Friday Facts #318 - New Tooltips

[Quarnozian]

Bot Tile Batching - Add Belts?

Eventually I get to the point where I need more throughput on my belt bus, so I use the upgrade planner and just sweep it across the whole thing..... Then I go have a nice home cooked meal as every construction bot in the base repeatedly:

• Flies to the chest
• Picks up a single belt
• Flies to the belt he's replacing
• Swaps them
• Flies to the storage chest
• Drops off one old belt
• Repeat, until it needs to recharge or the job is done.

Even a single lane of belt would benefit from this when placed from a blueprint or upgraded by the upgrade planner.

Train rails are another excellent use for this. Using rail blueprints or even Ghost rail planner with bots doing batch rail placement would speed up the process significantly.

[jodokus31]

Very nice.
Tooltips look nice, but have to see them in action to get a better sense.
Tiles batch building is very great. I think, this is the most important use case for batch building, because it always felt very slow. I would assume it applies also to landfill, which will help in seablock

[bobingabout]

I guess batch building tiles is a reasonable starting point.

I would say just go with everything, I mean, I often batch build solar panels for example, but then I play modded, my robots could have a much larger carrying capacity than base game, so it becomes viable to allow them to carry as much as an entire stack of whatever, and some things have small stack sizes (1, 5, 10) and other have stack sizes of 100 or 200. Most of those are items, but still, it would allow a construction robot to grab an entire stack of solar panels (after enough upgrades) and build a whole solar farm each.

[kenmras]

I love how much work you guys are still doing to make this game better every week so a big thank you.

Maybe I'm the only one or maybe I missed the discussion somewhere but I would like to see units on the fluids (m^3) or (cm^3) really any unit is fine. it just feels weird to me seeing 100 km/h or 10 kW or 2 MW and then see the offshore pump say something like "1200/s"
1200 what per second?
I know it's super minor but I feel like that is a polish issue that a game that shines so much already needs. Also, as an educational tool, reminding kids of all ages how important units are is always needed. My high school science teacher would mark my answers wrong unless I clarified what units. We (USA) even crashed a $125-million dollar rover on mars because of a unit mistake https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm ... story.html

TL; DR, Please add units

I also hear a lot of great discussion on the batch building and echo what others are saying. I'd love to see it in other places starting with these:

• Landfil
• Belts
• Pipes
• Walls
• Rails
• Solar Panels
• Drills
• Accumulators

From a vanilla game perspective, these are the units that ALWAYS go down en-mass and almost always in a very close grid. I don't know if you could offer some Mod-ability to mark something as able to be batch placed and allow modders to turn on other common batched entities but I know it would be appreciated.

Thank you again Wube

[DerGraue]

I thought landfill counts as a tile, so it should work with the new system, shouldn't it?

[chlue]

Regarding the new tooltips:

Is is really useful to print 'basevalue+bonus' in the tooltips? There is the nice separate screen to explore what kind of bonuses are researched anyways. So I think the tooltips would be easier to read by directly showing the sum.

[boskid]

I thought landfill counts as a tile, so it should work with the new system, shouldn't it?

landfill is tile so it works with tile batching

[mrvn]

First: Many thanks for batching tile updates. Another item to cross of my wishlist.

As for the tooltips for designing power plants:



The water and steam use is shown nicely now. But what about the "Consumes Burnable fuel"? Why doesn't that too say

Consumption: 1.2 MW of 1.8 MW


And what is the pollution of the boiler? Is it 20.6/m of 30/m? Or 30/m of 43.7/m? Or 30/m even though it only runs on 2/3 power?

Last another inconsistency: Consumption is "41.2/s of 60/s". But Health is "200/200". Steam output is "41.2/s of 60/s". But Power output is "618 kW / 900 kW". Shouldn't they all use "of" to be consistent across the board?

PS: The steam icon looks bit like a tree.

[mrvn]

I also hear a lot of great discussion on the batch building and echo what others are saying. I'd love to see it in other places starting with these:

• Landfil
• Belts
• Pipes
• Walls
• Rails
• Solar Panels
• Drills
• Accumulators

From a vanilla game perspective, these are the units that ALWAYS go down en-mass and almost always in a very close grid. I don't know if you could offer some Mod-ability to mark something as able to be batch placed and allow modders to turn on other common batched entities but I know it would be appreciated.

Thank you again Wube

My furnaces and assembler go down in rows frequently. (Or with a power pole in between but lets ignore that, don't do that if you want batching. .

How hard would it be to check just the 4 direct neighbours around an entity. If the entity is placed in a row, column or grid then batch them. For rails the places the track can continue should be few too.

I don't see any need to batch any 2 entities in reach that happen to be the same. Just batch those that are connected.

[noobmachine]

Love these updates!

