Timelapse Base Edition (TLBE)


Takes screenshots of your base at specified intervals.

Utilities
17 days ago
0.18 - 2.0
7.07K

g tons of errors

3 years ago

game freeze every some secs
tons of errors from the program such as maximum zoom reached (change image size or make ur base smaller)
despite the warning that this will show only once it bothers me every minute
how do i change zoom value?
into what?
from 1 to 2 to 3? or 0.1 0.2?
for some reason i cant find anywhere settings instructions
a bunch of numbers like frames or zoom that have no explanation on what to set them
for instance if i want 1 screen every 5 mins instead of 5 secs how do i change it?
my base is about 500000 x 500000 tiles

3 years ago

I am sorry for the bad experience you seem to be having :(

game freeze every some secs

This might happen due to the screenshots that are taken, your base is pretty large, so rendering the screenshot takes (some) time.

how do i change zoom value?

The zoom factor is automatically calculated to fit your base in the screenshot. Factorio has a maximum zoom factor, I guess as this would result in an image that does not have any detail left.
In order to reduce the zoom factor, you'd need to increase the "image size" as stated in the error message.

Now that I see your comment, it is obviously now clear what is meant here. I am going to change this message into "increase screenshot/image resolution" to make more clear that you would need to increase the resolution (size) of the screenshot images. This can be done in the camera settings (for each camera, in case you have multiple)

despite the warning that this will show only once it bothers me every minute

That is weird, as this message is only cleared if the zoom factor is not at is maximum anymore. Which would be the case when the tracked area is reduced (or you increased the screenshot size/resolution)...
I looked in the code to double check and I cannot see any other possibility :(

a bunch of numbers like frames or zoom that have no explanation on what to set them

I thought these were commonly know from (making) movies, but I guess the are not.

  • fame rate: Number of frames per second that your movie is going to be (often/default 25 fps)
  • speed gain: Amount (factor) that the timelapse movie should speed up compared to actual speed. A speed gain of 5 makes the timelapse go 5 times faster.
  • Zoom period: Amount of the time takes to change the zoom level to the new value (when smooth camera movement is enabled in the active tracker). For example a zoom period of 1 makes sure that zooming takes one second in your final movie (or 25 frames assuming the frame rate is 25)

for instance if i want 1 screen every 5 mins instead of 5 secs how do i change it?

So in theory you shouldn't care about number of screenshots per period. Instead you choose how fast you want the timelapse to be.
But you could calculate it:

Assuming you have a frame rate of 25 fps, a speed gain of 1 results in 25 screenshots per second. A speed gain of 25 results in one screenshot per second.
So for one screenshot per 5 minutes (300 seconds) you'd need a speed gain of 300 * 25 = 7500

Basically with this you speed up your movie by a factor of 7500, one hour takes about of half a second (60 * 60 / 7500) in your movie. (this makes sense since an hour has 12 blocks of 5 minutes, so 12 screenshots and a frame rate of 25 fps requires 25 screenshots to fill one second)

As said, I'll improve the warning in the next version.
And also look to add tooltips with explanations for the unclear camera settings.

Thank you for your feedback, I hope this helps you a little further with the mod.

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