Friday Facts #267 - Experiments, Explosives & Extended tags

[Philip017]

thank you for allowing the optional tool tip locations, i have been playing for a really long time and prefer them as they currently are.

i havent played much with cliffs but it's nice to know they can be blown up by robots now now i know someone will make a mod that will allow all cliffs in range of roboports will automatically be destroyed

too bad on the pick axe being perma gone, really would have been nice to have more levels of pick, for example i prefer speed 2 mining over speed 1, i guess a mod will address this issue for some, but imo we just needed more levels of pickaxes and a buff to no pick at all to address the lack of one in the very early game or when our's broke. if there is anyway you would reconsider this, please do!

thanks again for all your hard work!

[Charidan]

Interactive text looks really clean! I'll be happy to have a way to send recipes to people so they don't have to find them in the crafting menu while they're busy.

[ratchetfreak]

I really hope the "3 inserters" comment refers to a future FFF of the upcoming version, not just a dead thought that won't be seen for a long time..

implementing doesn't sound all that hard, for every time a bot is assigned a construction task, search nearby the destination (5 tiles or so) for a ghost needing the same type. Then make it pick up up to the cargo size and construct them one after the other.

Destruction can do the same,

This will help a lot with doing large paving tasks

[Terukio]

You guys never cease to amaze me.

Well done.

On another note, maybe make that empty spot above the armor into a second armor slot. This way players can swap between armor for building the base and armor for destroying biters.

[trad_emark]

BACKGROUND
FOR
CHAT
MESSAGES
PLEASE

[curiousinternals]

1. It always appears at the cursor, which has the disadvantage of always being in your way in the middle of the screen.
2. It always appears, but it has some delay.
3. It only appears when a hotkey is pressed (we tested it with Shift), which has the disadvantage that you have to actually do something to see it.

1 doesn't seem so bad since you can just move the mouse, but could get annoying in combat where you're trying to select certain targets and getting your view blocked a bit. 2 seems terrible since any comparisons you make will involve painful delays: Delays are something to avoid in all interface design. 3 seems undesirable due to additional keybindings.

I have a solution: You don't need a new key for option 3, just tie display of entity info to whether "show info" (alt) is enabled. If I want a decluttered interface, I probably want "show info" off. An extension to this idea is to do something similar to your debug views and have three levels of info and you can configure what elements of the interface are present on each level. I imagine some people might want a decluttered interface for combat, some info for general management (what's an assembler's recipe), and a full info view. You could consider adding rail block colouring and the grid to the list of options to display. I'm always using the grid, I think it ought to find its way out of the debug interface and into the normal interface.

Thinking of the grid, if you do make it more accessible, it would be nice to make the grid lines that intersect where the centre of rail tiles can be placed a different colour. Since rails are more restricted in where they can be placed, it would help to know where they can fit on the grid even when you don't have rails to place.

Pressing Alt could cycle through the interface layers.

We assigned each of the options to be tested by someone...

This confuses me. Surely in order to test an option, you have to compare it to others. Seems like you might have had more success if each of you tried all three in equal amounts and then shared your independent comparisons. It's hard to compare experiencing something to someone's description of it. Also, you might all have different needs based on how you play the game, which would reveal additional problems if you all directly witnessed all three options.

This extra work isn't for free, however the game isn't likely to have a large number of robots actively bringing explosives to blow up a cliff, since as soon as a robot is dispatched it quickly finishes the job and the cliff is permanently gone.

Something to note if you do have more complex bot logic is that the bots needn't process their orders super fast all the time. Imagine if you were to make a kind of bot that's free roaming and more multi-functional than the flying bots: It could pick up multiple items to place at once, it could even craft items from base products. It would have to do more complex planning to remain efficient. It wouldn't matter if such a bot sat there thinking for several seconds before it went on its way. It's order and forget. You don't mind it having thinking time because you give it orders and then you focus on your other business. By the time you're back it's done. Time is still saved. You could even give it a cute thinking face.

I find repeat play-throughs a bit of a pain in the early game because of all the manual building without bot support. I'd really like a more flexible independent bot early game like the one described above just to help with the tedium of building yet another early smelter. It'd even be fine if you just started the game with one and didn't have the means to build it until later. It'd be perfectly fine if it was only as fast as you are and maybe slow at building: It's meant to work in the background like your factory so you have time to think, not replace the speed of the flying bots. Extra neat if you can take control of it so it's like you have a remote body. Functionally a copy of you. It would be very useful for managing remote outposts.

