Factorio Forums

TL;DR - I wish it was easier to see what building are running and which have stopped more easily.

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.

Crafting machine animation (layers) can be tinted by entity status using https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/Working ... apply_tint and https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype/Cra ... tus_colors. As an example, https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution does this, you can see the green/yellow lights in the screenshots on the mod page.

Very nice work! I especially like the squares on your concrete. I have been using the pause function to see and measure. Yes, I know, there is an option to toggle a full-time grid, but I don't like it.

About the layout of your labs. I see you are chaining them all. Katherine of Sky, in one of her videos, said something about losing partials if you chain like that. But I cannot really claim to have any idea what she was talking about. Do you?

Redpossum wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 06, 2021 7:18 pm

About the layout of your labs. I see you are chaining them all. Katherine of Sky, in one of her videos, said something about losing partials if you chain like that. But I cannot really claim to have any idea what she was talking about. Do you?

I don’t think you “lose science”. What you do get is partial uptime: when the inserter takes a science pack out, the lab turns off for a moment.

If she was very early game, she might have been counting research packs; you can “lose” science in the sense that it will be spread out among two labs and your 10 automation science packs won’t actually research the automation technology.

If you research with a science pack in a lab and it gets pulled out into the next lab, there might be rounding issues how much of the pack was consumed. So it happens at some point, that you cannot finish a research with 100, because you are stuck at 99.999. You just need a new pack to finish instantly.

Redpossum wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 06, 2021 7:18 pm

Very nice work! I especially like the squares on your concrete. I have been using the pause function to see and measure. Yes, I know, there is an option to toggle a full-time grid, but I don't like it.

About the layout of your labs. I see you are chaining them all. Katherine of Sky, in one of her videos, said something about losing partials if you chain like that. But I cannot really claim to have any idea what she was talking about. Do you?

There is a second "cheat" in my concrete. I figured out that when the graphics get put down, the concrete "hr=concrete" (HR gets used in hi res settinngs) is divided into 8 sections, so basically it "pastes down" blocks of 8x8 tiles, so what I did was add a thicker divider line so that each 8x8 "block" now gets line, so it generates a map chunk-like line, but instead of being at each 32x32 i see sub-lines at each 8x8.

Its hard to explain, so screenshot. I have 3 versions, with 3 different line thickness, this one is Thickness 3 (I normally run 1, but to show it off 3 is easier to see). Stone tiles work differently, so I cant do it on those.