Friday Facts #419 - Display Panel & Inserter pickup fixes

[mm.lion]

I`m sorry, what are the parametrised blueprints?

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

Real nifty, huh?

Thx!

[kulg]

Obviously the most important part to mention is that the animations for the new machines are way too beautiful and mesmerizing. I 100% guarantee that as soon as I unlock some of those buildings, I will lose track of how much time I spend staring at it and probably get attacked by biters.

So excited for this expansion.

[The Phoenixian]

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.

I feel like this should be possible already. One might be able to use some combination of divisors and/or the Modulo operator to 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, etc, to extract each digit, then feed that into a bank of combinators against to check against values 1-9 plus either "no signal" or 10 for 0, and pass the digit that corresponds to a set of displays

What benefit do legendary quality Display Panels provide?

Well, it's a cathode ray tube, and generally overclocking one of those gets you a small particle accelerator, IIRC.

[Unintended]

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

Made an account to second this! "Show in Chart" sounds like I'd see it in the production graphs somehow.

If they think "Show on Map" might be interpreted as a toggle for displaying in the world in general, I'll toss out "Show in Map View" as an alternative.

[gorbag]

I don't mind the fact that burner (or even normal, gold) inserters eventually become obsolete. It's the march of technology! Perhaps to keep up with express belts, one would need god-quality burners? At least if the older inserters are run at higher rates, they should break down, with the amount of "overdrive" being exponentially related to breakdown speed. A model-T run on a track at 80 mph is just going to explode, after all.

[mmmPI]

I have to temper that joy though, because i am very disappointed by the inserter rework, i used to rely on this to create very intricate mechanism that would pick things up only if the belts were full and back up, and miss the item otherwise.

[ no i'm kidding i don't mind THIS change, because i saw on the last video that sometimes an inserter miss an item and i'm already planning to use corner green belts and low power yellow inserter to achieve the same results !]

Not sure you missed the part where i tell it's joke or not, in case i added it back x)

[gorbag]

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.

Yes, exactly!

[Daneel_]

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

I thought this would be the first comment, honestly. “Show in chart” immediately makes me think I can somehow make the output appear as some kind of graph. “Show on map” is a much better description in my opinion.

Love the display and inserter changes overall though! I agree with other commenters that a token system and possibly a 2x2 entity would be useful too.

[mmmPI]

I have to temper that joy though, because i am very disappointed by the inserter rework, i used to rely on this to create very intricate mechanism that would pick things up only if the belts were full and back up, and miss the item otherwise.

[ no i'm kidding i don't mind THIS change, because i saw on the last video that sometimes an inserter miss an item and i'm already planning to use corner green belts and low power yellow inserter to achieve the same results !]

Isn't this use case covered by splitter output priority?

Sorry but this was meant as joke, you could also have the belt wired directly and connected to the inserter, so it picks up item only if " condition", or yeah splitter filter, or output priority, there are quite a few possibilities

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

I think it's the internal name in the game, "chart" instead of "map" as if the whole game is just a chart representing some datas.
When looking for "rechart" i found this term was shown here : viewtopic.php?t=106308

Added optional surface parameter to LuaForce::rechart.

To me rechart is used when you want some part of the map to be re-evaluated, either to update the fog of war or terrain. I may be wrong though

[TheComputerLurker]

Ooooh. These display panels look good! It'll be nice to have a signpost system that doesn't involve map tags, and can be used to do things like dynamic warnings! (Yeah the programmable speaker can also do warning systems, but let's face it: Hearing HONK-HONK-HONK-HONK! or some other alarm ad nauseam whenever something runs out of resources is an absolute cacophony.)

Also love the inserter fix - feeding burner-based power plants could get really annoying once it comes time to start using blue belts everywhere.

[Necandum]

The display combinator is a great addition! I really enjoy the customisation possible.
On that note, will it be possible to change how large the icon / text appears on the map? I find that a problem with the current icons: at a certain zoom level, it can be hard to see the icon, and it's harder to indicate which icons are more important than others.

Could the icon appearing on the map also be toggleable by the circuit network (e.g as a modifiable option in the list item that matches circuit conditions)?

Re: map vs. chart, it might be a linguistic thing: numerous eastern European languages have something similar to 'karta' to mean map, from the German. Czech might be similar. Thus chart may the more natural seeming English translation, even though map is currently preferred.

[morsk]

I'm glad there aren't ugly scanlines or lense flares on the Display Panel.