You could even give this functionality to Compilatron.

Rich & Interactive Text 2

Nice work. That'll really help with a lot of common multiplayer communication problems.

[cheetored20]

So now that there is a space above the armor slot, where the pickax used to be, will the battery charge display be moved there?

[Nova]

Interactive text for the win!
Reminds me of other games like World of Warcraft. You can also link most stuff in the chat there.

[mexmer]

Interactive links in chat, especially blueprints and map points are great improvement. As for displaying entity tooltips, i’m missing one more option and that’s simple tooltip, vs. complex tooltip.

Eg. When i hover mouse over entity, there doesn’t need to be picture, there can be justname and current operation (like crafting recipe for assemblers, or output for miners/pumps/genrators), and with some togle ( we can even use alt, like it’s for minicon displaying) it will show complete detailed description.

[eradicator]

After some discussions, we decided on the following:

The current version of entity info will be the default.
We add an option to set a custom delay for it, that is different than the normal tooltip delay (or never).
We add an option to activate it with a key.
We add an option to have it next to cursor or on the side.

This is how professional GUI design should work. "One fits all" simply doesn't exist. Bravo. And a big thank you for the extra work you spent on it.
Btw, are there any plans to allow mods to create custom entity info? Or even just a player.gui.entity_info node to display stuff above (below?) the vanilla info. When creating complex buildings that require multiple invisible auxillary entities the selectable entity often shows irrelevant info (e.g. "crafting speed" when it's only an assembler to get a nice animation) and can not show mod-internal data.

For now, 'interactable' tags will only work in chat, but they might end up being allowed in mod GUIs too.

How many bags of what shape of candy do i have to send to whom to make this happen? It makes me really sad every time i want to mimic a vanilla gui and can't. Logging and redisplaying chat messages with on_console_chat for players that were offline is only one of the many usecases.

After making this system it has made me think if I could apply some variant of it to robots building things, so a robot could theoretically grab 3 inserters and build all 3 quickly in series. It's an interesting thought for another time...

I've thought about it too. Given how relatively small the queue is with it's 600 entries, anything that speeds large blueprints up is great. Though i'm not sure if i woudln't want more expensive robots/roboports for that for balancing.

[Quarnozian]

I love this FFF. Every single bit of it.

Also, I noticed the lack of pickaxe above the armor looks a little out of place. A while back I had suggested adding access to the blueprint library to that toolbar. Blueprint library would be a good replacement for that blank spot where the pickaxe was.


<- old suggestion

[bobingabout]

I have nothing bad to say about this FFF.

I don't have anything particularly good to say either.

I'm still getting over last week's bombshell.

[irbork]

The pickaxe is already gone. R.I.P. SteelAxe

[Light]

I was going to offer a suggestion but given how last weeks news went unmentioned and the changes already done, I wondered what would be the point of doing so.

Seems like I'm in the same boat as Bob right now.

[kovarex]

For those giving us ideas of what could go into the "empty hole" after the pickaxe:
The "main screen gui" is going to change lot. We have quite a concrete plan already that will be shown in some future FFF. I believe that most will like it

[eradicator]

For those giving us ideas of what could go into the "empty hole" after the pickaxe:
The "main screen gui" is going to change lot. We have quite a concrete plan already that will be shown in some future FFF. I believe that most will like it

Hopefully that includes a double-width toolbar instead of a double-height one like now. Or hey, even better: more options for more different tastes . Nevertheless good to have the "not leaving a hole" part confirmed, after all the hole in our hearts that the pickaxe left *eerhem*, i need to go now...

[Supercheese]

Nice to see that my clunky Map Ping mod will be no longer needed! This native implementation looks way nicer.

[TheRaph]

The pickaxes are really gone...

Now there's an odd empty space above the armor icon... something should be put there!

They should put the remotecontrol there.

[kovarex]

It's cool to have a ping/tag on chat, but would be really cool to be able to say shift+click on the minimap to generate an instant ping, without chat interaction (Like some Multiplayer games do. To say some, League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, and World of Warcraft).

There is a special "power user" shortcut for doing a direct ping without opening a chat, it currently is Control + Alt + mouse click (In the world or in the map).

[mrudat]

How about clicking on the recipe tag copies the recipe as if you copied the settings of a machine crafting that recipe?