Remote driving improvements

[tolomea]

There's a couple of little things that I think would substantially improve remote driving.

1: pin vehicles the same way you can pin ore patches etc, so you can find them easily (edit: you can use alt-right click)

2: an option to block zooming out to radar level when remote driving.

I often get confused if I'm in map view or remote driving view and my reflex is to hit escape to go back to the not radar view, but if I was zoomed out while remote driving that knocks me out of remote driving and now I have to scramble to find that tank before it does.

When you are in the tank remotely it feels a lot like being in the player. Mainly because the view is locked to the tank. So limiting zoom in a similar way feels consistent and makes it clearer you are in the tank. You can jump from there to map view easily enough if you want to look around. It'd also be consistent with the UI when being in the player in the tank.

[StansTheMan]

Very much agreed, and I'd also very much suggest being able to access the main menu (ESC), or more importantly, at least access the game saving and game loading screens all while remote driving (without exiting the remote view).

[GongT]

Me too, I have lost my tank many times by hit ESC.

And +1 for main menu, not only when remote driving, It should accessible anywhere! We use remote view long time when playing space age, I always forget what I'm doing after I go away for several minuets.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, see also :
[2.0.13] Clicking on minimap while in Remote view takes you out of it

Yeah, I can see how it would be quite tricky...

Also, quite related :

Note that dropping you back to normal view is already, and intuitively, achieved by pressing Escape.

This is actually part of the problem :
there seems to be an overlap between two functions that maybe ought to be different :
- Escape closes the top window
- Escape is also used to toggle the game menu

I'm starting, as the number of surfaces is multiplied, to get annoyed that to access the game menu (to change some settings, like muting sounds, or just to save the game), you are forced to close all windows, including remote view : this is bad because you might spend quite some time basically playing in remote view, and quitting it kicks you out of that context (into a different one, where your character is).

This is especially bad for (at least manual) saves, as context is something that you would want to keep - to not get confused and lost about what you were doing for instance. I assume that sending saves to another person (like for bug reports), it would also be much clearer to not first have to tell «and then remote look to surface X», but rather the save dropping them right where you intended.
(I see that autosaves don't show remote view either, at least in the preview - IMHO they should.)

This might be why other games use a different key than Escape for the game menu (?), F10 seems to be fairly common.

Also, I'm somewhat surprised to see that Factorio doesn't have keyboard shortcuts for a quick save, or at least directly for the save/load menu ?

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1: pin vehicles the same way you can pin ore patches etc, so you can find them easily

Wait, how are these different ?
You mean how you can only pin vehicles with Alt + right click,
but you can only pin ore patches by doing a search first ?

I guess it would be nice if both worked for both...

[tolomea]

You mean how you can only pin vehicles with Alt + right click,

I forgot about alt + right click. Thank you, now I have a pin on my tank.