Space Age Version?
Maybe in the future, if the demand is there although most space age entities look pretty clean already. They also have complex animations which would make the work more challenging.
What base game entities not currently cleaned?
Nuclear Reactor - Already very clean.
Heat Pipe - Pretty clean and that copper colour is a nightmare to work on, best left alone
Elevated Rails / Pylons / Ramp - Red colouring and the ramp sprite is especially complicated for a Factorio sprite, has no layers.
Rails - Already clean, not needed.
Rail Signal - Already clean, not needed.
Gate - Already pretty clean, and also has yellow hazard paint which will be turned grey and make it very ugly.
Artillery Turret / Wagon - Already good, also has yellow hazard paint.
How does it work?
It directly replaces most of the base game spirits with new versions one for one. It doesn't replace any light, most animations unless necessary, shadows, reflections or other unnecessary helper files. This also helps keep file sizes down.
How was this achieved?
With some Python scripts that identify certain pixels and replace them while it some cases still trying to preserve the original colour if its too close to brown. Originally some entities lost some brown / orange colours but I have spent many hours manually creating mask files and preserving them on a pixel by pixel basis where needed. Some of the bigger sprites require a lot of work and many revisions of the script to look good.
Can some be improved?
Yes, certain entities could be improved but you would have to hand mask on a pixel by pixel basis and its extremely tedious to do so. Maybe in the future I might go back and improve some of them. If you have any feedback about a certain sprite, please let me know and ill take a look.
I am taking another look at the chemical plant, I think it has some orange paint on the top that isn't actually rust, its going to have to be hand masked out in 4 separate directions and that will take some hours.
The other two sprites I am not happy with currently is the New 2.1 Oil Refinery and the Steam Engine, for different reasons. I have spent many hours on both already and this is more of a long term objective.
Is it possible to get the really shiny chrome look?
Not sure, Factorio is already pushing a lot of limits when it comes to memory and video memory. Someone on reddit posted some very shiny metals a couple of months ago but no one is sure if it was a real mod or just a filter over the top of the images. I did some experiments with some scripts but all i could really achieve is a gunmetal look that's a little bit shiny on the pipes. I don't think there are enough pixels natively to properly show the effect and Factorio doesn't have real time lighting / reflections. If there is a way , I am certainly not in a position to try and develop such a mod, sorry!
How long did this take?
About 10-15 hours of R&D to establish a consistent Py script which achieved the results I wanted, and then another 60+ hours of actual conversion of the images, optimizing the settings to get the best results. I am far from a professional in graphic design and certainly not an artist. I could never have created these sprites myself. Full credit to Wube.
Why?
Ive been playing Factorio for over 10 years with rusty machines and seeing new shiny machines working just hits different. I respect the original vision of the developers but wanted something new.