Blueprint Portal

[mattj256]

TL;DR: Make a Blueprint Portal (similar to the Mod Portal) to allow players to easily share blueprints with each other. Or add the Blueprint String mod to vanilla and let people use FactorioBlueprints.com.

FFF #170 discusses various options to make it easier for players to share their blueprints across games and in multiplayer games. I think it would be valuable to have an official Blueprint Portal that works in vanilla, and this could greatly simplify the GUI described in FFF #170. (Rather than solving the problem of how to allow many players to share mods with each other in-game, simply create a central repository and have the GUI only show "my shared blueprints" and "game blueprints.")

[Rseding91]

No, that's not likely to ever happen. The method blueprints are saved means it would essentially just be sharing small save files and that's not worth our time.

I personally don't see the point in sharing blueprints. The game's about factory design and automation and by sharing blueprints you remove half of that. Build your own factory - design it yourself - that's what makes the game fun.

[mattj256]

Thanks for the feedback Rseding91. I've put in over 600 hours into this game. Certainly sharing your own blueprints across games is valuable, so the only question is whether it's also valuable to share with others.

Thanks for all your hard work in making this game great! Happy holidays.
Matthew

[BenSeidel]

Download and setup the headless server. When you want to publicly share a blueprint place it in the "game" section. If you ensure the map is extremely small and of a fixed size (a 10x10 area for example) people can connect quickly when they want to and browse the saved blueprints.

[golfmiketango]

No, that's not likely to ever happen. The method blueprints are saved means it would essentially just be sharing small save files and that's not worth our time.

I personally don't see the point in sharing blueprints. The game's about factory design and automation and by sharing blueprints you remove half of that. Build your own factory - design it yourself - that's what makes the game fun.

Really? OK, I'll play along and pretend you actually mean what you've said, above, although I find it hard to believe.

There are a great many reasons one might want to share a blueprint in an openly-accessible way:

• Someone makes a claim about how it is possible to unload a train-car of a train at a station with 14 express inserters simultaneously. You find this difficult to believe. They want to prove it. So... they should share their entire save with you and say "check out these coordinates in my save"?
• You'd like to post something to "Share Your Creations" on this forum. So... you should not share blueprint strings, as recommended by the forum sticky, but share your save instead? OK, in some cases I could see that being better, admittedly -- but what if the creation is a combinator contraption that tries to measure the time of day in-game based on the behavior of an electrically isolated set of two solar panels, an accumulator, and a certain number of radars?
• I decide to host a Google Hangout where I will conduct an online classroom teaching noobs the mathematical principles which underpin the construction of basic belt-balancers. The class focuses on three different particular balancers: a 1->4 balancer, a 4->4 balancer, and a 1->3 balancer. At the end of the class students will be encouraged to try to build their on 1->5 balancer. The class offers a multiplayer place to hang out but is designed not to require participating in the multiplayer or the assignment at the end, to participate in the class. The class is also intended to be made available on Youtube later. Standard designs, that everybody uses for the above, are the examples to be shared and discussed with the class participants. So -- instead of sharing blueprints for the three balancers, I should instead put them all in a save and give out the save?

I could go on. There might be good reasons not to use someone else's blueprint, in some situations where it is tempting to do so, but no reason to ever do it? That's crazy talk.

To be clear: by the above I do not mean to say that Wube should host a blueprints database, as requested by OP. Wube never promised that &, personally, I'd rather Wube spent their time on other things.

For me, personally, I do sometimes -- often, really -- use other people's designs in my factories. The reason I do so is simple: someone shares a creation or technique that pareto-dominates any equivalent I could build. Or that I never even thought of using in the first place.

Once I've seen that, and understood how it works, I can stand around recreating it, to prove to myself that I know how, which I might well do, but how many times is that fun?

Ultimately, to do some "other" thing which is less optimal would be to deliberately sabotage my campaign in the name of being creative -- I'd rather win.