A suggestion: I would prefer to see totals calculated. For example, "Cargo capacity: 4 (1 + 3)". This way, I don't have to think about it and I still see what the bonus is.


The Nuclear Reactor tooltip is confusing me a little: is 40MW the current actual with the 100% neighbor bonus already applied, or do I need to do math? I would assume that 40MW is the actual output, but then why does it not follow same X + Y format?


Thank you for the great effort you keep putting into this game!

[TheVeteraNoob]

Just some thoughts.
1. How about we display consumption on a single line. Like...

Consumes:
Wire: 4/Second Max
Iron Plate: 2/Second Max
Produces:
Green Circuit: 2/Second Max

Just saves a lot of vertical space on a complicated recipe.

2. What if with bonuses you had like... 10 + 50 = 60 explosive damage. Just to save people doing math. I know this crowd doesn't mind that sort of thing but it does save confusion.

[zebediah49]

A couple additional comments --

When I first saw the "Burnable Fuel" icon, I did a double-take, and said "Wait, but how do you get the oil into the boiler?". Then I realized that it was talking about solid fuel. Point is that the icon really looks "liquidey" to me, and makes me want to put burnable fuel oil into it.

I'm also +1 for 1x1 entities being eligible for batching like tiles. I personally care less about belts, since when I'm placing many of those it's usually within a fixed net and 1k bots can go do it if necessary. Walls, however, often come out of my backpack, so I have to stand there while they finish.

Finally, I'm going to vote against scrolling on tool-tips. I generally play on a laptop where I have a touchpad scroll region... but it's not entirely reliable and requires giving up my mouse-move abilities for the duration. A non-scrolling presentation would be much preferred.

[SamuelCombrinck]

Would it be possible to implement a system of having identical entities placed by the same robot

I'm probably being naive and overlooking stuff but it could work something like this...

1. Blueprint is placed
2. On ghost placement a construction order for X entity at Y location is created.
4. Construction orders get sorted by entity ex. 1 inserter, 4 belts...
5. Sorted entities get divided into robot carrying capacity size(ex. 2) so 4 belts changes to 2 belts, 2 belts.
6. These then get a robot assigned to them.
7. The robot then picks up that amount of the item(ex. 2 belts)
8. The robot places the items one by one(ex. it goes to place a belt at location 1,1 then at location 1,2 etc until it's done)

It could be limited to only do this for items placed in the same tick, same chunk, same blueprint, or radius etc... if doing so would help.

Would an implementation like this be viable, or would it not be worth the development difficulty / performance drawbacks?

[TheRaph]

Nice FFF. Thanks for all that information.

Offshore pump isn't consequent to that other stuff.
I think it should have a "produce water" - category. Because it should fit to that "consumes water" - category of that boiler.

So I think it will also be smoother if the "last user" and "health" would be above the water information like in any other entity.

About batch and bots...
As far as I know the entity to be build searces for next nearest bot.

Why not let bots with free space but an assigned job be in that list of available bots, but only for that type of item they already have in inventory. (maybe separate list)

So it might be that a bot has not to build two or three things next to each other but two ore three things on the same building site.

I've got more ideas abaut that on my head but I've to sleep now.

[TheDukeOfRockford]

The tool-tips looks great! One small suggestion, though: Consider having different colors for "generates <name>" and "consumes <name>" text lines to quickly differentiate them. Red for consumption and green for production. I was thinking along the lines of how values and modifiers are colored differently in Paradox games (e.g. Stellaris and Europa Universalis 4).

Like this:

[BlueTemplar]

Could we please have upgrade planner work on tiles ?

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Standardization of tooltips is great.
However they look now a bit overcrowded. So much information and numbers could repulse new player(s).

Is it possible to make a newbie friendly tooltip, and the proper(proposed) hardcore one?

Paradox did a great job there :

(lol, ninjaed)

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@Twinsen Have you thought that with the multi-tooltip solution for several recipes + mods or GUI above 100% in relatively small resolutions (1080), it could happen that the tooltips get taller than the height of the screen?

Yes, this is my concern too. In fact this already happens often with 1920x1200 @125% with mods...

I second all of this. I currently play on a laptop with the UI set to 200%, and I would prefer to play at 225%, except too many tool tips get cut off at the bottom of the screen. These new tool tips look great, but if it results in more of them getting cut off the screen that will actually be a step back in terms of usability.

I wonder if you have data on how many people play at what monitor size, resolution, and UI size? When I loaded up the Factorio demo for the first time, everything was so small that I could not even find a setting to increase the font size. I had to resort to Google in order to discover that there was a setting that increases text size, which helped immensely. Without that setting I would not be able to play Factorio (and would not have purchased it).

(Side note: I did not make the connection that the "UI size" setting would increase text size. I was looking for a setting which said "font size" or "text size" or something more along those lines.)

