I've programmed a few offline tools for myself, mainly for figuring out stuff in Bob's Angels from first principles (without using spoilers); i.e. for the larger resource cycles with multiple alternatives.Jap2.0 wrote:I've consider creating an offline repository of info for Factorio (ex. ratio calculator, tech tree, basic statistics for most items, maybe something to do with blueprints - I'm open to feedback) combining some information from the wiki, the (now defunct) guide, various ratio tools, etc., but I'm not sure if or how much interest there is. Please let me know if you're interested, and what you want to see in it. I'll probably work on some more details if/when I start, and feel free to ask me questions.
One hint for you: at least when I did that (in 0.15), the game files did not contain all data in the form of plain, static data. That is, you could not just get a parser and read the stuff in your standalone program; it would work for 99% of all stuff, but a little extra of the data is modified by game scripts (or mod scripts if you have some...) in-game during startup. At least if and when mods are involved.
So, a good way is if you actually program an "export" mod which exports the actual, realized stuff from in-game and use that as input for your tool. This also makes it much easier to actually parse the stuff without running into too many corner cases. There might be such a mod around already, I don't remember.
All of this said, unless one plays a Vanilla game for the achievements (i.e., no mods), I still like Helmod a *lot* - the features it does offer are great and it has a pretty low bug-count. Most importantly, it is always up-to-date with the actual in-game values. You might take that as an inspiration. The one benefit you could really bring to the community by making its resource calculations a little bit more smart (especially when playing with mods, i.e. Bob's Angels or PyMods) with resource cycles (which Vanilla does not really have).