I'm playing with also the space-exploration mod (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration) enabled.
It does lots of things, including adding new orbital dimensions. Here you can place only certain specialized buildings. Most of the vanilla (or from other mods, including factorissimo buildings) are not in the list.
It would be interesting to place also the factories on such tiles, and allow the insides to accomodate the specialized space exploration machines.
I think that this idea would require a dedicated settings to turn on/off this compatibility, creating entities/items duplicates (maybe "factory-1-se" for example) and then modifying the collision masks of the exterior so to allow the players to place them on space tiles (removing the "space_collision_layer" entry) and the interior so to allow the placement of space machines (same entry in the place_as_tile.condition property of the tile). Eventually, this could be allowed by an additional technology.
I believe that it's not too complicated, and maybe I can also manage to do it by myself, but eventually it could also integrated in the actual mod

Ive managed to make the regular factory buildings placeable in space, the problem is you cant put any space only buildings inside it because the factories use special layers themselves for the interior. The best solution would be to make space only factory buildings with a compatible tile.

I'm actually interested in this, since I've started to play space exploration, but still didn't get so many things up there so that I want to place factories, but I will certainly miss them. I offer myself to help on this, so if you're interested, we can try adding support to it.

sure, sounds good. So the first thing you need to do is put this line in the space collisions.lua of the space exploration mod:
and (not string.find( prototype.name, "factory-", 1, true))
in the function "block_from_space" or something like that, around line 328
Now you can put factories on the space floor tiles, those that you craft and place like landfill yourself
The mainproblem is that the factory floor tiles have the collision box type "ground" and all space only buildings, well most of them, are prohibited from being placed on a "ground" type tile. if you enabled space only buildings to be placed on ground you could place them on a planets surface too, defeating the purpose of the mod quite a bit. So you have to find a middle ground

Hi! I've made a quick mod that just enables space buildings to be built inside factories:
https://github.com/metalbass/space-factories

I still haven't uploaded it to the mod portal, since I don't find this is cool enough to get there :D
I'm thinking about adding some kind of cost for balancing, like spending space tiles for them to be "upgraded".

This is just modifying the collisions masks for factories and factory floors, but the ideal scenario would be to duplicate all entities and make some aesthetic changes as well.

does this prevent regular things from being placed in them?

Crap, yes it does. I now understand your message about this.
This is my first experience with writing a mod, so I needed to see for myself. :)

So this forces me to duplicate all entities and change the factory floors to space platform tiles, which shouldn't be too hard, but I haven't looked into it.

the BEST solution would really be to make dedicated "space factories" that can only be placed n those space floor tiles, that allow you to only place the space only buildings in them, and chests/liquid in/outputs etc

Yes, that was my original attempt, in fact, but it seems like each factory is actually a collection of entities and it was hard for me (at least on my first mod attempt :D) to fully understand what I needed to duplicate exactly.

I may be confusing myself between entities that live on the inside the factory with things that are on the outside.

I wonder if anyone can shine any light on this before I take another look at it.

As far as prototypes go, you'll just need to duplicate the main entity prototypes in factory.lua and the floor tiles in prototypes/tile.lua, the other entity types should be reusable for space. Once you've done that, you need to create duplicates of the layouts in layout.lua, replacing the appropriate prototype names with the space counterparts (I think the layout names must be equal to the name of the factory building entity prototype, and there might be some other hardcoded restrictions on the names of factory buildings). After that you just need to make sure to add the new localization strings.

Thanks for the pointers! I'll be taking a look at it, see what I can come up with

Space exploration is just unplayable without factorissimo. Ive set up a space station that takes up an entire screen on max zoom to produce a measly 4 material science packs per minute. Its so damn ridiculous once again i resort to just buying the resource packs. With factorissimo i could at least save some space and make it manageable

Don't worry, since the mod is already halfway there. I think you will be able to try it out before/during the weekend :)

I've already duplicated the factories, changed their floor type to space plates and made sure they supported loading/saving.

I will need some help with the assets for the space factories, I'm afraid I'm not good with photoshop.
I tried painting the roof so that it's white, but it's not pretty, haha.

I'll also need some help with testing it, too. :)

It's been a productive evening, so with the current progress, you will be able to start testing them right away.
Make sure of making a backup save!
The mod is uploaded here:
https://github.com/metalbass/space-factories

Take a look at the readme for installing instructions.

Well i gave up on producing space science, i just use the intergalactic trading mod and buy them. Because fuck the complexity and space requirement of the space science packs. To produce not even a handful of packs of one type it takes up an entire screen all zoomed out. Thats the only thing i truly hate about space exploration. The science aspect of it is ridiculous. Kudos to your work on this project though

Haha, no worries.

@MagmaMcFry, I wonder if you could give the README a look, since I had to modify Factorssimo2 to add an interface through LuaRemote to call the mod on 2 different files. This basically allows other mods to easily add new factories and Factorissimo will handle the rest.

If you are open to eventually add something in this line, I can change the way I'm interfacing with Factorissimo so that it's more of your liking and make a PR to the repo.

Thanks metalbass for the mod, I will give it a try asap.

(sorry for the late reply, but afdter a month or so without any reply I tought it was a dead tread and didn't check it regularly)

I never tried to mod factorio (just some bug fixes/mod compatibility issues at most), but if you need help, I may look at the code and the API and try something.

hi metalbass, I'm trying your mod right now. I also spent some time to add the research to it (so to not trow out my game for the achievements). You can find the code here: https://pastebin.com/f4tJzUAJ (I followed the rules, so you have to call it from the data-final-fixes.lua file; I also used your icons due to the fact that im a so bad artist)

Also: the in-game names of the technologies are wrong. Probably the localization is needed.

Thank you for taking a look at the mod.
The localization still needs to be added. Each of the texts you see is actually the key of the text that is missing, so it's just about creating a locale.cfg file and fill it with what's missing.

The point that is preventing me to finish this and upload it to the mod portal is that it requires manual editing of the factorissimo mod.
When that is sorted, I'll add localizations and the research, since that's a nice addition.

What do you think the recipes for the factories should be? I was thinking that the normal cost of a factory + the amount of space tiling used would be fair, but I'd like to hear your opinion. :)

i like your idea, but instead of adding the space tiling, I would use it instead of the standard floor (some stone/cement/I don't remember what). Also, since there are two tiers of space floor (the standard, black one and the fast white one), I would use the later for the most advanced factories, while the former for the basic one

Also, for what concerning uploading it to the mod portal, take in mind that space exploration is moving to the 3.x version (so, maybe, updating will be required)

Any progress on this? I'm also about to give up on SE ...