Include machine color masks in base game.

[eradicator]

(Not strictly an API request, so feel free to move. I'm just posting this because i feel this has often been mentioned, but never been made an official request.)

What?

It would be the pinnacle of awesomeness if the base game included at last some color masks for commonly modded buildings like assembling-machines, furnaces, (centrifuges, inserters, belts?) that mods could use to easily make nice looking color variants of existing buildings.

Why?

A great many mods use recolored assembling-machines, because not everyone is a blender-god and can make their own awesome models :). Adding several paint-jobbed full-size sprite-sheets can easily increase the size of a simple mod tenfold. And manually deriving a proper mask from the existing spritesheets is difficult and inaccurate, whereas it should hopefully be easy™ to generate an additional color mask from the original blender models?

The practical upshot would (hopefully) be faster downloads due to reduced file size, less traffic to the portal, and modding a new assembler that looks as great as the vanilla ones would be as easy as:

Code: Select all

animation = {
 assembling_machine_1_white_pictures,
{filename = 'assembling_machine_1_mask.png', tint = {r = 0.5, a = 1.0},
 assembling_machine_1_shadows,
}

[Qon]

https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/Sprite#tint

Maybe describe more in detail how it differs from that for clarification. Thanks!

[Rseding91]

Almost none of the sprites use tints - they're all pre-built per sprite sheet so there's no mask to include.

[eradicator]

@Qon: The difference is that without a proper mask you tint the *whole* machine, instead of just the base. Which looks ugly.

tint.png (42.15 KiB) Viewed 1375 times

Almost none of the sprites use tints - they're all pre-built per sprite sheet so there's no mask to include.

The final base sprites sheets do not (if they did the mask would already be included). But i was hoping it wouldn't be too much work to ask one of the artists to generate a "white" version i.e. of an assembler-3, with a corresponding mask for the assemblers base *from the actual 3D model in blender*. Ideally this should be a quick one-time effort to change the material color in blender and render two new sheets, as graphical assets do not change that often. The files could then be included in the base game structure, but would only be used by mods.