Friday Facts #191 - Gui improvements

[nevniv]

[...] only to find out that your final game isn't fun or engaging for the general public.

Sometimes when making game design decisions for Factorio, especially when it comes to interaction, we come to a change that can make the game slightly better, but that will not be seen well by the current active players who have played for many hours, since it changes something they got used to.

When i show the game to friends, the first annoying thing they complain about is that you cannot place turning belts with holding left click.
Currently, to make a S section, you need to click 3 times and press the rotating key 4 times.

Implement it and make new players happy

factorio belt click 1.png

About the quickbar change, I think we should be able to keep the "random junk" ability of the toolbar. So when we pick items to move it, we have not to find them in the inventory. Maybe give us one "random junk" toolbar in addition of the several "filter/shortcut" toolbars?

YES! laying belts is so F'ing annoying. But will probably be lost in this thread. I am off to hunt for it in the feature request area lol

[Fishling]

I do have one idea to add: combine the toolbar and weapon bar into ONE single quickbar, so players can use as many or as few weapons as they want. Eg;
- Player "Twinsen" is going on safari, so he has 4 slots prepared with combat drones & grenades, and 10 slots filled with 5 different weapons & 5 with corresponding ammo.
- Player "Katherine" is building assembly lines, so she has 6 slots filled with belts etc, 4 with various crafting machines, some pipes, a selection of power poles, and the final 2 slots reserved for her personal side-arm & favourite ammo [just in case].

No separate toolbars needed, and ammo counts are always visible in combat. Would fit nicely with the "toolbar presets" I saw mentioned previously.

I don't think this is a good idea. The current system is great in that you always have a weapon equipped, even when you are doing something else, and that the selected weapon persists when doing other things.

With your idea, you would either always have to switch to a weapon or it would have to default to using something like the "leftmost" weapon. You also add in more overhead of having to manually switch between combat and construction loadouts if you want to use more than one weapon, and losing toolbelt space to weapons. RIght now, this is only limited to managing drones and grenades, and I think it would be a better solution to add more slots/keybinds to let you equip/cycle/use offhand items like those so they no longer take up toolbelt spots either.

[webkilla]

as long as they new hotkeys are rebindable - then this looks really good


...though, the lack of any "and we expect .15 to go live in X amount of time" was sad

[burner]

That change looks awesome. That quickbar had been just useless because things does not return to their places etc.
Another improvement need if blueprints. When you open blueprint from archive behind B and close it with Q currently it will drop it to inverntory each freaking time. My suggestion is that just remove blueprints totally from inventory. So when you open blueprint from B and close it with Q it will really close it and not insert it to inventory.

[IronCartographer]

Nothing to say to this proposal, just do it. It is way better than yet and more than a continuous improvement is not needed to become the best game ever.™

EDIT: Perhaps this should be taken into account: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=47645
cause it is "such a thing that cries for change".

Thanks for linking that thread!

And that is not really a GUI improvement, it's something completely new. But I thinks this is the next big thing: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=19987
Make a device, that is like a big area and can be connected to the circuit network and that can draw graphs like so:


What an improvement for the GUI: Let the players use the map as their GUI!

That is so Factorio. Performance implications worry me, but it's an awesome idea.

[bNarFProfCrazy]

Please no tabs inside tabs (Logistics).
The inventory should also remember the last used tab.

Otherwise good ideas.

[IronCartographer]

Please no tabs inside tabs (Logistics).

A thousand times: This.

The inventory should also remember the last used tab.

Already addressed:

Opening the character screen(using E) will open it with the last tab.

What I am still wondering is how shortcuts will be created: Middle click as filters are currently set? Won't that be a regression for people who don't have convenient middle click (laptops)? Something to think about.

[bNarFProfCrazy]

The inventory should also remember the last used tab.

Opening the character screen(using E) will open it with the last tab.

A haven't seen that. Thanks for the info.

Another improvement would be a grouping feature for the producation and kill stats.

I killed 25k Tree A and 24k Tree b and 12k Tree C and similar stuff for stones!? Who cares?
All I want to know is that I might have killed 50k Trees and 1k Stones.

