like to give you some information about our city’s architectural background. Because, as you will see, this is not a place that belongs to any particular western culture but mixed of its different branches.

For example, In Corot Park (takes his name from French painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, famous for his landscapes) we try to create catchy side seeings and wide green openings. A sort of Hyde Park and Central Park Hybrid. There are also some absurd/unreal-ish sculptures around Corot Park to your amuse.



Jules Street is the financial center. Tall buildings from 50’s NewYork and small stone houses that held its ground against the test of time… Jules Street is designed on open, large spaces for the visionary people of the Business World.

And the Midtown…



Here you can find every interesting item from shops, dedicated to different worlds of games, movies, music, books, etc. You can sense the spirit of any European Middle-age town with a touch of Hipster movement (what a combination, huh?). Rock and brick buildings painted and designed for different themes surrounded by open courts for people who like to gather and celebrate.

We really want you to lose yourself in a timeless, stylish city wherein every part will shift your mood into a whole new level!

So, cheers, and have a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious weekend dear citizen.

Read this post on our website.

We have a record low in our bug report forum, of only 55 active bug reports. I don't think in the history of Factorio the bug forum has been so clean. No doubt once we mark 0.17 as stable the count will shoot up again.

For this weeks graph I added the count of players on Steam as the left axis. We thought it would be somewhat interesting to see if there is any correlation between the two.


Note: The axis have different scales.

I also prepared the same graph but for the duration of the 0.17 release. You can see our player numbers are dropping quite a lot, from the all time peak of 22,457 on the 3rd of March 2019.



While bug reports might be at an all time low, we are not going to call the game stable yet. We still have an important milestone to reach, that is, implementing the new Introduction campaign graphics (FFF-301). A lot of the team has been on vacation these last few weeks, including the whole campaign team and most of the art department. What this means is that we expect it will be a few more weeks before we can call the current version stable.

We have been asked a few times when stable will be released, but my question is, why does it matter exactly which version we call stable? Are you waiting for stable to play a new playthrough? The thing is, this stable is only going to be the 'first' stable. Our plan is to have a number of short experimental phases after the first stable, where we will add new GUI's and such, which will add bugs and technical debt. After fixing the bugs in a 'small' experimental content release, we will then mark that as the 'new' 0.17 stable.

Besides, there are still a few edge cases with signals that kovarex is busy fixing:



For instance the setup above took him 3 hours to fix. The cause of the issue was that the segment has both an incoming and outgoing signal at the same position.

There was recently some news about G2A, prompted by a tweet by Mike Rose of No More Robots. In a follow up tweet he said: Please, if you’re going to buy a game from G2A, just pirate it instead! Genuinely!.

We have talked about the grey market resellers in some previous Friday Facts (FFF-145 and FFF-171), and our stance is pretty much the same as Mike, we would rather you pirate Factorio.

Upon hearing the news of G2A advertising Descenders, we took a look ourselves, and we discovered they were doing the same with Factorio:



Obviously we aren't super happy about it, but after looking into some trademark/copyright law, it seems there is not much we can do.

After the news broke, G2A posted an article on their website: {LINK REMOVED}G2A vows to pay devs 10x the money proven to be lost on chargebacks. After reading it through, I thought I would take them up on their offer.

We had a ton of chargeback and fraud issues in 2016 just after our Steam launch, with over 300 Steam keys of the game being purchased with stolen credit cards. With an average chargeback fee of about $20, we estimate the total amount of fees we paid because of chargebacks is about $6,600. We will be doing a deeper evaluation of our historic accounting records to get a more exact figure, but it doesn't matter so much now.

So I emailed G2A about the article and their 'vow' last week, and they are not exactly prompt in terms of dealing with the request. I have a list of all the Steam keys I had to revoke because they were purchased fraudulently, and G2A offered to check the keys. Currently this is where the story ends, they haven't replied to my last email (2 days ago) sending them the keys and asking how many of them were sold on the website.

