blueprint sharing through different factorio installs

[matonati]

Hi, i have a sugetion, but i dont speak english very well so i dont know if i will be able to explain correctly, i know its poorly explained but please, try to read it

TL;DR

Create the possibility of sharing bluepints through different factorio installs

What ?

My suggest is pretty simple, on the blueprint tab add the posibility to export to the PC a blueprint/blueprint book, and the game will generate the blueprints .txt and save them on Appdata\local\ in a directory called "factorio prints"

The idea is that all those blueprints are always saved on the PC, even if you uninstall factorio(factorio uninstaller can also ask if you want to save them or not)

Why ?

When someone plays factorio with mods it´s common to have different factorio installs that you use for different mods (for example one for angels-bobs mods and other completely different for space exploration mod) but there are a lot of situations where you need a layout you made on other factorio install, like belts balancers and you need to import all them again

[darklich14]

I think your proposed solution might be okay for what you have in mind but I think a more general solution of being able to use lua to iterate your blueprint storage to import/export strings could allow players and developers to create all kinds of solutions to this problem. I've been quite interested in a lua interface to blueprint storage and got fairly aggressive in looking into it for a while but sadly there was no path to completion at the time. I hope at some point we can programmatically integrate blueprints somehow.

[matonati]

I think your proposed solution might be okay for what you have in mind but I think a more general solution of being able to use lua to iterate your blueprint storage to import/export strings could allow players and developers to create all kinds of solutions to this problem. I've been quite interested in a lua interface to blueprint storage and got fairly aggressive in looking into it for a while but sadly there was no path to completion at the time. I hope at some point we can programmatically integrate blueprints somehow.

sry, but i havent understood what you want to say exactly, are you saying that it is imposible to program in lua a blueprint storage?

[darklich14]

It's just that the difference between what you are asking for and what I am proposing is a matter of perspective. You're saying put the blueprints in a particular location. I'm saying, provide *a way* for the scripting environment to get the blueprints into *a location*. That's all. In the end, you'll be able to get blueprints in and out in both ways, but with a lua interface then many people can make different mods and scenarios and scripts to leverage the capability rather than there being one hard-coded way to get to the blueprints from outside factorio.