For producation stats I would like to have some groups there.
How much ore do i produce? How many T1,T2...Tx stuff do i produce. (or a button do hide them all at once.) Because if I enable the ores the rest of the graphs shrink to zero and are useless.
And toggling between certain groups is annoying (15+ clicks) especially if the entries bounce all the time.

(Maybe a preconfigured/persist-able filter set for the production view might help.)

EDIT: And the fitlered/disabled items should be moved after the the active ones because items with low producetion quantites jump that often between ranks that it is hard to read how much i actually produce. (Yellow)

And for that feature to work better instead of two long columns that show the top and the center items

Like this:

1 - 6
2 - 7
3 - 8
4 - 9
5 - 10

Order them like this please:

1 - 2
3 - 4
5 - 6
7 - 8
9 - 10

Because if I wish to see the top entries, I want to see the top entries, there is no "I want to see the top and some random middle ones".

Another wish:
Most of the screens that are sold nowadays are widescreens, so if there is space for three columns show them. If you have to have to hide the entire screen, please do that, because thats is exactly what I'm interested in if I view the production screen. ( I cannot see my avatar anyway. )
Also sometimes it would be nice to just show the production without the consumtion rates. Maybe then there is enough space to show all items at once for production. That screen could also be optimized if
(Red+green)
EDIT2: Maybe add an option/dropdown like sort by name, type (same order as crafting menu), prod and consumption..

[Zyrconia]

I'm all for moving it into a tab, but, we still need a quick way of seeing which weapon we have equipped.

I didn't make it very clear in FFF, you you can still see your active weapon and ammo, something like this, possibly attached to the quickbar:

Capture.PNG

That works only with vanilla weapons.

If you mod you can have more involved items in your slots compared to weapons and I think it is important to see in which slot you are, what is your previous or next slot.

As was said in FF, it is useless to see weapons and ammo if 98% of the time you are building your base.

But what if you have zero combat tools in your slots but instead have only construction tools from mods? And what if you are super in to combat? Seeing all ammo counts is very useful. Not everybody keeps up with combat research and sometimes combat is a real life and death affair.

You could have it popup, but it probably better to have it on the screen. I would even like 2 more slots.

But I'm fine with the rest of the changes.

OK, maybe not the logistic ones. Keep the rest of the tabs, but keep the logistics on the screen. Don't move them to a tab so I have to press extra buttons.

Instead, move the logistics somewhere else and make it wider. Or make it high.

[Killcreek2]

I do have one idea to add: combine the toolbar and weapon bar into ONE single quickbar, so players can use as many or as few weapons as they want. Eg;
- Player "Twinsen" is going on safari, so he has 4 slots prepared with combat drones & grenades, and 10 slots filled with 5 different weapons & 5 with corresponding ammo.
- Player "Katherine" is building assembly lines, so she has 6 slots filled with belts etc, 4 with various crafting machines, some pipes, a selection of power poles, and the final 2 slots reserved for her personal side-arm & favourite ammo [just in case].

No separate toolbars needed, and ammo counts are always visible in combat. Would fit nicely with the "toolbar presets" I saw mentioned previously.

I don't think this is a good idea. The current system is great in that you always have a weapon equipped, even when you are doing something else, and that the selected weapon persists when doing other things.

With your idea, you would either always have to switch to a weapon or it would have to default to using something like the "leftmost" weapon. You also add in more overhead of having to manually switch between combat and construction loadouts if you want to use more than one weapon, and losing toolbelt space to weapons. RIght now, this is only limited to managing drones and grenades, and I think it would be a better solution to add more slots/keybinds to let you equip/cycle/use offhand items like those so they no longer take up toolbelt spots either.

No, you misunderstood the aim [or I did not explain clearly enough] ~ The way weapons work would not change at all: You will still have one selected & highlighted at all times [just like we do now], and the weapon swap hotkey will work the same: cycling between equipped weapons.
But you could use a direct 1-5 [or shift 1-5] keypress to swap to a specific weapon in addition to the usual cycling hotkey. So it adds more functionality, not less.