Funnily, we already know that at least some of the keys were sold on G2A, because after I revoked them, I had people emailing to ask what was wrong with their key:

• Hello, on 2016-12-26 I bought my brother a Factorio steam cd key from G2A website. On 2017-01-20 he got a message on steam that the game was revoked. What happened and how can we solve this issue?
• Hey, I got this game from my friend on my birthday a while back, March 11thish. He sent me it by key, I didn’t really question it. Yesterday, though, I was greeted by a popup telling me the game had been removed. After investigating, I learned my friend bought it from a site called G2A, little shady site from what I hear. Steam support says it was “revoked at the request of the publisher.”
• I bought Factorio on G2A last week for Steam. However, I can't find it in my Steam library anymore.
• On 3 March I bought the game Factorio on G2a It was 5 euro cheaper than on your website so I thought let's buy it here. But today I got a pop-up from steam saying that my Factorio steamkey has been revoked because of a problem with processing payment for this item.
• Today i logged in, after playing this game rougly 300 hours and about 2 month and got a message that Factorio was removed from my account. I got my key from G2A.
• I bought Factorio on steam a while back and when i went to play it, it said i had to purchase it. I contacted steam and they said that it had been revoked and i should contact the publisher. How and will i get the game back? I bought the game off of G2A.
• I bought the game on g2a and got the steam product code and my account is saying that I don't have the game bought.

Well anyway, after we switched payment providers to Humble Widget, the fraudulent purchases stopped. We don't really care about G2A anymore (but we are in a unique position due to our no sales policy).

There are still Steam gifts of Factorio being sold on G2A, these are most likely 'legit', in that they were not purchased using stolen credit cards. The question is, where do these gifts come from? Obviously people would not be selling Factorio Steam gifts if it did not generate a profit. We have some ideas:

• Regional fraud - Buying the game in 1 country and gifting it to someone in another. This is likely, as we can see that the Europe gift is cheaper than the US/Worldwide.
  
  
• Speculative buyers from before the price increase - The price of the game was $20 a year ago. So buying 1,000 copies and waiting 1 year, nets you a profit of $5,000 if you sell for $25. Not a bad gain in a year. For Factorio the opportunity only came once, but other games go on sale multiple times each year, which is where the speculative buyers and the grey market cash-in.

To conclude this whole topic, we strongly recommend people buy from us or one of our official partners. Not only for the reasons you might think. If you buy from a grey-market site and have a problem with the game, or something goes wrong, you will have to deal with their support system. I don't have the exact details of how to request a refund or customer support from G2A, or how long they will take to respond to your issue.

If you buy from us directly, we offer a 28-day refund policy. If you have a problem with the game, you decide it's not your cup of tea, you thought the biters were too cute, just send us an email and you will have a refund in short order. We also deal only with Factorio related support problems, we don't process orders of thousands of different games, so you can be sure your case will be handled expediently by team members who know the game in and out.

As always, let us know what you think on our forum.

Over the past several months, Motor Gladiators has gone through some major changes. Most notably the game has gone through a graphics upgrade with more of a cartoon look. Now featuring cel shaded graphics, cartoon textures for models and terrain, as well as new particle systems to match up with the game’s toon style.
All levels have been retested and reevaluated. Many levels have had minor adjustments such as the placement of repair and ammo pickups, while some levels have had major changes as they have been redesigned and overhauled. A couple levels have been replaced.
Finally Motor Gladiators now has an achievement system implemented, with a total of 68 achievements.

Hi all!

Since our last article we added a few cool features to Lost in Sky we'd like to share with you. We're really excited about them!

Parallax effect

We added a frontal layer that moves past slower than the foreground layers, which adds depths to the scene. However weird this might sound, in fact, it's a very cool feature. Well, a picture's worth a thousand words!



Upgraded levers

Levers got a new look, now they're easier to be seen. It takes just one glance to tell an enabled lever from a warden, an elevator, or a health kit. And from a disabled lever as well. Just in case: green means ON, red means OFF.



Langoliers' new attack

We decided that a repulsive look of a langolier isn't enough to show how much it is, in fact, hostile toward players. Now langoliers swell and become bright red just before they attack. There must be no doubt as to what is happening.



Ally resurrection

Lost in Sky's main feature is a two-character action. If one of them died, we had to restart the whole level. We thought that the survivor deserves a chance to go on on its own. Now, if one of the characters mistakes a langolier for a lever and dies, the other can find a resurrection point and bring their buddy back to life.



