Ok, bear with me. So, I do weird stuff in this game to pass the time, and one of my long term ones is to just replace any graphics that I find hard to see (I dont see THAT well) with ones that I can see better, a lot of it by ... stealing graphics from "everywhere" and just replacing the PNG's client side as Factorio dosn't "check" for those shenanigans. I see my version of the game, and everyone else sees their.
ie, semi transparent power wires, more visible Logi wires, Space-X rails, re-colored Tiers and belts, flatter Beacon, and a ... VERY work in progress solar panel :/ ... concrete and stone with squares (helps with spacing), and all my landscape is snow white. Also a bunch of making a ton of PNG's just "blank" so I dont see tree stumps anymore after cutting a tree.
Now, I find it hard to live without the Bottleneck mod because I can VERY easily miss the fact that a bunch of factories are "idle" as I cant see the animation top sections well, but MOST servers dont run it, so I tried to make my own "fix", Now, I had that problem with Labs, and I fixed it like this
I found that when a Lab stops, it goes back to FRAME-1, and I (first copied someone elses Labs, sorry) AND then made FRAME-1 bright red. Now even zoomed out, the Red is very easy to see against a Blue running one.
The thing about MOST other entities is that they dont STOP on a set frame, they just stop animating at the current Frame, so this PNG hack-trick wont work. I could say, just paint every second frame with a different colored dot, and just look for the "changing dot color", but I wish there was a "vanilla option" to tell what was runnign and what was not without squinting at zoomed in buildings all the time.