Whacking together some big sloppy turd (now that I know a better way) is probably not fun -- instead, it feels like I'm a factorio deadbeat.

I am aware that learning other people's designs is a kind of "spoiler" that removes a puzzle that I could enjoyably spend time solving myself. But it can be hard to avoid that. Sometimes the thing "spoilered" is anyhow is not a design, but literally a whole approach to playing the game that I simply never thought of. I can't un-see things and I'm not going to avoid places like the forums just so I don't miss out on the fun of figuring every little detail out independently.

[Klonan]

A blueprint portal might not be made for the same reason we don't have a 'savegame portal', a blueprint is sort've a creative convenience, you apply your own creativity and knowledge to design a setup, and then use the blueprint to easily use your complex design.

But i do see the demand, i have seen all the blueprint posts and sharing on the forum and through other websites,
So i may make a subforum for blueprint sharing, and if the demand is truly great enough, may consider expanding to a dedicated portal.

[Yoyobuae]

What about the blueprint string function? Would be more convenient if that was included in the game. BP string copy&paste to/from clipboard could be more streamlined.

BP string mod works, but requires a few steps to get blueprint string out of the game (save BP to file, open BP string output folder, open BP string file, copy string). Ideally it should be only one step: Copy BP string to clipboard. But mods can't implement that (no access to clipboard, which they shouldn't have anyway).

Once BP strings become easily accesible then anyone can make a BP portal for sharing them.

[ssilk]

When I read this I suddenly had a picture in my mind.

I need to make some kind of short introduction first.

We are in the world of electronic music instruments. 1980/90s or so. This

is nothing else, than a device that sends standadized signals on a bus, when I press a key on that instruments.
That's the basic function: No sound at all, but some electric change on a cable.

The sound comes from the SoundFonts:

... a file format and associated technology that uses sample-based synthesis to play MIDI files. It was first used on the Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card for its General MIDI support.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundFont

But stop!! I do not compare SoundFonts with Blueprints! No! I compare one sound of the SoundFont with one Blueprint.

A SoundFont would be in Factorio a compilation of Blueprint, that matches together and can be blended one into another.


The difference between a sound and an instrument

Before SoundFonts you could play in many instruments only one sample for all keys of the keyboard. Such samples still exist, some very basic sounds, especially bass-sounds, play perfectly over one, two maybe three octaves. But with the time this was too less, a piano for example plays many different sounds along the keyboard.
Soundfonts where born due to the need to use different soundfiles along the keys of the keyboard. You can test that here: https://onlinesequencer.net/226123
Play notes by clicking into the sequencer and you can hear of course different sounds in different pitches, but when you hear exactly you can hear, that nearby notes have different samples. Best example is, when you switch the SoundFont to "Percussion". And what you can also hear eventually, is that the percussion instruments match nice together.

I see Blueprints equally. And perhaps it's a bit difficult to see the equivalence. So I try my best:
Type One: we have single blueprints. That are like SoundFonts containing only one sample, that is played in different pitches.
There is not much to say about this: There is a blueprint of a castle. If you place it you will have a castle.

Type Two is then layering of blueprints. Blueprints Layers. Such blueprints can be overlayed to build something. For exampke, you have a blueprint of the walls of the castle. If you place that, you have the borders of a castle, but nothing inside. To fill the castle, we have different blueprints. Like for the types of weapons you want to place, more lasers or more gun-turrets for example. The equivalent in SoundFonts are layered sounds; sound that contains two or more samples and when you play the lower sounds it is more the first sample, while in the upper sounds it's more the second.
Example: viewtopic.php?f=204&t=8377 Modular Extensible PnP Factory
Or (bad) example: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35529 CELLS - grid modules Prototype
The point of these types of blueprints is, that you have a container, something, where you can put things into in a fixed format, limited by the borders of the previous blueprint.

