Friday Facts #405 - Whole belt reader, New logistics GUI

[BeanHeaD]

With this, we reach the current state of the New Logistics GUI. Can you think of any other improvements we can make to it?

I normally use the Logistics GUI to tell if I'm running low on any resources, I scroll to the bottom of the list and check for any items with negative values.

With that in mind I really liked the Requests tab you added in iteration 2, I would like if it could make it into the final Logistics GUI.

Here are some improvements I'd suggest you could make to it from the version you had in Iteration 2:

Visualize Request Satisfaction

Having the {TOTAL_COUNT}/{TOTAL_REQUESTED} displayed on the right is useful, but doing a quick scan to try and find something that has less items than what is requested is challenging. So the idea here is to have that supply/request ratio visualized with a background color to show the ratio similar to how the loading progress is displayed on train conditions.

Another possible addition to this progress bar (that I'm not 100% sold on yet) is to change the color of the bar based on some conditions:

• Green - All requests fufilled (chests already have items, or have items on the way)

• Teal - All requests fufilled, but there is a chest that is empty (you have enough items in the network, but you are requesting to few of them at a time)

• Yellow - There are items in, or on the way to, all the chests requesting this item

• Red - There is at least one chest requesting this item that does not have this item and also has no bots on the way

One possible issue with this is that if your requests are in the thousands and you're trickling in resources then the progress bar would be so small that you wouldn't be able to see if the bar is yellow or red, a possible solution for this could be to have the negative part of the progress bar be a very light/opague version of the color that is being displayed.

Filter out satisfied chests

Another great option would be a checkbox to hide requests that are satisfied, based on the coloring suggestions from above it would remove everything that is Green. This would making finding bottlenecks in bot bases much easier.

Thanks for taking the time to read my message. I'm super excited for 2.0 coming later this year!

[adambyte]

The list of logistic networks currently shows the number of roboports on the right. Consider adding the ability to switch this to showing the distance and direction from the player* to the network** (e.g. "725m ↖"). Of course this needs to be disabled whenever the two are on different planets.

*Or from the center of what's currently shown on the remote view. Ideally implement both.
**The single point representing the position of the network should probably be something like the center of gravity of all of its roboports.