Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Allow Players to change the Anchor Points of Blueprints to place them better.

What ?

Right now, the anchor point of the Blueprints is in the Center of the Blueprint.
For small BP it´s good, but as soon as you get blueprints, which are bigger than your screen, it gets really hard to place them correctly.
Make a hotkey so we can change the anchor point to different places.
The 0 on the Picture is the anchor point right now.
For the most bigger BP the 4 corners should be good anchor points (Number 1 - 4).
In some cases it might be even better if you could have anchor points between these numbers (for example between 1 and 4)

Why ?

It will help the players to place bigger BP.

Good idea. Hm. I think this is not very intuitive.

What is if you press for example midle button and you move with the mouse to any anker point you want.

Merged --daniel34

If you have very large blueprint it can get pretty hard to place them in the world because you cannot see it completely and it's centered at the mouse.

Could you add keys (numpad 2, 4, 6, 8) to move the blueprint one field to the side?

Nexarius wrote:If you have very large blueprint it can get pretty hard to place them in the world because you cannot see it completely and it's centered at the mouse.

Could you add keys (numpad 2, 4, 6, 8) to move the blueprint one field to the side?

and/or make the max zoom correspond to a 110% view of your whole blueprint without having to lose accomplishments

ssilk wrote:Good idea. Hm. I think this is not very intuitive.

What is if you press for example midle button and you move with the mouse to any anker point you want.

Some configurable hotkey anyway.

It would also be nice if the screen would default zoom out to 110% of the blueprint size so you can see everything it could touch (without losing accomplishments)

+1

I have a few blueprints that I have to walk far away from the buildsite and then zoom as far out as possible in order to place them accurately. I also have one that I'm unable to use at all because there's no way of seeing it's edges prior to placing it.

Num pad to set location? or set location in edit blueprint mode?

+1

Moving the mouse while holding down shift while holding a blueprint moves the blueprint instead of the mouse. That way you can freely chose which part of the BP you want to see while placing.

A possibly easier-to-implement solution would be to simply allow selecting one of the entities in a BP as the "anchor entity", marked e.g. in red, by middle mouseclick in edit mode.

Yes, I would suggest this being something in the bluepring editor, NOT a hotkey, because:

• The numbers 1-5 are already used for the hotbar
• It's not that intuitive, and might be confusing to new players
• Then we can permanantly change it for large bluprints of our choice - if it was a hotkey it would probably either have to be pressed every time you place the blueprint or be on permanatly for all blueprints, neither of which I think would be a good solution

Could be done with a GUI on the blueprint. Or a settings in options to default what corner your blueprint anchors at. I know personally I'd rather all my blueprints anchor bottom left corner.

Bottom left corner of the blueprint as it's printed or as you're holding it?

JohnyDL wrote:Bottom left corner of the blueprint as it's printed or as you're holding it?

When I go to set a blueprint down I want the bottom left most ghost building under my cursor with the blueprint spanning up and right from there.

Yeah I kind of thing that's the useful way to go, I know if you make blueprints 'by hand' rather than in-game you can (I've seen it done) make them use a different point to handle it but as you rotate it it rotates around your hand, which is super useful for expanding solar arrays where you want to be at one edge but there are multiple edges to consider, but not so useful adding to a bus or train network

Does sound like a good idea (only read the title)

Sounds good to me too. Though I hadn't thought about how to implement it.

eradicator

A possibly easier-to-implement solution would be to simply allow selecting one of the entities in a BP as the "anchor entity", marked e.g. in red, by middle mouseclick in edit mode.

JohnyDL

Num pad to set location? or set location in edit blueprint mode?

I will try both of these out at my earliest convenience, and get back to you guys

It was easier than I thought.

Added a way to demonstrate the functionality in BPEdit 0.1.3

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Bigfootmech/BPEdit

Currently, you must add a new element, to be able to "anchor", or "centre" to it.

In this particular vein, I want to add functionality to
- Be able to select anything without adding a new element to the blueprint beforehand, to set it as an anchor point
- Be able to use the keybindings to pick a "corner"/"side" of a blueprint to centre/anchor.

These don't necessarily need to be done in any order (after the work I've done already).

I think the first one would be more cumbersome to use, but faster to implement, so I'll just try to do a quickie of that in a branch.

I would love an easier process for large blueprint placing. Unless you're placing a blueprint in the middle of an empty area, it's annoying to find all the entities that are blocking you from putting down a blueprint, and it's hard to line things up just right.

Well, that was fast/east

0.1.4 Added ability to "select" entity.

It's clunky, but it works.

You can now "select" any single entity on a blueprint (TAB), then hit CAPSLOCK to make it the anchor (blueprint placeable around it)

Next up: trying to tackle the corners issue

version 0.1.5 posted

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Bigfootm ... /downloads

You should now be able to use NUMPAD keys as well to do the same thing (move anchor point).

Try it out, and see which way you prefer guys.

I won't be adding mouse just yet, because I'm not handling GUI yet.

Will keep you updated here if/when I get around to it.

NOTE:
It's currently SLIGHTLY cludgy. I'm not using the blueprint EDGE, but the centre points of the most extreme elements. This might be a preferred functionality for some people, but it isn't as "universal" as I'd like it to be. So, look out for it changing at some point, when I can be bothered to fix collision boxes.

Open Map, u can place BP from MAP view.

I never have a problem to ghost a BP with this solution.