New blueprint website, featuring search and automatic images

[lawl]

Today we’d like to announce the launch of our Easter project factoriolayouts.com.

While playing Factorio and looking for blueprints we were not satisfied with the other available webpages. They were either missing images or didn’t provide any satisfying search functionality. So we decided to develop our own solution and are proud to share it.

Here is a quick overview of our features:

• Automatically generated images of your blueprints
• Search by tags & mods which are predefined, so there will be no more tag-spaghetti
• We’re providing tags + mods to add to your blueprints
• No account is required for the main functionality
• Instantly edit your blueprints after uploading them
• Upvote layouts that you like (we also order by upvotes)

Few planned features we will definitely include:

• Tag & mod pages, which list all the blueprints for one tag or mod
• Usability improvements

We are always open to your suggestions and will prioritize them according to our available time which is not sunk into playing Factorio

About the automatically generated images: There are a few limitations as of now, not gonna lie.

• Rail tracks might not always look very good. You will get what the intention behind the rail track is, but it might not be aligned pixel perfect. Fixing this will require a substantial amount of work that we could not get in for launch.
• Pipe layouts can be a bit indecipherable from the image alone, the work required here is most likely the same code infrastructure that’s needed to make rails not LookLikeShit™.
• Again, same reason why belts & underground belts are a bit weird, but those you’ll get used to and it’s pretty easy to read the layout from the image.
• We don’t have the images (yet) for items from mods. So the generated images from blueprints using purely non standard items might look a bit weird. We hope to support (at least the most popular mods) at some non specified point in the future.

When we make substantial changes to our image generation code we will retroactively update all already submitted images. So feel free to post them already, even if the blueprints are mod-heavy.

We hope that you guys will enjoy our new blueprint homepage and we bring you some good quality of life improvements to enjoy Factorio even more

Cross-Posted to reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... earch_and/

[Durentis]

Looks like you're off to a good start.. I put up a few for you.

Just some suggestions:

• - Accept an image upload, store it locally, and only show the auto-generated image if one isn't submitted until you can generate images like those on in-game blueprints.

• - Having to save edit links is a bit weird and are easily lost, making submissions difficult/impossible to maintain long-term - better to implement basic user accounts.

• - Will need tags for game difficulty when 0.15 hits if ratios are messed with.

[lawl]

Having to save edit links is a bit weird and are easily lost, making submissions difficult/impossible to maintain long-term - better to implement basic user accounts.

Agreed! We wanted to reduce the friction for casual users, so you can manage blueprints without an account. Usability features for heavy users managing a ton of blueprints may come in the future.

Will need tags for game difficulty when 0.15 hits if ratios are messed with.

We're always open for new tag suggestions, Pming us on reddit is probably the easiest way. We want to manually add new tags though to avoid same-tag-different-spelling problems.

[Terukio]

This looks awesome.

I can't wait for more blueprints to be available in the future!

[mophydeen]

blueprint books?

[lawl]

blueprint books?

We'll likely work on that at some point, but we have other things we want to focus on right now.

[Engimage]

While the idea is nice the visual representation really lacks quality.
I am talking mostly about belt visualization. And underground belts as the worst part.
And ofcourse pipes.
Yes I know that even in-game blueprints display non-interconnecting belts and pipes. But underground belts at least look fine in-game but are a disaster on your site...

[Taszi]

It's really nice job, I love it.

Is it possible the Description section handle BB Codes?
- Include a forum link to the relevant discussion, or a youtube movie, would be more informative. Or include picture of the working layout, which input belts which kind of material.
- I know, adding a discussion thread under the layout, it's a different suggestion.
- Maybe add blueprint verification to prevent duplications.

Yesterday I have difficulties with Compact Processing Unit Something wrong, after import into Foreman, some belt direction is not correct, and I spent a lot of time, to fine the errors and correct it.

[Durentis]

Looks like someone created a lot of duplicate entries that haven't been cleaned up in quite some time.. a check to prevent such from happening in the future would be a good plan. I think this also serves as a strong example of why requiring user accounts are important, as any abuse by a user and you can remove their account and associated uploads very quickly.

But has Factorio Layouts essentially been abandoned? Doesn't appear to have received much use/maintenance since the initial announcement.

I wonder in general if this sort of site is worth the effort in the first place given how easy it is to access blueprints in multiplayer now and people only need to get a particular blueprint once. And having similar features fragmented over multiple sites probably isn't helpful to either site's popularity. Perhaps it would be better to collaborate with other sites to maintain a larger array of features for a single repository?

What if the Official Factorio Wiki instead maintained a section of the most popular blueprints all sorted nice by categories?