Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Make screenshot of big factory is complicated, be able to upload screenshot on an online service that everyone can browse our map like in google map would be great.

What ?

An online service that provide the ability to see factories likes in google maps. From the game we can send the factorie to this server.
The amount of data can be light because the graphics doesn't have to be send as it can be hosted on the server.

Why ?

Because share big factories is hard, as it's impossible to make too big pictures (more than 10000x10000px) and if it's too zoomed out it's unreadable.
So a service that provides the ability to zoom out in order to see the entire map and zoom an drag to see the details would be great.

I know, it's not a simple tweak. And require lot of work. But it can offer more visibility for factorio if it's easier to share his own creation.

Someone tried a google maps way to look at factorio in an old version, I like the idea in some ways but expecting factorio to be able to host multiple maps per player indefinitely is an unrealistic goal, might want to check out the mod though, not sure how it works but if you could save and share your own maps by using dropbox or google drive that might solve your issue

viewtopic.php?f=97&t=30205

As only the position of the tiles has to be saved (not the tiles themselves) it mustn't take so much place (less than a 500 Mpx picture at least)
To represent the complete factory I see 3 layers:
- The terrain layer, the biggest one in size, but maybe it can be generated identically from the map seed, and it become the smaller.
- The construction layer, that contains factories, belt, inserter ... All fixed stuff
- The details and moving parts, details like when you push on the Alt key, to see what this factory is building, items on belt and the cars and trains.

For argument's sake lets say they do all that optimising with the regular saves, they don't save every little detail of every sprite they save locations and orientations and movements of sprites and then there's all the things that aren't maps like box contents and that's about 50% of the save file that still leaves you with 10-100MB of data per map you upload, multiply that by how many users? Total forum members 40874, just that right there is between half a TB and 4TB and you can bet if it's the games that people think are their most epic they'll be the big ones and not the little ones. And eventually you'll want to share a second or third, as will everyone else and that's a conservative estimate of 10TB of files you're effectively asking the Factorio devs to host without it being paid for. That amount of files really needs mirroring, and don't think the server side program running for a google map is free even if the map is static

Yes I 110% agree that having a tool that lets you render out huge screen shots in super high definition (maybe even gif say 30 frames worth) would be super awesome, (I've made a 256 to 256 lane balancer and I want to show it off at some point in all its glory) so being able to see/show them off them Google maps style would be a bonus but you'll have to host them yourself not it be a service provided by the makers of the game easily 100x ing their server costs.

I think the best thing would be to be able to abuse a blueprint in someway select an area and then it quietly fully renders a screenshot of that area from the next autosave/save to a file somewhere. Or that mod might do something

For example, the sharing map strings for my actual map is 980 char long.
So less than 1KB for the 1st layer.
You take the savegame as strating point, but saves contains much more that you can see.

I'm pretty shure that is possible to be under the megabyte for a map. Maybe even less. A developper point of view would be great.

but you asked for details of everything moving so adding the possitions of all items on all belts and where the inserters are in their cycles what's in their hands, what point of animation each assembler is on etc etc, there is far more in the save file than just the blueprint, you could save the entire world layer with the map exchange string, but that wouldn't tell you how much of each patch had been mined and what bases and trees have been cleared and where the landfill is. I'd say that the vast majority of save data is to do with things that would effect your google map view, the stuff in chests what things are programmed to are relatively small pieces of data by comparison and by making it as small as possible you're making it so the server has to unpack it which might not cost in storage but it does cost in computation time and energy.