Am I correct that Remote View removes the ugly scanline "vignette" currently on the map view? (I hacked the shader to remove it years ago, so actually I have no idea if it still exists. But I assume it isn't gone yet.) This would be a trend of removing things that are ugly for no reason. I appreciate it.

[GregoriusT]

Now that ingame Text is more prevalent, may i request use of a more complete Font so that I can OωO properly without it turning into O|O due to lack of Greek support? XD

(note, i am talking about just filling in missing unicode characters, the already existing characters should ofcourse stay)

[ombus]

New items too

cable ?
new battery ?

[mmmPI]

Re: map vs. chart, it might be a linguistic thing: numerous eastern European languages have something similar to 'karta' to mean map, from the German. Czech might be similar. Thus chart may the more natural seeming English translation, even though map is currently preferred.

According to online translation, the Czech word for "map" seem to be "mapa". I had to verify because i found it interesting and i have nothing else to do, in french it's "carte" for "map" which is also the word used for "cards". it come from latin "carta" like the "magna carta" also sometimes refered to as magna charta they say on wikipedia.

I had always thought "map" was coming from german but no ! i found online it's said to come from latin "mappa mundi" translating as "map of the world" and in that origin "map" was used to describe the cloth/napkin on which the "world" was drawn.

Sorry for all that newly acquired pedantry all i wanted to say was this thing, in 2.0 ,will have a lot more information to it than right now !

Am I correct that Remote View removes the ugly scanline "vignette" currently on the map view? (I hacked the shader to remove it years ago, so actually I have no idea if it still exists. But I assume it isn't gone yet.) This would be a trend of removing things that are ugly for no reason. I appreciate it.

Yes it is still there, and sometimes i still try to do things from map view not realizing i'm in map view because those "aren't visible enough". I too hope those are rework for something that would be more visible than intentionnal blur, probably no longer necessary if the overall look of the map view makes it more obvious we are in map view with useful pannel of train/logistic information rather than "lost space". I can't tell if you are correct saying that this was already announced, i wish you are

cable ?

Maybe, when i saw it i thought of fabrics, the kind of which you'd dip in resin and then let it dry to mold some particular shape , but then cable makes more sense in Factorio maybe.Still it look like fabrics to me

[Therax]

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

I thought this would be the first comment, honestly. “Show in chart” immediately makes me think I can somehow make the output appear as some kind of graph. “Show on map” is a much better description in my opinion.

I have to emphasize this. My first thought upon seeing "Show in chart" was to expect some sort of integration with the graphs in the "Production statistics" window to e.g. display alerts about some resource being low. The existing terminology everywhere else in the game is "Map," from the default shortcut key being M for "Toggle world map", the tooltip shown on mouseover, "Ping a map location," etc.

[ombus]

cable ?

Maybe, when i saw it i thought of fabrics, the kind of which you'd dip in resin and then let it dry to mold some particular shape , but then cable makes more sense in Factorio maybe.Still it look like fabrics to me

Yeah at first i thought the same thing .. some sort of fabric comb ... but being bactorio and the resulting item looks like a battery...
i can see it as some sort of copper rod with cables in a coil.. like some magnet

[dragon_gawain]

Two thoughts:
1. It would be nice if the on map/alt display text had some sort of symbol to let me (and others) know that there was more text that can be seen upon hovering over/opening the display panel.
2. That extension speed buff... I'm wondering how it'll effect Bob's custom inserters where you can have an inserter pick up from two tiles away, but drop off only one tile away.

As always, great stuff! Excited for everything to come!

Edit: After reading through pretty much all the other comments and noticing a few people saying stuff about how it would be nice if the display ports were bigger, I offer this solution (and I apologize in advance, cause it'll prolly be hell to code if you go with this idea):
If you place display ports directly next to each other, the display faces combine into one larger display area.
(more practical solution would be to prolly just add in another tech for like, 'larger display ports' and unlock a 2x2 and 3x3 display port or something like that, but I wanted to toss out the idea of nxm sized ports created just by sticking them next to each other)

[pleegwat]

On showing quantities, something like

Code: Select all

[signal=iron-plate]

may be a good fit from the user side (compared to existing

Code: Select all

[item=iron-plate]

in rich text). Though of course I don't know if you can get at the numbers easily from the engine side.

[morse]

If only there was a mod to take ideas from...

Seriously, why no segmented displays and numbers? Seems like a no-brainer.