Space Exploration 0.7 Closed Testing

I’ve been asked for a bit more detail, well maybe this is too much, but it’s a good month for it because I've been doing a lot on the mod updates.

At the end of the last devlog it felt like Space Exploration for 2.0 was about a week away from being ready for closed testing. Just to manage expectations, closed testing doesn’t mean it’s nearly ready for actual release, just that it’s stable enough for testers to help find bugs.

The big issue at the time was to do with rocket silos and specifically rocket launch products. In Factorio 2.0 it’s just not possible to have rocket launch products to go back to the silo. (I did actually find a way to do it with scripts but it was very hacky and also gave a terrible user experience requiring filtered inserts to output from the silo so wasn’t really acceptable.) The game engine basically forces you to send things to a landingpad, and as you probably already know you can only have 1 landing pad per surface.

The 1 landingpad restriction really goes against the SE philosophy of giving you low level flexible tools so you can build your own systems. If you want to have two completely detached bases on a planet you should be able to do that, but the 1 landingpad restriction won’t let you do that. There’s a way to allow multiple langingpads on a surface, so that’s great, except that the rocket silos themselves are hardcoded in such a way that they’d only ever use the first one placed anyway and the others are redundant.

I managed to add some of the cargo rocket functionality to the basic silos, so now on a satellite rocket silo you can select a landingpad name to send it to. Then when the rocket is launched I intercept the rocket, prevent the normal behaviour, and send it off somewhere based on the settings you’ve chosen.

The base game landingpads can now be named like the SE landingpads. It doesn’t really make sense to have 2 types of landingpad so I’ve merged the two. There were a lot of extra little problems along the way, like not breaking arcospheres, making it work with probe rockets, and not having too many silos deliver to the same landingpad at the same time.

For a week I put in a lot of work trying to get it ready for closed testing. Lots of testing of my own to find problems, lots of bug fixing, and I made a lot of progress. One week later it seemed like things were coming together.

There was one notable area of the mod that wasn’t working so well, which is remote view. On the main branch of the code it was still using the SE 0.6 setup for remote view and not making use of 2.0’s map view version of remote view. It didn’t work like 0.6 though, because now in 2.0 all of the non-character controllers make you snap to “map mode” when you zoom out. That along with a few other changes in 2.0 made it feel very clunky, and also there were quite a few crashes when you tried to do certain things. These weren't necessarily a big concern though because there was already a different branch of the code to switch the mod over to using the 2.0 built-in map mode version of remote view.

After doing more through testing of that branch though, I found a lot of problems. The most obvious function of being able to look around on different surfaces, blueprint things, and change recipes worked ok. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. This is a small selection of the first set of problems:

• It didn’t work with the starmaps because if you zoom out enough to see the map properly it put you in map mode where none of the render objects of the map would display, so the screen would go blank until you zoomed back in, but at that point you might have scrolled away from where the content is and not be able to find your way back.

• It didn’t work with spaceship anchor scouting. That’s a special mod with a more controlled movement speed.

• It didn’t work with the targeting mode for delivery cannon, energy beams, or space capsules as you’d end up with a ghost targeting item on the character afterwards. The 2,0 remote view is still linked to the player so it doesn’t have a dedicated “remote view inventory” like SE0.6.

• Anything that made your character change surface also moved the remote view position at the same time, which could be really annoying if you’d character’s on a spaceship or space elevator train while you’re trying to build something.

Anything where the player is in spectator mode, like while riding a rocket or space capsule, completely broke if you were in remote view during the sequence and even more if you exited remote view during the sequence.

Another week of hard work went by and I fixed all of these problems, however…

In addition to the first set of remote view issues there was a whole other set of problems to do with too much of the “SE special stuff” being removed. The biggest example of this is the SE view history system where you can use the forward/back buttons to jump between various locations that you looked at. At first glance it might seem like this feature exists for player convenience, and it is very convenient. Factorio 2.0 has their own history forward/back system which covers places that you looked at (but also so UIs that you opened and closed). All of the SE history code was removed to just use the Factorio 2.0 code instead, and if you’re not familiar with a lot of the SE code it might seem like a safe thing to do. It caused a lot of problems though.

