Friday Facts #337 - Statistics GUI and Mod Debugger

[FactorioBot]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-337

[whaleberg]

The new UI looks good. Merging the kill stats into the general stats window is a great idea.

There's 1 additional thing that I think would be a huge improvement to the power stats: a bar / line for total accumulator charge. It would be really useful to be able to see how your accumulator charge varies over the day, and it could help head off sudden power losses due to slightly overcapacity power draw.

[Gergely]

What if we need to... you know... test if things are multiplayer safe?

[justarandomgeek]

What if we need to... you know... test if things are multiplayer safe?

Then you turn off the debugger for a while. For the most part if you write correct code in the first place it just is mp-safe. I'm hoping to add some static analysis tools eventually to detect many kinds of mp-unsafeness in advance too.

[Shingen]

One thing that i would like to see in the statistics GUI is a... pause button.
Trying to click the proper icon while they oscillate rapidly between 2-3 places, because the production/consumption of several items is about the same, is really obnoxious.
Yes, i could use the search function, but doing it for every item i want to be highlighted? ugh. Also if you have (i guess while using mods) a couple of items with a similar long names, you'd have to input it all every time to just make a single click.
Also it helps with comparing several things to each other in a "snapshot" of the production state without having to pause the entire game.

[vorku]

Seeing the new statistics windows for electricity, I was suprised to see the same figure in satisfaction (100%=37.8GW) and production (37.8GW = 95%?) with different bar widths — but obviously one is "37.8GW satisfied out of 37.8GW requested" while the other is "37.8GW used out of a max of 40GW".

I feel that the UI would be easier to understand if we added both the current and max values on all bars; this would answer at a glance:
- What is my current max production capacity?
- What is my current max capacity?
- How much spare capacity do I have?

I know those could be manually computed by multiplying the number of producers/accumulators by their power/capacity, but having an aggregated value would make things more readable.

[conn11]

One thing that i would like to see in the statistics GUI is a... pause button.
Trying to click the proper icon while they oscillate rapidly between 2-3 places, because the production/consumption of several items is about the same, is really obnoxious.
Yes, i could use the search function, but doing it for every item i want to be highlighted? ugh. Also if you have (i guess while using mods) a couple of items with a similar long names, you'd have to input it all every time to just make a single click.
Also it helps with comparing several things to each other in a "snapshot" of the production state without having to pause the entire game.

a work around to this is selecting the items at a greater data set (e.g. 10h). But a pause ability would be nicer, so you don't have to research the items in an updated list. But perhaps the new search function will provide this.
I would actually like a button to quickly deselect any highlighted items and return to the overall production graph. Deselecting multiple chosen items is tedious.
As far as visuals goes, in quick comparison to the current statistics: seems to increase readability.

[valneq]

And now is the right time to incorporate the logscale for production statistics, see also
viewtopic.php?p=259034#p259034

[deef0000dragon1]

The biggest issue I can see with the search change would be where someone is trying to search for the input and output for an item, not the I/O of that item.
IE lets say science packs had a massive drop in production. By looking up the circuits on the consumption page, you can see that there was a massive drop in consumption of green circuits corresponding. (letting you continue to diagnose further on)
I dont know if it is actually all that large of an issue, but it came to mind.


On a seperate note: Would it be to possible to add a field so we can specify the graph time scale (IE I want to see the last 3 hours instead of 1 or 10. )?
The last thing that I would like to request, though I have NO idea how feasible it is, would be the ability to specify the start and end times. (say a 20 minute span 10 hours ago vs a 20 minute span 1 hour ago to compare solar production or something)
I feel the first request should be pretty easy and might even clean up the UI (no more bar of time selection, only a single time input), but I suspect that the second would be much more difficult given you probably are not storing sub-second resolution statistics for the lifetime of the game.

[TreefrogGreaken]

The only slight tweak I would make here.

Satisfaction shoude change to Demand.

It should be the electric network is demanding 38.7 GW of power, and producing 38.7 GW of power. I believe this is the standard wording for power networks.

It always confuses me what satisfaction is when i initally look, it doesn't make sense, the word means provided, but this is showing required, where as demand means required.

Just a small simple change here would be great.

[Serenity]

A huge issue with the statistics is only having one digit after the comma. Could we please get more significant digits, rather than rounding? For example display 1.24k instead of 1.2k. Or maybe better 1240 instead, since going to kilo doesn't actually save any characters in that case.

This is very important when testing builds to see if you're producing as much you targeted. Tiny things can make a difference there. The power graph also has that problem. In a practical factory it doesn't matter much, but it can be important when testing if a nuclear power plant actually produces what you planned.

[deef0000dragon1]

And now is the right time to incorporate the logscale for production statistics, see also
viewtopic.php?p=259034#p259034

Log scale+total production (vs over time) would be a great looking graph.

[Shingen]

a work around to this is selecting the items at a greater data set (e.g. 10h). But a pause ability would be nicer, so you don't have to research the items in an updated list. But perhaps the new search function will provide this.

Ah yes, i forgot to mention that too. Used that as well, didn't like it either.

I would actually like a button to quickly deselect any highlighted items and return to the overall production graph. Deselecting multiple chosen items is tedious.

Resetting chosen items to the default of everything is done by the circular red arrow, assuming it will work as it did until now.

[conn11]

I would actually like a button to quickly deselect any highlighted items and return to the overall production graph. Deselecting multiple chosen items is tedious.

Resetting chosen items to the default of everything is done by the circular red arrow, assuming it will work as it did until now.

okay that was quite obvious, my bad.

[Turbofant]

One thing that bugs me in the statistics GUI is that it always defaults to the 5 second view if you open it. I usally use the 1 and 10 minute view, since theese are more representative for the produciton of the factory than the 5 second view.
Maybe if you reopen the gui, it could show the last used time frame?

Another intresting view would be a net yield graph, where Production - Consumption = net yield. So you could easly see which products are currently running low.
("The net yield of iron ore was -500/min in the last 10 minutes, better start building a new iron mine!")

[meganothing]

The new UI looks good. Merging the kill stats into the general stats window is a great idea.

There's 1 additional thing that I think would be a huge improvement to the power stats: a bar / line for total accumulator charge. It would be really useful to be able to see how your accumulator charge varies over the day, and it could help head off sudden power losses due to slightly overcapacity power draw.

Isn't this already in?

If you look at the picture in the FFF, you see the production diagram with the data for 1.5 in-game days. The green line shows that for about 60% of the usable day the accus are charged (corresponding to the blue line in the consumption diagram) drawing 39GW. 40% of the usable day the accus are full and the rest of the factory only needs 22GW. "usable day" in this case means the part of the day where surplus energy is available for charging accus.

[cantina_fly]

I don't know what's better, that there's a mod debugger now, or that you got the devs to make a code change to support it!

Pinch me with an inserter!

[mlofinti]

Why is the number inside the bar now? That makes the color and background of the text inconsistent, and sometimes switching in the middle of the text, rather than having the values aligned with their names and always drawn consistently. Making the bars a bit thicker could be good, but that's an independent change.

It always confuses me what satisfaction is when i initally look, it doesn't make sense, the word means provided, but this is showing required, where as demand means required.

But that is what the satisfaction meter shows. The colored bar is the amount being provided. The total width of the scale is the amount demanded. These are only the same when your power demand is fully satisfied.

[AndrewIRL]

Mod debugger looks amazing, great work indeed!

[J-H]

I didn't even know there was a production measurement tab/tool in existence!

Something that this reminds me of - could we get a "turret status" window for monitoring turret ammo status? There is no easy way to check and see which turrets need to be manually refilled at early stages of the game.