Friday Facts #419 - Display Panel & Inserter pickup fixes

[GamerGuru]

I would like to display numbers in the circuit network with the new display panel

[SpoonUnit]

The screens feel a bit too clean for me, which is a little immersion-breaking. All the machines have a patina; surely these screens should have a few little dings and scratches?

[Retne]

I love the ever changing message at the end of FFF posts telling us where to show our thoughts.

This is a brilliant coincidence.
I thought I should log in for the first time in ages to say just that and it's the first post (I read every week, but post rarely).

Excellent call, Gergely

[mm.lion]

I`m sorry, what are the parametrised blueprints?

[scarhoof]

I love the new displays! Would it be possible to have more font options? Maybe I’m just so used to Nixy Tubes or the display plate mod’s font.

[RoastCabose]

I`m sorry, what are the parametrised blueprints?

These are Parameterized Blueprints: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-392

Real nifty, huh?

[Kyralessa]

The screens feel a bit too clean for me, which is a little immersion-breaking. All the machines have a patina; surely these screens should have a few little dings and scratches?

Or better yet, big cracks across them like everybody's mobile phone. Mod idea?

[Panzerknacker]

Eerrrh, I don't see the point in buffing the inserters, I think their behaviour was just fine and always intended like that? Why the hell would you use burners on blue tier belts anyway, except maybe at the end (where is will ALWAYS succeed in grabbing the item no matter the belt speed) as fail-safe backup?

Also, your design is flawed, we all know that taking items from undergrounds halves the time for the inserter to lock onto the items, you should not try to pickup from undergrounds with fast inserters from green tier belts. Instead you should use either faster inserters or change the design so that you can pickup from the overground belt.

The whole point of faster inserters was that they are reliable able to pickup items from the fastest belts because other than that they are usually worse than the other inserters (higher power consumption) and should only be used when needed for that or for higher insertion frequency.

And indeed, there are a few designs where the inserter miss factor could be used as part of the design, that was a funny little quirk.

I think you are trying to streamline the game too much at this point.

Good job with the displays tho, liking it..

[gnutrino]

I would like to display numbers in the circuit network with the new display panel

You will be able to do that using mod/div in arithmetic combinators combined with the digit virtual signals but it seems such a common use case that I wonder whether it could be built into the display panels themselves kind of how the Nixie Tubes mod works

[FritzHugo3]

What we really need is a way do Marks and write in the Maps (this was exist but BIGGER and with scaling by zooming out!) Plus it must be showen in the lower (zoomed max out) chematic mapview.

I see not one case where I place the "Textbox" in this fff - Make a multiblock from this and I see a sense in this.



(The same with the Textplate mod, much to smal letters in the original - this makes so much more sense - https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... height=702

[husnikadam]

Nice display feature!
One thing I wish it to do: display a signal numerical value as a message. Just display the plain number, that's all. Or create a parametrized message where the number gets inserted into it

[madpav3l]

The display looks very nice, but I feel it is too small to be usable in the game, it blends in with other objects and I generally have a hard time finding it in the screenshots, how about a 2x2 size?

[Krazykrl]

Eerrrh, I don't see the point in buffing the inserters, I think their behaviour was just fine and always intended like that? Why the hell would you use burners on blue tier belts anyway, except maybe at the end (where is will ALWAYS succeed in grabbing the item no matter the belt speed) as fail-safe backup?

Having inserters miss items as they travel by made no real sense, all the inserter jaw has to do is clamp an item. Higher tier inserters should have higher throughput dependent on their rotation speed. Burner inserters have the second highest power usage out of all inserters, only stack inserters draw more power.

Not needing kluges like handfeeding boilers or whatever this abomination is so your boilers auto-start is a nice QoL improvement.

Abomination 37.png (283.68 KiB) Viewed 2297 times

[Koub]

As a few others have requested/suggested before me, I with I could display the value of a signal alongside with the icon on the display screens. Use cases : link any buffer tank to a display, and display its content.

And cherry on top, if I could do that also for chests would be super neat (to keep an eye on strategic buffer chests (those I use as buffers, not the logistic buffer chest).

Maybe there will be a way with the combinators 2.0, I'll tinker with them when 2.0 is out.

[Phuncz]

Would it be an idea if a speaker is connected to a display panel with messages configured (like <100 copper gives a message), that it automatically adopts those settings by default, so it basically makes the "local" message a "global" one, with just one wire ? Like an inserter or pump is set to enable/disable mode when a wire is attached. Just a small QoL feature.

[Rain_Randomnumber]

I always thought the inserter thing was intentional.

[mcmase]

For panels with multiple lines of text (so you have to hover to see it in full), maybe it would be useful to have a small visual indicator that there actually is more text to be displayed? Like a small "[...]" icon in the corner or something. The point is, then users don't have to guess whether there might be more text: you would always know whether you read the whole thing on first sight, or whether there's still more text to be read, and you wouldn't have to do pointless "mouseover checks" just in case there is more text that you weren't aware of.

Came here to suggest this. Seems like without an indicator, display messages would become super annoying, always checking to see if someone put a long message or not.

[JigSaW]

I like the Display Panel and the fact that it functions like a combinator (great for debugging) but the actual display being less than 1x1 block is too small, this needs to be 2x2/have a 2x2 variant to be able to catch your eye in all the visual noise.

In the fff-419-display-monitor-use-case.mp4 vid you can see how hard it is to make out what icon is being shown. This is farther exacerbated by the fact that the game will probably gonna be played a lot from the satellite view, meaning you gonna spend more time zoomed out in comparison to when you play with a character and spend most of the time zoomed in (this is a conclution from my experience of playing Space Exploration where 1x1 variant of display plates mod (which are bigger than the new official Display Panel) was too small to use practically).

[alefu]

Great changes, as always! But why is it called "Show in chart" and not "Show on map"?

[kpreid]

I like the Display Panel and the fact that it functions like a combinator (great for debugging) but the actual display being less than 1x1 block is too small, this needs to be 2x2/have a 2x2 variant to be able to catch your eye in all the visual noise.

+1. Came here to post that large icons are important. But I particularly like the idea of having a 2×2 variant — you get to pick between compact “debug info for your circuits” displays and more attention-getting ones, while still having a Factorio-style gnarly machine around the display (unlike if a display was enlarged to nearly fill the 1x1 square).