Factorio Movie Maker

This project encodes a 178x100 3-bit color movie in a Factorio map, now updated for Factorio version 1.1.58.

Contents:

• images are where individual frames of the source video are stored.
• script is where console commands are recorded, to be pasted into Factorio.
• sources are where you can put your video files.
• movie.zip is the original unchanged save file, compatible with Factorio 0.15.
• movie-updated.zip is the updated save file, compatible with Factorio version 1.1, with no changes made to it other than the necessary migrations.
• movie-corrected.zip is the update save file, but with signal "raw-wood" replaced with signal "artillery-wagon", using corrector.py.
• build.lua is the original image conversion script, with minor compatibility changes. See changelog.md for details on what is different.
• build.py is a Python translation of build, which is slightly less verbose. Can be used if you already have/prefer Python. Currently WIP.
• corrector.py produces a blueprint that can be placed over the player to change the aforementioned "raw-wood" signals. Used to create movie-corrected.zip.
• screenshot_recorder.lua is a script that you can use to record the movie player while in game.
• screenshot_combiner.py is a script that you can use to combine the output images of screenshot_recorder.lua to a video file of your choosing.
• example_output.mp4 is an example recording of the movie player in action, of Darude's Feel the Beat music video.

Usage

1. Install dependencies. You can either:

   1. Install FFmpeg and Lua if you don't already have them.
      Or
   2. Install Python 3 and pip install -r requirements.txt if you want to used extractor.py instead of standalone FFMPEG.

2. Obtain a source picture or video. It must have a 16:9 aspect ratio or it will be stretched. In this example it is called source.mp4 and placed in the sources/ folder.

3. Extract each frame from the source and encode it with the palette of the screen to images. This can be done either of 2 ways:

   • Lua and FFMPEG:

     cd factorio-movie-maker
     ffmpeg -i sources/source.mp4 -i palette.bmp -filter_complex "fps=20,scale=178:100:flags=lanczos,paletteuse" -pix_fmt bgr24 images/%04d.bmp
     

   • Python 3

     cd factorio-movie-maker
     python extractor.py sources/source.mp4
     

4. Next, create the script files by running lua build.lua or python build.py, depending on which method you prefer. This will populate your script folder with numbered text files titled topXX.txt and bottomXX.txt. This will also output the total number of frames that the movie uses, which is needed later.

5. Start Factorio and load movie-corrected.zip by installing it in your saves folder.

6. Open each file in the script directory, select all, and copy/paste it into the Factorio console. Keep in mind the map file as provided can only store 4800 frames of video, unless you expand it. Attempting to run any script greater than script/top08.txt or script/bottom08.txt will result in missing-combinator errors.

7. Open the constant combinator at position {-183,-1}. Change the red signal to the frame count of your movie, as learned earlier.

Create a recording of the in-game movie player:

Once the movie is loaded and playing, you can use the following steps to create a video file to prove that you did it:

1. Reset the frame count combinator back to a value of 1.

2. Go into editor mode using /editor in the console, navigate to the time options and pause the game.
   In addition, you can also change the time of day and freeze it to a particular value. Back when the video player was first made, the color contrast on lamps was different, so to get a more visible effect you can change the time of day to night and freeze it there.

3. Change the frame count back to the number of frames of your movie.

4. Open screenshot_recorder.lua. Change any parameters in the heading bit and then copy the code itself. Paste the code into the console prepended with /c to run the code as a command. Make sure you have the settings set to what you want before you run the command, because if you want to start over you must repeat the previous steps.

5. Wait until the script finishes. It will take a screenshot centered around the screen every tick for however many frames you specified. Each screenshot will be written to your Local Factorio script-output folder.

6. From here, you can either stitch the files together into a video using FFMPEG, or use the provided screenshot_combiner.py to do the same.