[Twinsen][0.17.66] Station names badly aligned

[planetmaker]

Look at the attached screenshot. The station names seem to be placed to the right by about one station. This can become quite confusing in space-constrained setups like these when the station names differ. Actually I thought that the left-most TrainYard station accidentially got named to " " or similar.

My suggested fix is to move the station label closer to the actual station position so that it starts more above the position than pointing with the angle towards it.

[Loewchen]

Can not reproduce, labels follow direct after the marker for me.

[quale]

Alignment changes with zoom level. It’s good at the default zoom level of the train interface. As you zoom out and the circle icon shrinks, text stays at the same offset from the center, creating a slight gap. As you zoom in, text moves far away from the center, creating a massive gap. The text offset code may be trying to stay a fixed distance from the icon, but getting it wrong because it mixes up zooming in and out. It acts as though icons stay the same size when you zoom out, when they really shrink. It acts as though icons grow when you zoom in, when they really stay the same size.

[Bilka]

Looks aligned to me:

[planetmaker]

Looks aligned to me:

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes it is aligned in the fashion you indicate - which is here the problem.

My argument is that the given alignment is un-intuitive and/or the separation from the stations needs some different scaling:

Separation of the text label from their corresponding station is larger than the separation of the stations. Result is that the start of a text label is closer to another station location than the one it belongs to. In cases like this where every point is supposed to be annotated, common reading habits has it (probably most widespread) that annotations are expected to start closest to the point which they label.

It would likely help if the station name starts more or less immediately adjacent in the upper right quadrant to the marker so that the name can easier unambigously be attributed to the station it belongs to.

(The screenshot shows a situation where stations are as close together as possible for parallel tracks.)

[eradicator]

If you move the names too close to the circiles then the font will start colliding with the circles (i.e. bottom-extended letters like "g" or "q".). Probably worse in other languages. Also tall letters start colliding for vertical stackers (if you change the default angle to "compensate" you lose readability).

Imho a magic feature that combins identical station names into one block (like other train games do) could solve this, but if that ever happens it would be post-launch.

Ugly mockups:

compressedstations.png (69.15 KiB) Viewed 5236 times

vertical.png (36.7 KiB) Viewed 5236 times

[eradicator]

(This should possible be split into a seperate bug report? I'm on 0.17.66.)

Looking at this very closely i noticed something funny with the english font. It is not actually centrally aligned to the center of the station circle, but shifted downwards (depends on rotation). I'm playing on english locale, and while for english names the effect is obvious to the naked eye at default angle, for japanese names it is so marginal that it might as well be measurement error. Further investigation shows that it depends on the station name rotation, and becomes more prominent at higher angles.

0°:

zerodegree.png (268.7 KiB) Viewed 5225 times

31°:

thirtyonedegree.png (626.53 KiB) Viewed 5225 times

90°:

ninetydegree.png (332.99 KiB) Viewed 5225 times

[benplumley]

Regarding the suggestion of combining station names when they're close together and have the same name - I've made a mockup of how I'd imagine this looking. The top stations show the suggestion and the bottom stations show the current behaviour.

[Optera]

Regarding the suggestion of combining station names when they're close together and have the same name - I've made a mockup of how I'd imagine this looking. The top stations show the suggestion and the bottom stations show the current behaviour.

Having seen a lot of tube maps, this looks familiar and very nice.
However it wont solve the main problem of misaligned names when each stop has a different name.

[Jon8RFC]

@eradicator
Was it better aligned before this fix?

Looks like maybe it was, when using FerMod's second image.

[eradicator]

@eradicator
Was it better aligned before this fix?

Looks like maybe it was, when using FerMod's second image.

To my "naked eye" it does look better, but... When i measure that image assuming 30° the first letters are better centered, but the text is not parralell to the axis. If i measure it assuming 31° the text is axis-parralell, but suffers the same problem as mentioned above. Therefore without knowing the setting used for that screenshot i can not say. (Is the default value 30 or 31?)

fromthatotherthread.png (660.96 KiB) Viewed 5162 times

[Twinsen]

Fixed in Version: 0.17.67.
The offset was not scaling the same way as the icon, making it look weird.
Also the vertical centering was broken as it didn't account for the angle of the text.

[planetmaker]

Wow, I'm again surprised how quick and well bug reports are handled Thanks a lot, looking forward to 0.17.67

The factory must grow.