Friday Facts #289 - Character GUI

[Zaflis]

Please, I beg you, do not make darker slots in gui (under items) I have form of astigmatism - light emiting pixels are blurry in my eyes, so i use light IDE, bright themes, because I must to use it. Too much contrast of background making game for me unplayable (white numbers on dark background). Please, add hide option to allow lower contrast or something. I love the game, but these GUI change will be my end of playing a factorio.

Yes, I play only light themed games, with light GUI's.

If it's possible - how can i redraw Gui theme? for lighter (as today)
Of course, upcoming style is better than actual but too dark.

Personally i'm the opposite. Bright screen irritates my eyes and i favor dark themes whenever possible. It also causes the famous dark under-eye-patches for people for being exposed to bright lights hours and hours a day.

But it shouldn't be too hard to some point later make UI color themes customizable.

[vinegarninja]

What about those of us who are red/green colorblind? It can be impossible to tell the difference when the colors all look the same!

I love the new update though.

[dzaima]

I have never (successfully) used the automatic trash for anything because of one problem - there are always exceptions when I want to hold more of an item type - e.g. building a massive belt, moving a furnace setup and not wanting to kill all robots with thousands of ore/plates, hand-crafting something not worth automating (for the time being, don't worry), having a full inventory of wood and robots too far away for them to do anything useful, etc.

I feel the logistics tab would benefit a lot from an option to temporarily turn off the logistics trashing (and maybe requesting too? I find myself mostly using the slot filtering for items I request as putting them away means robots will get it back to me whether i want it or not, but it's still wanted sometimes, e.g. when filling up the inventory with solars for electricity expansion)

[Lee_newsum]

Good to see some of you at EGX Rezzed .

[ixnorp]

I'm concerned about how incredibly tiny that search button is on the mock up.

I thought that too, although you can always use ctrl+f. The button is probably there more as a hint that that you can do so than anything else. I would assume the tooltip also tells you the shortcut. If not it should.

I agree with this. I checked the image and the search button (as well as the other two) are only 16x16 pixels on the mock up image. That seems counter-intuitive when cleaning up the rest of the GUI to be more easily accessible. I use keyboard shortcuts (though certainly not all of them) however I am sure there are many, many people out there who will never use or even know what they are even if there is a hover tooltip on the button.

[IronCartographer]

Great to see logistic Requests and Trash being brought into alignment with each other.

It would be amazing to see things taken one step further as demonstrated in this 0.16 mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Logistic_Slot_Manager



Basically: Toggling groups of requests per-task, with request, idle, and trash states depending on the desired composition / transition between each set.

As a bonus, it would integrate the much-requested "Toggle Logistic Requests" functionality (might need a clear toggle for 'every' profile as well as each profile) which is helpful when you respawn and don't want to be inundated with items.

Edit: I should have linked this 0.17 mod as well, with its blueprint-contents-requesting and preset-saving functionality, though it lacks auto-trash and profile hybridization/composition: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Logistic-Request-Manager

[Pankeko]

I'd love to see a table for favorite items you can pick and choose, my friend has issues looking for stuff now and again and I say it's silly just search the item and you'd be fine, but it seems like a good concept, something you can toggle on and off just like the buttons for copy and paste.

[ixnorp]

I feel the logistics tab would benefit a lot from an option to temporarily turn off the logistics trashing (and maybe requesting too?

It's super annoying any time I die and have logistics requests set because I'm too slow to escape my fast bots who refill my current inventory which was already full before as I go to fetch my corpse's inventory.

[cid0rz]

Hello, I am really concerned that you remove the tooltip for logistics. I like a lot the statistics it brings in a comfortabel way. In fact sometimes i request something just to know how many of that is in the LN. I know you can use the L statistics and search but it is info for free of the things you are using the most. Colors are ok, I'm not completely against colors (even if abusing them can lead to not aesthetically pleasurable compositions) but let me mouse over the requests and read numbers, please.
The rest looks greatly promising! I'm sure with the ideas of all we'l make a better GUI. keep up the good work!

[Koub]

Something I'm wondering : when will the order to logistic network be sent (whetever the order is) when tinkering with the logistic slots ? Right now, despite the very welcome "request 1 by default" option, I'd rather not send the order before I've set my request properly.

Also eager to see how the gui for adding a request will look like

[Pinga]

Ewww durability.

