Smurfscup Valley this tuesday 21-1-2020 at 20.00 CET
More info about this Smurfscup at https://smurfen.nu/valley
MX KO Valley right after the Smurfscup at 21.30 CET: https://maniacalendar.com/event/218

Happy Gaming!

Hey there! It’s Weekly...er... Monthly News time!

Yes, we are switching to monthly news instead of weekly ones. Why? Because we need to focus all of our forces on the development if we want to keep our promise of releasing Bum Simulator in the first half of 2020.



Also, the past week was focused on polishing and refining everything we have done so far, so we don't really have anything shiny and new to show you.

Although the news will be less frequent now, we will try our best to make them more substantial as we are getting nearer to the release.

Dear Players,

We will perform our weekly maintenance as follows:

• Global 9:00 UTC ~ 13:00 UTC
  
• Central (EU) 10:00 CEST ~ 14:00 CEST
  
• West Coast (NA) 1:00 PDT ~ 5:00 PDT
  
• East Coast (NA) 4:00 EDT ~ 8:00 EDT

• Guardian will be released and Guardian Launch Events will start.
  
• Toshi's Request event will start.
  
• New scrolls will be available at the Campsite.
  
• Lowered the difficulty level of capturing a horse in the Horse capturing minigame.

• Guardian Pre-creation Event
  
• Pre-registration for Guardian
  
• Grab the Mysterious Axe
  
• Winter Wonderland
  
  • Event 2: DIY Snowman

Follow us on Twitter & Facebook to stay up to date.

We apologize for the inconvenience and we ask for your generous understanding.


Best regards,
BDO Team

It came from space and ate our brains is a unique arcade top-down shooter and its remastered version is coming later this year. What do you shoot at? Aliens, of course! We’ve managed to catch some specimens to introduce them to you. Watch out, they bite!


Me vs my responsibilities.

• Pink Chewer - Quickly, do some pew-pew-pew before Pink Chewer does some chew-chew-chew!
  
• Pink Slurper - It’ll make a smoothie from your brain if it gets to you!
  
• Pink Snacker - Congratulations! Pink Snacker believes that you’re a legit snack. Let’s be honest, some brains aren’t enough for a proper meal.
  
• Pink Eater - Pink Eater likes healthy food, like your brain. Prove him wrong. Become fast food. Literally.
  
• Pink Biter - This one won’t even eat you, just take a bite. As if you were untasty. Rude.
  
• Blue Aliens - Not really sure about these, some say they’re real, others say they aren’t.

A monster's worst fear is being found.

They would be much cuter if they weren’t trying to bite your head off! Remember these aliens well. This knowledge will help you when you face them.


Hot as hell in here.


The crops grow great this year! Sometimes you eat stuff on farms, sometimes stuff on farms eats you...

Everything about It came from space ate our brains:

• Chat with us on Discord
  
• Like us on Facebook
  
• Follow us on Twitter
  
• Visit our website

https://store.steampowered.com/app/342620/It_came_from_space_and_ate_our_brains/

The past few days I've been working on a custom system to replace the current world generation system. The current 3rd party tool that I use was built for a wide-variety of purposes and has a number of flaws that have caused some known problems from day 1. I don't want to go too much into it yet as it's still a work in progress, but wanted to make it clear that that's going on.

I took some time away from that for this patch which has one rather large change, that seems to be working well. Floating point precision, you may have heard me talk about before, is a problem where 32-bit floating point values (decimal numbers) can only be calculated with 7 digits of precision. That means that at 10,000.00 meters, or 10 kilometers, you can only calculate down to centimeters. At 100 kilometers, you can only calculate down to decimeters, and so on. This causes graphics and physics to fluctuate back and forth in-between the centimeters or decimeters.

This patch does not fix this problem on the server side of things, only on the client side. That is to say it fakes the players position so as to sidestep the graphical problems. On a dedicated server you are still technically 10 or 100+ kilometers away from the start, but often the difference of 10cm versus 11cm on the Physics engine is not super important when you're throwing fireballs. A real fix will someday require that individual pockets of space are managed per player, in order to eliminate the problem server side, but it's quite a headache, and not necessary at the time being. This patch should allow multiplayer play up to around 1000km without any real noticeable problems.

I did also find a pretty nasty navigation bug that was causing monsters and animals to lock or, get stuck, or run in odd directions, that is now fixed.

