Friday Facts #337 - Statistics GUI and Mod Debugger

[ohmusama]

Love the VS Code integration, way cool!

[astroshak]

I’d like more information on the Power screen as well.

I’d like to see a couple of percentages - yes, there is the whole bar there but having numbers to go with it would be nice - % of power demand being met, % of maximum power generation being used.

I’d also like to see two new pieces of information on that screen : Maximum Demand, if everything connected to that electrical network was running, what would the total power demand be? And what percentage of the maximum power generation that would be.

Right now, the power screen only displays current use and generation. However, machines are often backed up, or idle, meaning they draw a lot less than their active power. Laser Turrets, for example, draw a lot less than their active power most of the time. It would be nice to see what the total, maximum demand upon the power grid would be if everything was fully active all at once. It would be nice to be able to compare that to our current maximum power generation capability as well. And I think that the power screen would be the perfect place to display such information.

[Burninator]

Can you give us the option to display the production numbers in seconds rather than minutes. Pretty much everything in game uses seconds as a time measurement (belts, production time, fluid consumption etc) so I find the X/m inconsistent and unhelpful.

[GottZ]

i see first class debugging as a big barrier for people to start contributing to anything.
i'll certainly check out that vscode plugin.
i have to say though that the lack of proper debugging til now was the main reason i didn't touch factorio modding too.

[frugal10191]

Is there any chance of the individual power production item bars (i.e. steam engines, solar panels etc) showing the amount of power produced by that type compared to the maximum amount of power that could be produced by that type rather than as a comparison against each other?

i.e. if you have set of steam engines that could produce 100MW max and are currently producing 20MW, and a set of Solar Panels that could produce 50MW max and are currently producing 40MW. Today the Solar panels will show a completely full bar and 40MW, and the Steam engines will show a 50% full bar and 20MW. But in reality the Solar panels are producing 80% of their max and steam engines 20%, so showing the bars at 80% and 20% full is more meaningful.

[kenmras]

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?

I came here to say exactly this. Please keep the last time frame selected. I like the idea of a meet measurement but that is much less important to me.

[DBotThePony]

Will "Total" tab in electricity statistics display consumption in joules? Since currently, displaying total statistics in watts doesn't make sense.

Nice changes, but that new unified search icon is extremely small! Very hard to spot.

I've always wondered why the accumulators' charge was in Joules, while the production is in Watts.

It would be quite a lot easier to have them in W.h (with 1 W.h = 3600 J).

Having it in W.h would easily allow the player to understand if one has enough capacity for the night.

Ex: if the factory needs 36 GW steadily, and if the night is 10 hours, then we know we need at least 36 * 10 = 360 GW.h of capacity.

Right now, in Joules, it always need a conversion on the side.

Joules inside accumulators make sense, since they store not watts, but work in general. Watts are work / time, and in factorio, power consumption (work) very wary in time. I think accumulator charge should be left as-is.

[DoubleThought]

They store joules because that's watt*second. A watt-hour is 3600 joules. The second they refer to is a game-second, or 60 frames. Nights are absolutely not 10 hours; they are 41 2/3 seconds at full darkness and 166 2/3 seconds darkening/lightening, for a total of 208 1/3 seconds not at full power, and 125 seconds worth of full darkness in terms of solar power.

A watt-hour is a perfectly usable measure of energy for billing houses, but with the timeframes of nights, watt-hours are too big.

In terms of units, the power statistics should show watts for instantaneous power usage, and joules for power usage over time; that's how those units work.

[aljo]

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.

That tells you if you aren't charging quickly enough during the day to fill your accumulators. I'd like a graph of accumulator charge over time so I can see if I'm getting close to depleted (or how close I've been getting) during the night. I do have an alarm for low accumulator charge, but it would be nice all the same to see a graph of this. Dunno if that's what the OP was describing, but I'd like this.

[HiddenWolf]

Please, please, please make the new statistics window remember the time frame that was previously selected.
I’d much rather see the 10m or the 1h stats than the last 5 seconds, and it would be great if the window could remember that selection.

[Jiehong]

They store joules because that's watt*second. A watt-hour is 3600 joules. The second they refer to is a game-second, or 60 frames. Nights are absolutely not 10 hours; they are 41 2/3 seconds at full darkness and 166 2/3 seconds darkening/lightening, for a total of 208 1/3 seconds not at full power, and 125 seconds worth of full darkness in terms of solar power.

A watt-hour is a perfectly usable measure of energy for billing houses, but with the timeframes of nights, watt-hours are too big.

In terms of units, the power statistics should show watts for instantaneous power usage, and joules for power usage over time; that's how those units work.

Oh, I see!

I don't know why my brain didn't make me read Joules as W.s

[RobertTerwilliger]

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.

I also was looking at these two bars, feeling they're in fact redundant somewhat. They really should be merged into a single one.
Because at all times one of these bars is full, while the the other one is not, the single bar should work like this:
- if satisfaction is 100% - the bar fulfillment shown is requested/productionCapacity, in GREEN (now is "production")
- if satisfaction is under 100% - the bar fulfillment is producted/requested (reverted) in RED (now is "satisfaction")
- number value shows "production/request" at all times
Since bar will turn red if production is insufficient, you'll also notice "inconsistency" in interface, attracting your attention to "do smth about it"

[BenBlut]

This is a ideal time to bump my request for a net-production graph. See viewtopic.php?p=428069



I still would like this feature implemented en I'm not the only one. The rewrite of this GUI is a great moment for this option.

So, please...

[Darkehart]

If kills is merging into production statistics, why not go all the way and have one unified statistics window with a single keybind?

[Darkehart]

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.

This! ^ I'm used to it not but it still makes my head tilt sometimes. It should be an incredibly simple thing to fix.

[Itemfinder]

Please, please, please make the new statistics window remember the time frame that was previously selected.
I’d much rather see the 10m or the 1h stats than the last 5 seconds, and it would be great if the window could remember that selection.

I second this.

Also, I'd like to suggest re-thinking the intervals. I'd like 15 or 20 minutes, particularly for monitoring power production. 10m is too short to get a feel for trends over a 2 or 3-day period, and 1 hour compresses the graph nearly to the point of illegibility.

[Yxen]

Please, please, please make the new statistics window remember the time frame that was previously selected.
I’d much rather see the 10m or the 1h stats than the last 5 seconds, and it would be great if the window could remember that selection.

I second this.

Also, I'd like to suggest re-thinking the intervals. I'd like 15 or 20 minutes, particularly for monitoring power production. 10m is too short to get a feel for trends over a 2 or 3-day period, and 1 hour compresses the graph nearly to the point of illegibility.

So why not simply allow to enter the number directly/ by the slider for any arbitrary value?

[jockeril]

Add a logarithmic display option for production/consumption graph - I've endorsed that and I think all should read and make a vote on it so Wube knows if is a popular request

[Brambor]

Since "kills" is in "production" statistic, shouldn't it be renamed to something like "statistics" tab?

[steinio]

Since "kills" is in "production" statistic, shouldn't it be renamed to something like "statistics" tab?

It produces pain.