Amazing changes all around, the number of personal requests is not nearly enough right now, so happy it will be infinite.
It's missing one thing though, what happened to the sort buttons idea?


Source: FFF #191

The use case: When I want to pin items to my inventory, if I put it in the bottom, they will drop to the floor if I ever unequip my armor. But when sorting is on, I can't move them to the top. So what I need to do is, go to settings, turn off auto sorting, move the items to the slots I want, pin them, then go to settings and re-enable auto sorting. A button in the UI to sort at will would be much nicer.

[0mega]

I just feel that the colours in the new GUI are too dark, and have too much contrast. The old colour combinations were cleaner.

[IronCartographer]

Something I'm wondering : when will the order to logistic network be sent (whetever the order is) when tinkering with the logistic slots ? Right now, despite the very welcome "request 1 by default" option, I'd rather not send the order before I've set my request properly.

Also eager to see how the gui for adding a request will look like

The GUI definitely needs to be more than the current item (signal/filter) selection panel so that you can choose an item without creating a blank request (which defaults to trashing, as per the FFF!) before it activates!

It will probably create and activate once you hit confirm on the request UI you seek.

[Pinga]

Another suggestion, it would be nice if the character tab showed every relevant stat. Like, what's your current move speed? How much power is your armor generating? What's your personal laser DPS? And more...

You know, similar to how ARPGs do.

[AcolyteOfRocket]

I am not a touch-typist so I have been finding the new GUI more annoying than the old one. The GUI needs a "Click here to clear cursor" button - hitting the Q key is not something I do as fluently as a touch typist. The button could be one of the optional buttons in the lower right of the new GUI.

Also the new tab structure looks suspiciously like you might implement scrolling to accomodate additional item menus in the crafting menu, especially where mods are a factor. I hope you DON'T do this as most of the scrolling controls in the new GUI are small and fiddly, you do icons (ie old GUI) better than you do scroll dialogs imho.

Cheers.

[fur_and_whiskers]

This is excellent. One thing that concerns me, many times I make logistic requests for items I need a lot of, but I am happy if I have more than that amount. So requested amount does not equal auto trash over requested amount. If I've requested 300 belts while relaying belts and pick up a lot more during deconstruction I'm happy to hang onto those even though I end up with a lot more than the requested amount.

[Philip017]

i would still like to have logistics blueprints, where i can have mining layout, rail building, belt base building, and robot base building logistics request and trash configs,

currently if i want to build rails, i have to trash all the stuff eating my inventory from building the base, request rails, inserters, chests, signals, ect... trashing everything else for the most part.
when i get done laying rails, build the mine, trash all the rails, request miners, belts, modules, ect...
now back to building the base, trash miners, rails whatever make new requests for base stuff, rinse and repeat.
if i had a function to set these requests...
yes i know there is a mod for this. but still hoped it would come to vanilla.

however look forward to seeing the changes.

[DOSorDIE]

Look great, but i missing the "Logistic Bots Delivery to me" Stop Button.
Maybe a ON/OFF button on top ore something.
Sometime it will extrem helpful to have that.

[dgw]

Add me to the contingent of users who noticed the unexplained (9) pointer in the Logistics tab. But I think it probably does exactly what it looks like it does (change the number of visible slots/rows).

If you're giving out pins at EGX Rezzed, does that mean we can maybe get those in the merch store? I like pins!

[_alphaBeta_]

I feel the logistics tab would benefit a lot from an option to temporarily turn off the logistics trashing (and maybe requesting too? I find myself mostly using the slot filtering for items I request as putting them away means robots will get it back to me whether i want it or not, but it's still wanted sometimes, e.g. when filling up the inventory with solars for electricity expansion)

Agree with this. The current and proposed systems don't account too well for temporary situations where you want to keep a lot of certain items at the expense of additional items coming. You either have to manually change everything or try to outrun your bots (which can be interesting).

I still don't know what I think of logistics going on another tab. Sometimes too many tabs can be counterproductive. There's plenty of screen space to use when the character window is open. Why so many tabs? When you're crafting, it's tabs within tabs. I really wish there was an option to remove all tabs for advanced players and basically show all the tabs' information on one screen/frame that takes up the majority of the screen. I'd be willing to concede a certain default behavior for shift-clicking inventory items. How often do we really want to shift-click into the weapons and armor slots?

EDIT: Is inventory sorting, especially of non-player entities, still on the roadmap?