The primary purpose of SE’s history code isn’t actually for player convenience at all, it’s so that the code knows where you were. By knowing where you were, it knows where it can put you back. With the 2.0 version of the system this isn’t possible.

• It’s not an actual locations list

• It can understand special contexts like which star’s starmap you were looking at.

• And the real killer - there’s no API to access the history data.

Here are some examples of the problems this created:

• After scouting for an anchor position for a spaceship, it needed to take you back to the previous view location. This isn’t necessarily where your character is. A lot of spaceship control can be done remotely. With this history data gone, jumping back to a character completely unrelated to the spaceship you were remote controlling was really annoying.

• When using targeters for delivery cannons, energy beams, it needed to take you back a history step too.

• And the biggest one: The starmap. Accessing the starmap is a cycling function that takes you to the system map, then the interstellar map, and then back to where you were. Again this relied on the history information, so without that the third press of the button just broke the game state. Also, you used to be able to go back through many different starmap states in the history, for example, seeing different star system maps in sequence.

I had to restore the SE history system to be able to fix most of these problems. At this point the SE history is hidden from the player, it’s only used for the internal “go back after an action” types of functions. Mostly this works, but I’m still not happy with how the built in 2.0 history system works. It just doesn’t seem as good. It keeps losing states so you can’t go back. You can go back to “a starmap” now, but it can’t go back to the actual starmap you were looking at in sequence - it just has to guess the last one.

Another week of hard work went by and I fixed all of these problems.

And so after 3 weeks of putting all my free time into the mod, closed testing seemed to be about a week away. Again.

Along the way I’d found some more problems. Some were more urgent than others. I’m mainly focussing on things that can break a save file or would need migrations across versions. If a sprite needs to change, some translation is wrong, a prototype value is wrong, then it’s not a high priority. As soon as it’s fixed then it’s fixed for everyone. The high priority things are issues that if not fixed now then the problem can get saved into the game and it’s harder to fix both the source of the problem and the state of the saves game.

For example: Ruins generation was broken, like the ruined starting asteroid base / satellite. If it’s not fixed when it spawns then it’s stuck that way if the game gets saved.

Here’s a shortened list of some of the things I fixed this week:

• Fix ruins not generating.

• Migrate players that were spectating.

• Fix permissions and removed roles from old remote view.

• Make the starmap remote view not rely on “charting” (like radar scanning) the way that remote view does by putting you in an invisible character instead (also the only way to prevent zooming out too far).

• Fix issues relating to the base game personal reactor equipment being a “fission reactor” instead of fusion reactor - change the SE reactor types to compensate: RTG > Fission > Fusion > Antimatter

• Fix broken pins.

• Fix dying if you exit the starmap.

• Fix the character getting teleported into a vault if moving over one in remote view.

• Fix spaceship floor drawing underneath natural tiles.

• Fix crash on cancelling tile placement.

• Set per-surface evolution factors for planets as they generate.

• Fix immediate crash if an energy beam hits the ground.

• Fix the universe regenerating and changing all the planet/zone resources if you loaded an 0.6 save.

Added a “partial landingpad reservation system” so that smaller payloads, like rocket launch products, can be delivered to a landingpad in parallel.

For various reasons the contributors have been busy with other things so it’s mostly just been me for the last month. (Update: The last few days they’ve been more active again). But anyway, another week of hard work went by and I fixed all of these problems. There are still more bugs to fix but… it’s playable.

It’s finally ready for closed testing.

I don’t want lots of people testing it at the same time at first, otherwise lots of people will report the same problems and testing enthusiasm will fade quickly. Especially since for the first few days you should really not save the game.

For the first few days it will just be Patrons / Patreons, mainly just to restrict the number of testers. Then I’ll put it in the main closed testing channel for a while until it’s stable enough for the mod portal, but that could take weeks.

If you want to test it:

There’s a new forum on my discord server called “closed-testing-forum”. In the forum there’s a pinned post called “Closed testing release: SE 0.7.0”. Instructions and download links are there.