A friendly team of Japanese gamers also helped me to translate the Steam store page into Japanese, and I spent some time adding the help menu strings to https://crowdin.com/project/solace-crafting along with a few others, and hope to add the tutorials and other missing strings very soon. I have updated the language files to the most recent build for this patch.

Because multilingual support and multiplayer are still works in progress, Solace Crafting is still listed as single player only and in English only on the Steam page. Finishing those two systems up, adding a bit of the polish I've been working on, and incorporating Steam Workshops along with a creative mode and we should have a pretty solid base to start expanding content not just from my imagination, but from our community as well.

v 0.6.2.8 2020.01.21
- Added loading progress percentages to the start screen and main game transitions
- Added a number of strings to the language system
- Updated language files
- Temporarily adjusted some of the new building pieces to line up better
- Fixed a navigation error causing mobs to stand still/not respond
- Fixed the possibility of storage chest data exceeding the network limits
- Fixed client side graphical stuttering at long distances on multiplayer

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

New Steam Purchase

The incredible 20+ song soundtrack of “Celtreos” will be released soon, as a standalone purchase on Steam! It will also be available as part of a bundle that includes the game itself.

The soundtrack is huge…nearly 45 minutes of music in high-quality MP3 format, at an average price of about 27 cents per song (and with the launch discount, 25 cents per song!).

The soundtrack works on any platform (even Windows!) but you need a Mac or a phone to play the “Celtreos” game itself.

Important: The game “Celtreos” already comes with music that plays during the game. The soundtrack is only needed if you want to play Celtreos music while NOT in the game, or if you want to hear the songs while on another platform like Windows.

Dear players!

Servers will be down for scheduled maintenance on 22.01.2020 from 08:00 to 10:00 UTC (09:00 to 11:00 CET). Please bear in mind you will not be able to access the game during that time.

See you all in game after the restart!

• Steam users can now log in automatically through Steam without needing their Factorio account password.
  
• Steam users without a Factorio account can create one by providing only a username.
  
• Reworked main menu structure.
  
• Added a "Continue" button which quickly loads the latest save game.
  
• Added a "New Game" GUI that shows all the ways to play the game
  
• Added a setting to the map editor to show/hide the extra entity settings.
  
• Added a map editor GUI to edit force data modifiers.
  
• Added a PvP team option to create a moat around the starting area.
  

• Added animation to water.
  
• Added animation to trees.
  
• Added LUTs and color corrected the game sprites.
  
• Added sliders to the graphics settings to adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation.
  
• Added on damaged effects for most entities.
  
• Added specific dying explosions for most entities.
  

• New or updated sound effects include:
  
• Nuclear reactor, chemical plant, furnace, fire, burner mining drill.
  
• Tank.
  
• Mining by hand, chopping wood
  
• Roboport door, Combat robots
  
• Player footsteps.
  
• Biter and Spitter footsteps.
  
• Worm breathing, Spitters and Biters, idling and attacking.
  
• New sound features include:
  
• The ability to fade out sounds instead of a sudden stop, e.g. for the furnace.
  
• Varying the pitch of sounds to a min/max level, to add more variety.
  
• A 'Random, no repeat' feature to reduce repetition, especially on sounds that happen frequently, such as player steps.
  
• The sound for the game has also been rebalanced to highlight certain sounds and make others fade into the distance.
  
• The default sound settings have also been updated to improve this mix.
  

• Optimized particle logic.
  
• Improved performance when side-loading transport belts.
  
• Improved performance of inserters interacting with assembling machines and furnaces.
  
• Improved performance of inserters when the circuit network turns them off.
  
• Improved performance of mining drills and inserters in general.
  
• Improved performance of burner entities.
  
• Improved performance polluting entities.
  
• Improved performance of smoke producing entities.
  
• Improved performance logistic and construction robot performance when they're flying towards their target.
  
• Improved performance of furnaces and assembling machines that use fluids.
  
• Improved heat pipe performance by 3x.
  
• Improved item request proxy performance by turning them off in 99%+ of the cases.
  
• Improved locomotive, cargo wagon, and fluid wagon performance by turning them off in 99%+ of the cases.
  
• Electric networks, fluids, and heat pipes are updated in parallel if you have enough cores.
  
