"Free" Spritesheet art for modders

[dabalciunas]

Hello Factorio Developers,

I love how this game is moddable, and how these mods are able revive Factorio after one has completely explored vanilla or is eventually not satisfied with one or another vanilla limitation.

However, many mods suffer from the same curse: they are implemented by LUA programmers, which usually are terrible artists.

So... if you have any sprite art which is currently not used in vanilla, I would love to see them in the mods. Even if they are not in vanilla, they are invaluable for us. Yes, they take some time to load at game startup, so if you could provide this art separately and all allow us to make slight changes on it for modding purposes, this would be perfect. I believe that a license limiting the art usage exclusively for Factorio modding purposes would be enough.

I would even go further, and suggest you to, please, produce some additional art for this specific purpose.
It doesn't have to be much, just take a look of what most mods usually require, and make some art available for us. Some art ideas: Factories, Chemical Plants, Storage Buildings, simple 1x2 / 1x3 chests of the 3 types, big 6x6 storage buildings, maybe the old electric poles, electric stations, old beacon, icons, vehicles, airships, available for modders. It would be so nice to see all of this officially released for this specific purpose, and organized in a super simple web page.

Anything you make available would help make the mods to be much more graphically pleasant. I'm absolutely sure, that our mod community will be pleased, and will honor your effort by giving life to your art in so many different ways, making Factorio an even more pleasant game.

Thanks for considering this initiative!

[ssilk]

It makes not much sense, to put things into vanilla, which aren’t used in the end. And it makes even less sense, to do that by purpose.

This is a mod.

[dabalciunas]

It makes not much sense, to put things into vanilla, which aren’t used in the end. And it makes even less sense, to do that by purpose.

This is a mod.

I am clearly not suggesting anything to be added to the vanilla game, please read carefully my first post.

The art does not have to be embedded into the game: it could simply be made available on a Factorio website for downloading, so modders can incorporate it into their mods. So, this has absolutely no impact on vanilla.

[ssilk]

This is a mod.

I am clearly not suggesting anything to be added to the vanilla game, please read carefully my first post.

Well, if you don’t want it in vanilla then as mod. Then it’s not the right place here.

The art does not have to be embedded into the game: it could simply be made available on a Factorio website for downloading, so modders can incorporate it into their mods. So, this has absolutely no impact on vanilla, and I don't know what you are talking about.

Well, it’s a bit complicated.

Let me first say I won’t upset you. This is not my target. This is just one of those suggestions, which is not clear, WHAT to do.

And so, this can be implemented in several ways, for example as mod. For that case we have an extra suggestion-board (viewforum.php?f=33). But you can also do it as external data-source, then the general board is eventually the best place.

But as it is yet, I would just leave it here.

[kirazy]

It makes not much sense, to put things into vanilla, which aren’t used in the end. And it makes even less sense, to do that by purpose.

This is a mod.

I am clearly not suggesting anything to be added to the vanilla game, please read carefully my first post.

The art does not have to be embedded into the game: it could simply be made available on a Factorio website for downloading, so modders can incorporate it into their mods. So, this has absolutely no impact on vanilla, and I don't know what you are talking about.

Mate, making art assets of the nature you're asking for is a lengthy, time consuming process. If they're not being made for anything except use by modders, that's a lot of effort with no payoff.

[eradicator]

To add a realistic perspective: In the past I've asked several times (i.e. 70381) if we can have color masks for assemblers to make them nicer to tint. This would've been several orders of maginitude less work than creating a completely new assembler model (let alone several as asked by @OP), and yet it has never happend. The base assemblers use hardcoded colors because all three assemblers have different animations anyway, and there doesn't seem to be any interest/capacity on wube's side to change that.

Regarding old art (old trains, substations, etcpp) you can just grab them from the old version archive and include them in your mod. I wouldn't be opposed to a semi-official "old assets" mod, but I doubt even that is gonna happen. (Unless we're really lucky and @Bilka took a personal interest in it similar to the "no-base-mod" mod.)

[dabalciunas]

It makes not much sense, to put things into vanilla, which aren’t used in the end. And it makes even less sense, to do that by purpose.

This is a mod.

I am clearly not suggesting anything to be added to the vanilla game, please read carefully my first post.

The art does not have to be embedded into the game: it could simply be made available on a Factorio website for downloading, so modders can incorporate it into their mods. So, this has absolutely no impact on vanilla, and I don't know what you are talking about.

Mate, making art assets of the nature you're asking for is a lengthy, time consuming process. If they're not being made for anything except use by modders, that's a lot of effort with no payoff.

Well, I disagree when you mention "there is no payoff". A game which contains high quality mods has a much longer lifespan. Really, Factorio IS about modding, otherwise we wouldn't have thousands of mods.

Unless you really restrict yourself forcibly to the vanilla world e.g. for achievements, I simply don't know a single player who never uses at least one mod. So this "no payoff" speech is actually wrong if you think about the customer's satisfaction point of view. A happy customer means more recommendations, and so, more sales. With an otherwise greedy close minded decision, one gets lured into loss of oportunities.

[jodokus31]

The idea is alright: if something is there, which is not used (anymore), it could be used for mods.
Actually, it's already the case.

But, I'm not sure, if the devs should explicitly provide additional assets. I won't complain, but it's a lot of work for minimal "payoff" (I wont say, no payoff)

Also, I appreciate very much, what other modders already have added to their mods. I wonder, if it would have restricted the creativity slightly, if the assets would have been existing, already.

[kirazy]

With an otherwise greedy close minded decision, one gets lured into loss of oportunities.

The opportunity cost of producing art assets that won't be used by Factorio itself, but only to make them available for modders to use in their modding efforts is not trivial. That's time and money that could be used to make art assets that Factorio WOULD use. So no, it's not a "greedy close minded decision" not to make art assets for modders exclusive use.

Arguably it's greedy and closed minded to insist they do so.

[ssilk]

@all keep coo! This thread is about to streaks an area, where we allow we all don’t want to have it it!

[dabalciunas]

This doesn't change the fact few artists make mods, due to their limited interested in programming LUA for hours. And programmers usually have terrible artistic skills for designing art for the mod. People could team up for developing a mods, but in practice the truth is 99% of mods have a single author.

Given these facts, unused art originally intended for developing vanilla (discarded at some point during development process of Factorio) could be made available, even if it is not completed. I'm pretty sure it would be scavenged by mod developers and transformed into magnificent mod content.

This, and fixing color masks of some sprites, are good examples of showing to the mod community that Wube cares about them. And also cares about the improved graphical quality of many mods, which thousands of players will be using. At the end, this does affect positively the product being sold.

Many ideas were probably discarded during development of Vanilla because they did not suit well the base game. There is an oportunity for Wube devs to throw some art content which would never ever be used in Vanilla at the hands of modders. If mods were never an important part of Factorio, then why did they invest so much programming effort on it in the first place? And if it do is important, then sincerely, why is art any different? Why must Vanilla get 100% of the investment in art, when so many "free devs" are available in the modding community, hungry for "free art" ?

[Bilka]

Given these facts, unused art originally intended for developing vanilla (discarded at some point during development process of Factorio) could be made available, even if it is not completed. I'm pretty sure it would be scavenged by mod developers and transformed into magnificent mod content.

Many ideas were probably discarded during development of Vanilla because they did not suit well the base game. There is an oportunity for Wube devs to throw some art content which would never ever be used in Vanilla at the hands of modders.

An example of sprites that were used in development:

From: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-167


From: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-173


From: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-128


From: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-120