[0.11.x] Factorio Maps

[Phillip_Lynx]

I've will change it for the next update. Until then, it's best to stay inside your base. Why you ever want to leave your base is beyond me anyway, but hey, peacefull mode and living on the edge!

I have encountert some aliens on this map (far far far to the north)

And if I make a run to them and then my friend ask 'give me your map *NOW*' then I wish to toggle it . But as I say, this is my laziness.

And yeah, I would like if the awsome devs can put the ALT-info into the shots

[jeroon]

And yeah, I would like if the awsome devs can put the ALT-info into the shots

that, they will \o/

Also, from 0.11.0, there is a new showentityinfo flag.

Now all we can do is wait..

[Malachite]

I think it'd be quite nice if the default tile size could be set, or quite possibly just larger in general. Having 100k new files on generating a map can make things quite difficult when trying to upload to, say, google drive or dropbox.

[jeroon]

Updated for 0.11.1

Changelog:
4 nov 2014: v0.4.0
- updated for 0.11.x Single Player (still works in 0.10.12)
- added entity (Alt) info option
- added option for tile size
- changed layout to one click
- added help text

[SuperSandro2000]

You forgott to change the title to 0.11.

[jeroon]

good point fixed it.

[jeroon]

0.11.3 broke the mod, can't create a GUI in game.oninit anymore it seems, so small fix, it works again

Changelog:
17 nov 2014: v0.4.1
- Small change to make it work in 0.11.3

[Salmelu]

Is it possible to use the mod in an existing save without this mod? It worked for me before on 0.10.x, but now on 0.11.6, it doesn't. I have a multiplayer game we've played with my friend for some time and now, I'd like to go to single player and make a map from the game, but no buttons are shown, it seems like the mod doesn't even load.
Any ideas?

[mngrif]

Just reporting that this still works in 0.11.8 without issue.

https://lennier.info/factorio/FactorioM ... index.html

[FeepingCreature]

Hey, useful info: if you use pngquant (http://pngquant.org/) you can usually significantly reduce the size of the generated PNGs for little to no quality loss.

I got my map data from 750MB to 110MB in exchange for slightly wrong colors.

[n9103]

MS Paint, and any other image editor for that matter, will save as a PNG without needing to use a new piece of software.
I don't know for sure, but I'm gonna bet OSX and Linux have the equivalent installed by default.
That being said, I prefer Paint.Net for my screenshot editing/converting, as it has fine control of image lossy-ness and a few other settings (even dithering for when space matters most!), and has immediate feedback of the expected quality with a preview image.
I could be wrong, but I would bet that pngquant doesn't have a significant quality difference at the same size. Pngquant was specifically designed for this task, so I would expect *some* difference, but not enough to matter in a file format that's not meant to be used on photos.

[FeepingCreature]

Okay, to clear up some confusion.

pngquant is a "lossy PNG compression" tool. It does something fundamentally different from an image editor.

Usually, with an image editor, you want to save your PNG in full quality. PNG is a lossless format, so the only tweaks you can do to reduce size are compression algorithms (zlib) and clever encoding.

pngquant, however, does a trick - it deliberately reduces the image quality, by "quantizing" the image (reducing the number of colors) before saving it as a PNG, in a way that will lead to smaller PNG sizes (by using an indexed format instead of RGB).

Image editors normally don't do this by default because they assume that the user wants the best-quality image. In fact the idea of modifying the image data to enable better PNG compression is relatively recent. But it turns out you can achieve impressive gains this way - if a PNG is 600KB before pngquant, it might end up 100KB afterwards with slightly off-looking colors. (Or 200KB with perfect-looking colors.)

Now, the reason this approach does especially well with Factorio screenshots is that Factorio is a tiled game, which means the same colors are repeated for every tile. So while the number of possible colors is large, the number of actually used colors is usually relatively small. (At least, compared to 8-bit-per-channel RGB.)

Now it's possible that Paint.Net uses the same algorithm, but I'm pretty sure you don't want to load ~400 files in Paint.Net and save them again. That's when you need a commandline tool.

(Also the png compression of Microsoft's "stock" programs like MS Paint is usually horrible. Without any data loss, you can usually achieve filesizes two or three times smaller using lossless tools like pngcrush. Of course, this is irrelevant since this thread has nothing to do with system screenshots.)

[psihius]

You should really add some process indication in the UI.

I'm trying to make a map of my MP game, and it's huge, well, F*****G GYNORMOUS. It took it around 6-7 minutes just to start writing files to disk, then it took a lot more time to actually do the writing, and I have a high-end SSD - I don't even wana think about poor HDD guys that will have to wait an eternity

Some UI feedback or at least warning texts would do a lot of good for the mod

Also, an abort button is needed. I just started a test run for 256x256 JPEG full size map - I'm at 66 000 files and counting, this was a mistake But the only thing I can do to stop it - kill the game, and that's not really a good way.

And are JPEG's progressive?

[Frostea]

Process indication would mean that the script that runs the screenshotting program would have to be async from the UI thread. I'm no LUA programmer, but I don't think that is even possible under the current LUA scripting interface for Factorio. Gonna need a dev to answer this. I think the current implementation is crude but it works. I am more concerned about the immense file size generated by the usage of PNG. It can probably be optimised through the use of PNGCrush. I'm now working on a third party program to reduce the size but preserve the quality, although it'll be for Windows only.

Edit: Well, my fellow internet wizards have apparently done the job for me already: http://pnggauntlet.com/

[FreeER]

I'm no LUA programmer, but I don't think that is even possible under the current LUA scripting interface for Factorio

Not true async but Lua does have co-routines that can simulate it, as far as I'm aware those would work within Factorio as well.

[psihius]

Okay, well, PNG just does not compress that good on photos and stuff like that, so I decided to try the JPEG at the moment, it clocked out at 5.6GB Because it takes like an hours to make the map, at this moment I do not wana try the PNG again

[Rseding91]

Regardless of how the API calls the screenshots if you don't do them all in the same tick you'll get weird borders between areas and the game processes all screenshot requests at the end of the tick they're requested in so it won't impact performance differently.

[mrtux]

Thanks for creating this nice mod.


However, it does not work for me: after creating about 5000 images Factorio just quits (0.11.16 with some mods). It looked like everything of the base had been covered for one zoom level. I could also observe that the memory usage suddenly went up. The Factorio logs did not contain anything useful.

Any idea?

[mngrif]

What does "Grid size" affect?

[StoneLegion]

My train stops don't seem to be showing up on the map. But besides that amazing mod