I don't know if it's just me and I need to have my eyes checked again, but it really seems like with 0.17, Wube has dropped support for people of average or below average eyesight ? (For my part, I have to increase it to 125%...)
It's kind of hard to find precise information about ergonomics :
For the distance :
"one arm length from the screen (45.7-71.1 cm)" (I'll average to 58 cm.)
For text size (though other factors are obviously involved) :
"A recommended maximum distance for comfortable viewing of text is 150
times the text height."
I'll use the example of a typical 22" 16:9 monitor, that's 27.4 cm in height for 1080 pixels.
58 cm / 150 = 0.3866.. cm for the text height
that's 1080 pixels / 27.4 cm * 0.3866.. cm = 15.24... pixels for text height - and that's on average (+/- 23%).
Whereas in the option screens for instance, your text is only 10 pixels high for upper case and 7 for lower case !

----

Steam engines will have max temperature of the Steam. That means you cannot connect them to heat exchanges any more. Will they blow up if you connect them anyways?

No, you just waste most of the energy.

[...]
With electricity, you never know what your surplus or deficit is currently running. You just have a yellow bar that you have to guess how many steam engines to add and it never seems to be enough. Or how much demand can I add without expanding power. So you just double it which is not so easy with some of the more complex mods.
[...]

You do know : it's the ratio of the bars, but it could indeed be conveyed better.

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- While we're on tooltips: can we please get resistance back on some items? Walls, in particular?

Yeah, it's weird that only armours and aliens do... the other day I saw a player worried that flame turrets would burn his walls...
And it would make clearer why walls are better than, say stone furnaces or pipes at defence...

----

see the offshore pump say something like "1200/s"
1200 what per second?

L !

[...]
The Nuclear Reactor tooltip is confusing me a little: is 40MW the current actual with the 100% neighbor bonus already applied, or do I need to do math? I would assume that 40MW is the actual output, but then why does it not follow same X + Y format?

[...]

Yeah, this doesn't make sense, either the bonus is 0%, or the 100% is not a bonus, but a multiplier. And shouldn't it be displayed to the player as Efficiency too ?

[EnerJi]

I don't know if it's just me and I need to have my eyes checked again, but it really seems like with 0.17, Wube has dropped support for people of average or below average eyesight ? (For my part, I have to increase it to 125%...)
It's kind of hard to find precise information about ergonomics :

Very interesting. I'm brand new to the game, so I'm curious, did the default text size decrease in 0.17 compared to earlier versions? If so, I wonder why they would do that?

Obviously Factorio is a game where a lot of detail needs to fit on-screen, but it seems to me that you'd want the default size to be relatively approachable and readable to a wide audience. I mean, the text size was so small I seriously struggled to even read the interface to try and find a darn option to make the text size larger! (And I was unsuccessful - I resorted to googling for options to make Factorio text larger.)

It's great that they have options both to make text larger for folks with bad eyesight (e.g. folks like me) and options to make it smaller for those with very large monitors and / or excellent eyesight (although the tool-tip cut-off really concerns me), but it's just odd that the default text size is SO darn small.

[Philip017]

I like the look of the new tool-tips, i would prefer that they not scroll vertically, but expand horizontally if they grow beyond the available vertical space.

I would also like to see batch processes work on adjacent entities of the same item, like belts, walls, miners, solar panels, accumulators... i know you didn't set it to work on anything but tiles right now, but for building my main bus or large solar arrays it would be especially helpful. but a really good job and thanks for the update for tiles, we pretty much banned blueprinting large tile arrays due to the high demand on the server for robot usage, it doesn't take long to do it by hand however, once you know how to use the + and - to make tile placements larger. maybe this could be added to the UI when holding a tile?

the ratio for nuke power heat exchanger of 103/s fluids is a bit confusing. the 6x exchangers to 10 turbines is the closest ratio. and will probably be the common for small ratio reactors. although the use of the wiki will probably still be common place with the strange ratio.
this is one of my favorite locations to look when i need ratio calculations

https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#nuclear-power

as for upgrading tiles, i have successfully placed a blueprint for concrete to replace bricks by simply shift clicking, and the robots pickup the brick and place the concrete, with out the use of the upgrade planner, even though it might make sense to use it, it doesn't work the same with tiles as entities.

[gerren]

Just talking off the top of my head, but the one entity type that seems like it would benefit from batching the most is belts.

Yes, belts, inserters too.

Belts certainly! They even cannot work, when not chained together!

Mostly anyway - apart of transitioning to another tier or going underground or into a splitter.

[RobertTerwilliger]

I think, "outputted item" tooltip should not appear on default. Make it pop up, say, on holding shift (adding "hold shift to..." tip on main tooltip). Would result in more efficient screen space, IMO.

PS. +1 to belt batching idea suggested above