• Improved script rendering performance for text and lines.
  
• Improved performance of rotated bounding boxes.
  

• Fixed the recipe tooltip showing negative values for some complex recipes. more
  
• Fixed graphical glitch when GUI element with blurred background got out of bounds of the screen. more
  
• Fixed hard coded English string in NPE. more
  
• Fixed potential crash in NPE when Compilatron is pointing at something that gets deleted. more
  
• Fixed issue where sometimes you couldn't move to the second area in NPE. more
  
• Fixed issue where Compilatron would sometimes tell you to build more boilers when that was not the problem. more
  
• Fixed issue where Compilatron's speech bubbles could block you from interacting with the world behind him. more
  
• Fixed items with excessively long names squashing the count label in the recipe tooltips. more
  
• Fixed accumulator charge text in statistics bouncing around because of inconsistent number of digits. more
  
• Fixed train path finding penalty when there are 2 or more trains in block. more
  
• Fixed a crash when creating trains during the player moved event that was caused by the player getting ejected from a vehicle because the vehicle died. more
  
• Fixed a crash when removing mods that had custom GUI elements. more
  
• Fixed a crash when using Lua event filters when the thing to be filtered becomes invalid. more
  
• Fixed that some turret sounds could be heard on other surfaces. more
  
• Fixed that the tooltip for the generator would not show its efficiency correctly. more
  
• Fixed a crash related to building tiles in multiplayer with some mods. more
  
• Fixed that turrets would sometimes fail to attack things that are in range. more
  
• Fixed follower robot lifetime tooltip property not taking into account following_robots_lifetime_modifier. more
  
• Fixed cliffs sometimes getting marked for deconstruction when they shouldn't have been. more
  
• Fixed inconsistent rounding in the statistics window. more
  
• Fixed a desync when setting .active=false on beacons through script. more
  
• The map will be re-charted when the mod configuration changes. more
  
• Fixed inserters sometimes not being highlighted when selecting a large modded vehicle. more
  
• Fixed a crash when entity grid would destroy itself during update. more
  
• Fixed a crash with rich text tags and dynamic images. more
  
• Fixed setting the held stack of an inserter didn't update the inserter state correctly. more
  
• Fixed tooltip alignment in some specific cases. more
  
• Fixed a crash when lua removes pipe-to-ground between entity revive and deferred pipe connection fix. more
  
• Fixed a crash when setting infinity chest filters to legacy items. more
  
• Fixed that splitters could be set to have invalid bounding boxes that would lead to corrupt saves. more
  
• Fixed word wrapping of rich text containing tag that doesn't fit given width would duplicate the tag on multiple lines. more
  
• Fixed if migrating old achievement data to Steam Cloud failed, the old file would not be deleted resulting in the same error on every startup. more
  
• Fixed train pathfinding penalty for circuit network closed rail signal was not applied in some cases. more
  
• Fixed a crash when mods would define construction robots without some sprites. more
  
• Fixed that trying to do 0 damage would still trigger the entity-damaged event. more
  
• Fixed a save corruption issue related to modded loaders with different belt_distance values. more
  
• Fixed that train would forget amount of ticks waiting at signal when doing repath. more
  
• Fixed that train pathfinder was not counting penalty of last segment length in path cost. more
  
• Fixed PvP error on configuration changed. more
  
• Fixed pump tooltip showing double pumped amount when pumping to fluid wagon. more
  
• Fixed manual ghost revive of a loader in unload mode would not work in visually matching direction. more
  
• Fixed calling LuaEntity::order_deconstruction() on item-request-proxy would corrupt the game state leading to crash. more
  
• Landfill can be placed over shallow water.
  
• Fixed that LuaEntity::color wouldn't accept "nil" to reset the color. more
  
• Fixed that train pathfinder was not counting penalty of opposite train stop at last segment.
  
• Fixed that train pathfinder was counting penalty of whole starting segment instead of only part in front of locomotive. more
  
• Fixed that train pathfinder would return single segment path even if there are shorter, multi segment ones. more
  
• Fixed technology screen not showing modifier tooltips when tooltip descriptions are disabled. more
  
• Fixed belt tooltips sometimes showing their speed in exponent format. more
  

• Added UnitPrototype::light.
  
• Removed the "particle" prototype type.
  
• Added the "optimized-particle" prototype type.
  