Type Three, is, where we can plug more things together: I call it "Blueprint Domino". That are blueprints that match together like Domino-Stones and you can build a "Line" out of them. Think to the current track laying: The path is made out of matching "track stone", that can be put together by simple rules.
The equivalence to the sample is for example a piano-SoundFont, which contains different samples, but when I press a key only one sample is played. See the link above. All samples together build an instrument. In blueprints that would be things like wall-elements or train stations, where different blueprints fit together. You don't place the castle, but you place the walls around the castle to define the castle.
Examples: viewtopic.php?f=194&t=28769 Track Junctions Blueprint String

And there are other forms of combinations. I wrote a long article about that: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=37517 Blueprint-Mirroring, BP-Shifting, -Programming, -Iteration, -Editing, Ornaments and Recursion

So in the end, what counts is not the single blueprint. "Look, I have a blueprint, that creates a whole oil-production". That is useless (in the long terms), cause that will fit only for that special situation. Some longer pipes anywhere and it might not work anymore.
What's really useful are blueprints, that match together in some kind of rule (like explained above).
Cause that is also the point of the whole discussion: If there would be a blueprint portal, everyone would put only Type-One-blueprints on it. You can see what happens then: There are thousands and more sites, where you can upload single samples. Between type one blueprints and this, there is not much difference: Upload some data somewhere, add some properties and a description, make a picture.

What makes blueprints really interesting is, when you can combine them in a clever/complex way. But that needs to be supported by the game first.

Seen like so: A blueprint portal NOW is useless, cause it would be spammed. A blueprint portal that enables only to upload blueprints of the other types is much more useful.

[allmhuran]

I found this thread while looking for a way to share blueprints across my own saves. I'm not sure if Mr Rseding91 thinks any differently about that.

The primary reason? I am still exploring factory patterns, but when I get to a stage in the game where it's time to put down solar panels or a bus, it's just tedious having to do the same thing over and over again if I know the design is the one I am going to stick with. Further, let's say I'm trying out some new design for red circuits. Well, it would still be nice to plop down my blueprint from last game to get me up and running while I work on new ideas.

Indeed, in my browsing through reddit etc, given the number of blueprint "strings" I found, I thought it was *already* in the game. I'm amazed that something so obviously popular is considered "not worth dev time".

[EditorRUS]

ssilk's post, TL;DR version: most blueprints aren't created to be always modular (being able to create an entire factory out of these blueprints without changing the original blueprint) and composable (being able to easily form a chain of transformers out of these blueprints and connect them without changing the original blueprints) and factories won't be able to effectively and easily use them, making them only suitable for the factory where they were initially created. A blueprint portal would get spammed with such blueprints which would render it useless for most people.
In addition to that: it's hard to judge whether some blueprint is fully modular or not. Composability is even more difficult to decide.

SoundFonts are not really comparable to blueprints in my opinion. They have common points, but how they work is completely different.

[ssilk]

But you got my point?! Or not?

Well, yes, Soundfonts are not the best example, but are not the worst. It's complex to find an composition-system, which works similar.

I like your TL;DR, which really brings it to the point. Which I now point a bit more:
- Most of the blueprints will work only for the factory, where they are created. Or the player who created them.
- Creating really useful blueprints, which can be used everywhere takes a lot of time. Uploading such blueprints on such a server guarantees, that they will be never used, cause they cannot be found.

I got an idea of how to work this: We need a checksum over all blueprints and whenever a blueprint is used, it logs it's usage onto Factorio website, which counts just the usage of all blueprints by a simple checksum (In the database is just "A301804D29901 is used now 28479279 times by 4958 people".
In that case the game can ask the player, who created the blueprint initially and shared it with others by just playing multiplayer, that his blueprints seems to be useful and if he would like to share the blueprint with others....

Well, very much needs to be though around this, it's just a simple idea.


Edit: A blueprint portal would be useful to add YOUR blueprints, so that you easily can share it (here in the forum and with others) by sharing two links. One for the blueprint itself (in raw-text), plus a description and meta-data and one for a picture to show the usage of blie