We currently have 20 item + 3 weapon slots + 3 ammo, = 26 total: If you choose to have no weapon equipped with my idea, you would have 26 combi-slots to use for building materials. Same in reverse for weapons ~ up to 13 equipped at once. Or any mix in between to suit your needs. So you would not "lose toolbelt space" at all.
Essentially if a combi-slot has a valid weapon & ammo then it functions as a weapon slot, otherwise it functions as a normal quick-select slot.

I did say that it would fit nicely with the "quickbar presets" idea a few others have mentioned.

[teenkertoy]

Please add a toggle button to turn auto-trash on/off without changing the auto-trash shortcuts or amounts.

Feature Suggestion thread:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=37716&p=226830

There are plenty of times when I want to carry a bunch of some item around with me that is usually an auto-trash item, such as carrying a lot of fuel because I'm about to deploy a few trains. Right now when I pick up the extra stuff, it goes into auto-trash slots and bots whisk it away before I realize I forgot to adjust the auto-trash amounts. Then I have to change the auto-trash amounts, go get more of the stuff, figure out where the bots took the stuff I wanted and go fetch it too, do my job, then also remember to adjust the auto-trash amounts back to normal. Such a lot of work.

[TsBandit]

Twinsen said:

The basic idea is to change the quickbar from a separate inventory to simply a shortcut bar to the player's main inventory.

The player's cursor is also an "extra" inventory slot, separate from the main inventory. Will that stay as it is? Or will the cursor inventory slot also become a "shortcut" into the main inventory?

[Rikash89]

I'm not sure if anyone has suggested it yet, but to solve the issue of granularity of inventory why not allow inventory slots to be locked to a certain item the same way that train slots are allowed to be locked? Then you can save any construction bots/blueprints/books/whatever and dump everything else. Added in with maybe multiple logistics load outs (one for oil, one for trains, one for belts, one for assemblers with modules, etc) you could swiftly swap between different types of building equipment late game.

[StrangeHawk]

I'm not the most avid player of the game as I don't have the most time, so I'm waiting till the game's finished so I don't have to relearn too much as things change [For reference, the farthest I've gone is oil/plastics production, then realizing trains will have a huge learning curve]. However, I've been loosely following the Friday Facts and the GUI improvements sound awesome! Pretty much every issue is something that came up for me. Heck, I didn't even know filters were a thing. And I can't count how annoyed I got at random junk filling my quickbar or how often I wanted to lay out blueprints while I waited on things to craft, especially in the early game. Looking forward to these changes!

[kooskotopia]

I like the UI changes. The hotbar thing would make it much easier to organize your inventory. I would appreciate it if you added an option to turn off PVP before you create a new multiplayer map.

[Eitelkeit]

Like the toolbar change, don't like logistics slots change. It would be annoying to switch tabs everytime.

[illoooosion]

The only concern i have is the removal of the 'character screen'. As a deathworld player, it's useful to be able to see how much ammo I have, especially in the middle of fight. Not having it there by default seems fine, but an option to turn it on for situations like that would be a good way to accommodate for this.

[malventano]

I approve and like the quickbar change but the inventory/tabs change needs to be more tuned up. I think that default tab should be crafting, second logistics and last character as nobody cares about the character most of the time.

I think they intend for the default to be crafting, but I see where you are going there - character tab should be the far right. crafting far left.

[LemonyFresh]

I haven't read all 15 pages of replies, but based on what I've read the verdict seems pretty clear: people want these changes and more! I don't think you'll find hardly anyone willing to oppose a change on principle just because they don't like change and they're accustomed to a weird and wonky way of doing things. Go boldly and make changes because UX is SO SO SO important!! I can see how a lot of potential payers are being turned off to Factorio just because of the clunky UI. I have several suggestions (and I know some of these have been suggested already):

-The first one might seem pretty radical, but just hear me out. In the spirit of Factorio being a game all about building factories, why not make it less tedious and more fun to build factories? What I have in mind is a copy-paste feature with a very basic interface and available from the start of the game, requiring no technology whatsoever. The idea is this: when you click and drag a rectangle, you create a temporary blueprint of whatever buildings are there, and your mouse cursor now moves and deploys the ghosts (similar to the current blueprint UI). Furthermore, when your character moves adjacent to any ghost and has the appropriate building in inventory, the building is automatically placed. There should also be an easy command, such as right-click-and-drag, to destroy ghosts in a rectangle. Yes, this probably seems overpowered to people used to doing it the hard way, but think about it: this doesn't design factories for you, all it does is make it easier to lay out copies of things you've already built. What's the harm in that?

