Factorio Forums

Hi All,

I wanted to see how my base looked as a whole, so I did this composite shot, and thought I would share it. This is my 1st full play though, I have only played a few games before this up to Sci Pack 2 creation. This is over 50 hours of play, I kinda play a bit slow as I am still learning. I tend to expand outwards using walls, and as I expand out I retain a single layer of wall as I build further out. Just in case some get through, they will have a another wall to have to get through. But I am sure that wont be a problem. I set up a lot of accumulators, they total over 1GJ!

I have learned about design and management, so my next game will be much more organized. I see its quite a mess, but I learned as I did, and now I see more on how things work. The logistics I could have used much earlier if I know how to use it, and without it the base is far more jumbled.

You have to save the image to see all the walls to the east - the image is too large to view in the forum, it only shows about half the image.





I have the save game below if anyone is interested:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pqv6ren23jastid/Game_3_35.zip

Thanks for looking!

This really makes me want to work on my screenshot-assist mod...

Looks very organic. Nice.

sparr wrote:This really makes me want to work on my screenshot-assist mod...

We will implement taking screenshots from the lua api soon. This is necessary because we will shoot the trailer v2 this way. We made some experiments and even quite a solid computer was not able to record the trailer in 1080p without stuttering.

slpwnd wrote:We will implement taking screenshots from the lua api soon.

Excellent! The mod that I have in mind would utilize that feature, but I'm also thinking of other things, like automatically setting alwaysday=1, teleporting around to get multiple adjacent screenshots, hiding the player ("god mode"), etc.

slpwnd wrote:

sparr wrote:This really makes me want to work on my screenshot-assist mod...

We will implement taking screenshots from the lua api soon. This is necessary because we will shoot the trailer v2 this way. We made some experiments and even quite a solid computer was not able to record the trailer in 1080p without stuttering.

Wonderful!! Please do add a screenshot and full map screenshot hotkey on top of the api

slpwnd wrote:

sparr wrote:This really makes me want to work on my screenshot-assist mod...

We will implement taking screenshots from the lua api soon. This is necessary because we will shoot the trailer v2 this way. We made some experiments and even quite a solid computer was not able to record the trailer in 1080p without stuttering.

Thats great! Will you be able to zoom a little further? I took like 13 screens to make this image. Had to resize and merge them in photoshop, so a wider area would make something like this much easier.

Hogweed wrote:Will you be able to zoom a little further? I took like 13 screens to make this image. Had to resize and merge them in photoshop, so a wider area would make something like this much easier.

try this in the console: game.player.zoom=0.125
that's about twice as far out as you can get with the mouse. do not try zooming out further than about 0.05 or else your computer will regret it

Few advices for making this "panoramic" pixtures of your bases:
- always use same zoom level. This wil alow your panoramic picture software to stich them together more easily and faster.
- use good mode when doing it as it alows you to move freely. Trees, water and other objects won't be in your way to get to nice positions
- use debug mode for temporary showing ingame grid so you can easily move to good position for next screenshot. Keeping constant overlaping of pictures can make panoramic stiching a lot faster.
- pause the game before you start taking screenshots (you may want to disable grid showing on pause option in display options). This will alow you to take screenshots of your base at same time of the day (same ambient light). NOTE: You can still move around when the game is paused if you are in god mode.

@Developers
For recording smoth video of your gameplay I recomend next approach:
If posible don't record the video on the same computar that is running Factorio. Best way to achieve this is by buying a TV tuner for PC which has capabilities for capturing video from HDMI input (I'm afraid these aren't realy cheap and bit hard to get at least here in Slovenia). Thisway encoding of video won't affect performance of the game and computer doing recording will have more than enough power for encoding of the video.

If the above aproach is not posible then here are a few suggestion that might help you out smothening the process of video recording on single computer:
1. Using task manager limit which cores can Factorio and video recording software use (setting process affinity). For instance:
If you prevent Factorio from using CPU cores 3 and 4 and at the same time alow your video recording software to be only able to use those two cores you will prevent both Factorio and your video recording software from fighting each other about getting CPU power. This should greatly reduce the common slowdowns and FPS variations.
2. Try recording video with the lowest posible compression as this will reduce the needed processing for video encoding (would need more hard drive space). You can still reencode the video with better compression later on.
3. Never record your video to USB conected external hard drive becouse limited data transfer of USB2 could cause quite considerable slowdowns. And with some motherboard chipsets even cause whole system slowdowns. USB3 should be fast enough but I don't have any expirience with it. Usiong eSata conection should provide fast enough speeds.
4. If posible record your video to RAM drive (requires lots of free RAM on recording computer). Since RAM is extreemly fast recording to RAM drive would not be afected by any HDD slowdowns. NOTE: Some recording software even has support for recording of your video directly into memory (no need for RAM drive).

As for taking screenshots of the whole map:
I think it would be best if you would design special algorithm to do just that without using any lua code.
All you have to do is just calculate the needed size for the picture beased on the size of explored map and then you simply iterate through map chunks and draw them one by one on that picture. And for this all you need is to read the savegame or current game state to see which sprite needs to be drawn where.
I'm sure players wouldn't mind id taking such screenshot would take some time so you don't even need to consdier about optimization of this algorithm.

SilverWarior wrote: @Developers
For recording smoth video of your gameplay I recomend next approach:

video recording very much depends from PC, my laptop dont have any problems with video recording even in 3D games(last i wrote was Mech Warrior Online game).

I think that's not the point. Even on my PC the game sometimes has "lags", it doesn't run completely fluid. The problem is, that the game needs sometimes more than 1/60 second to calculate the next tick (this is because to guarantee the determinism). And especially in the demo, where you need to do some very nifty stuff. And even if it takes only 1/59 second: the eye can see this little difference as a lag. Using screenshoots is a very cool idea, which guarantees lag-free videos without much afford.