Stamina visuals

We mentioned changes in Stamina system in one of our recent posts, so here are some quick facts. When you're about to run out of Stamina, here's what you see:

- the stamina bar blinks;
- Stamina level moves beyond the tick that indicates a low stamina warning;
- a white screen border appears.

Just a few minor things that might allow you to quickly notice that something's wrong. It's supposed to work like an insurance against situations, where you're surrounded by crowds of enemies—and you suddenly run out of Stamina. We hope it helps.



Critical damage visualization

It's easy. Old-school shooter style. When you character is almost dying, a red screen border appears, and your health bar starts blinking like crazy. Just like the Stamina thing, only red ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



That's all for today! We'll come back to you with more cool stuff! Stay tuned!

UPDATE: The firefighting system has been postponed for Alpha 5.

Today's blog is going to be a bit smaller than the previous ones due to the fact that a lot of this past week's work has been focused around boring, technical stuff that nobody really wants to read about. The technical stuff concerns the Mech and bug fixes that will be revealed in the patch notes.

As you can see in the pic above, the fire system has been fully adjusted to work with sources other than fire tornadoes. The mech flamethrower can now shoot flames up to 30 meters away. You can now start a fire when you aim at the top of a building or a tree for example and it will spawn the fire at that point and then spread in every direction on the object. It's also been greatly optimized and there are still a few more optimizations left to do.

The flamethrower is one of the best weapons you can get on the Mech, as fire is extremely good in certain situations, but not all. For example, you can take it with you when you explore and lay waste to the environment and any animals or monsters that will catch fire will spread it on their own. But we wouldn't recommend it when defending your own base as the fire will easily spread to your own buildings and if you build them particularly close to one another, then it will spread even more easily because just as water has to flow, so does fire has to spread. Within reason of course.

So when you shoot some flames at the ground, a grid of 3 by 3 flames will spawn, spreading outward from the middle cell to the outer cells. The fire tornado will now spawn 5 by 5 grids instead of the current 3 by 3 to maintain relevancy.

All this fire can easily get out of control, so we need a way to combat it. There's currently no way of fighting fire in game, apart from running to a building and trying to repair it as it's burning, therefore risking becoming bbq yourself.

Originally we wanted to just put in some kind of scifi fire extinguisher that the player holds in their hands. But that's too bland, boring and also ineffective due to the amount of fire that can spawn. So instead we decided to make something cooler. We want players to build a firefighting station that has an area of effect of let's say 250 meters. The station will have a certain number of flying drones available, say 4 of them. If the station detects any fire within that area of effect, it will dispatch an available drone to deal with it. The drone will fly towards the fire, pour some water on it, go back to the station to get more water and rinse and repeat for other burning buildings or fire cells. These stations would hold a certain amount of water that gets pumped from the ground at a certain rate. If they're built near water, then that rate would increase.

That's how helicopters deal with forest fires in real life and we think having that in a scifi setting would be pretty cool. I can think of only one other game that has this and that's City Skylines and that's where the idea came from. Of course, implementing this system would be quite a bit more time consuming than just a single fire extinguisher but it should be worth it.

Due to having this autonomous fire fighting technique, we might have to scale fire spread as the game advances. In Rimworld, fire spreads until it either burns out the entire map or until it rains assuming there's no player interaction. It's hard coded to start raining to prevent fires from erasing more than a quarter of the map at a time. So we might do something similar, but instead of forcing rainy weather, we'll kick in the semi infinite fire spread once you build a firefighting station or after a certain amount of gameplay time so that you have a chance of dealing with it by building multiple stations for example. We say semi infinite because we don't want to literally burn out the entire map either, so we'll just raise the fire grid cells from low single digits to low double digits. If we want to have this much fire on this grand a scale in a 3D environment, then we'll have to optimize our fire and water particles as much as possible while still maintaining the current visuals.

This whole firefighting system is currently theoretical as nothing has been implemented yet. We'll be working on the firefighting system next week and we'll see if we have to adjust our expectations or not! What do you guys think?