- Not being able to click and drag transport belts. This is nothing short of a UI disaster! The mantra should be: Every time a Factorio player is forced to press R, a kitten dies. Save the kittens! They need your help!

- On a similar note, it would be nice to be able to orient inserters automatically without having to press R a bazillion times. One possible idea: if you have any kind of inserter selected, and click and drag from entity A to B, the game places the inserter so as to move items from A to B.

- Left-click should do common, default things while right-click should do more advanced things such as opening the GUI. Every time you have to open a GUI screen to do the most common task, more kittens die. For instance: left-clicking a chest should transfer one full stack of whatever's in the chest to your inventory. If the chest contains more than one type of thing, or if the player right-clicks instead, open the GUI. Left click (and drag over multiple buildings) should also grab smelted products from a furnace, and it should refuel anything that needs fuel if you have coal or raw wood in your inventory. Basically what I'm saying is, the current CTRL+Click functionality should actually just be left-click most of the time, because opening the GUI for the most common tasks is the same as murdering kittens.

- The manual crafting queue should be a stack, not a queue. Suppose I decide to make a gazillion science pack 1 while I run around thinking of what to do next. Suddenly I realize I need more transport belts right away. I should be able to click the belts and have them go to the top of the stack without having to cancel the science pack order. Whatever I clicked most recently is the thing I want most right now. I can still use the bottom of the stack for lower-priority things that take a long time, but want to work on when nothing else is needed. If somebody can think of an advantage to the current first-in-first-out order, I want to hear what it is.







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[Albrat]

The entire tthread so far... tl;dr : But An idea I had about the UI/UX if you are tweaking about with it. I did notice a problem in windowed mode ( hovering over a logistics chest on a large network.) The information screen under the map is now dropping through the bottom of the screen. So basically in windowed mode it is un-readable. (I am using 1600x900 on a 1920 x 1080 screen Factorio running in a window because I have two screens.)

The ability to move the additional info panel would be handy (I do remember being abled to move it before we got the achievements and trains buttons in 13.x)

The suggested quickbar changes sound great but I would also add a seperate 2 / 3 slots for seperating stacks of goods. sometimes I notice we need to break a stack into 25 and with a 100 stack it is not easy if you can not use your quick bar to help ( the quick bar will not auto sort / stack items. )

- The manual crafting queue should be a stack, not a queue. Suppose I decide to make a gazillion science pack 1 while I run around thinking of what to do next. Suddenly I realize I need more transport belts right away. I should be able to click the belts and have them go to the top of the stack without having to cancel the science pack order. Whatever I clicked most recently is the thing I want most right now. I can still use the bottom of the stack for lower-priority things that take a long time, but want to work on when nothing else is needed. If somebody can think of an advantage to the current first-in-first-out order, I want to hear what it is.

I like the idea of a crafting stack. But maybe a UI that gives you a priority number that you can set before you craft. Eg. I set the priority to 5 and click the science packs. Then set 2 and craft some track / transport belts. The belts and track get top priority. Then I set a 7 and build some furnaces. Once the other items are done the furnaces get crafted. Just a simple "priority = {textbox}" in the crafting interface.

The only concern i have is the removal of the 'character screen'. As a deathworld player, it's useful to be able to see how much ammo I have, especially in the middle of fight. Not having it there by default seems fine, but an option to turn it on for situations like that would be a good way to accommodate for this.

Maybe a combat detection that turns on the character screen. Player shoots / takes damage then Character screen activates and stays active untill combat is not detected for 600 ticks (6 seconds) nb : make an option to change the active time. so people can set it to always active or 1-20 seconds... covers all the options.