• Added the "burner-generator" prototype type.
  
• Removed GeneratorPrototype::burner.
  
• Added the "pass_through_mouse" option to speech bubble styles. This lets mouse interactions fall through to interact with the world behind.
  
• Added optional "radius_color" property to capsule prototype.
  
• Removed EntityPrototype::emissions_per_tick, it is replaced by emissions_per_second.
  
• Removed EnergySourcePrototype::emissions_per_second_per_watt and emissions, they are replaced by emissions_per_minute.
  
• Removed TilePrototype::ageing, it is replaced by pollution_absorption_per_second.
  
• Removed ItemPrototype::stackable, primary_place_result_item and can_be_mod_opened, they were replaced by ItemPrototypeFlags "not-stackable", "primary-place-result" and "mod-openable".
  
• Added "probability" to trigger items and trigger effect items.
  
• Added "script" trigger effect item. It will call the "on_script_trigger_effect" when triggered.
  
• Added AttackParameters::rotate_penalty and AttackParameters::health_penalty.
  
• Added generic support for rendering radius visualisations on entities through radius_visualisation_specification.
  
• Changed construction robots and logistic robots sprites to be optional.
  
• Changed the loader prototype type so it has a fixed belt_distance of 0.5.
  
• Added the prototype type "loader-1x1" that has a fixed belt_distance of 0.
  
• Changed render layer of belt structures (underground belt, splitter, circuit connector) to object layer. They now have special sorting logic, so they are not rendered over player or cars.
  
• Horizontal directions of splitter sprites were separated to two sprites (for purposes of the special sorting logic).
  
• Added AttackParameters::ammo_categories.
  
• Added optional artillery projectile property "rotatable".
  
• Scenarios can now contain a description.json file. In the file "order" determines the sorting in the New Game gui; "multiplayer-compatible" determines weather the scenario is shown for multiplayer games.
  
• Added "multiplayer-compatible" to description.json file of campaigns also.
  

• Added on_unit_group_finished_gathering and on_build_base_arrived events.
  
• Added LuaRendering::bring_to_front().
  
• Changed LuaGameScript::particle_prototypes to reference the optimized-particle type.
  
• Added LuaGuiElement::scroll_to_item() function.
  
• Renamed LuaInventory::hasbar(), getbar() and setbar() to supports_bar(), get_bar() and set_bar().
  
• Added LuaEquipmentPrototype::attack_parameters read.
  
• Added on_script_trigger_effect event.
  
• Set lower limit of zoom parameter of LuaGameScript::take_screenshot to be 0.0315 (1 pixel per tile) instead of allowing any value greater than 0.
  
• Added LuaPlayer::get_infinity_inventory_filter(), set_infinity_inventory_filter() functions.
  
• Added LuaPlayer::remove_unfiltered_items, infinity_inventory_filters read/write.
  
• Added LuaSurface::get_entities_with_force().
  
• Added optional "dealer" parameter to LuaEntity::damage().
  
• Added "force" filters to the on_built_entity and on_robot_built_entity event filters.
  
• LuaSurface::min_brightness doesn't have any effect on rendering as brightness of night depends only on color LUT of night.
  

You can get experimental releases by selecting the 'experimental' beta branch under Factorio's properties in Steam.

Did you ever wish for a character you created to appear in a game? Well you're in luck! January's Vote will be a design contest - one where YOU will be creating the mayor of Caer Cyflen, the main city of our upcoming game. Now don't panic, you will need nothing but a pen (or a keyboard) and your imagination for this contest. We will not be asking you to illustrate your submission (unless you want to), only to create the mayor as if he was a character for your next tabletop campaign!

Interested? Head over to this thread to read the rules and get your creative juice rolling! But don't wait too long, for the submission period closes on February 3rd! After that the voting will start, and you'll be able to choose the final winner among our own selection of Mayor Candidates.

Hear ye, hear ye! We will now begin the selection for the next mayor of Caer Cyflen!

To celebrate Lunar New Year, 3DMark is now available in Traditional Chinese. You can change the language on the Options screen.

為了慶祝農曆新年，3DMark 現在提供繁體中文版本了。您可以在 3DMark 應用程式裡的“選項”頁面上更改語言。

3DMark is available in English, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Which language should we add next? Leave a comment and let us know.