Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add a color component to the station name so you can quickly find them in the list.

What ?

I want the player to be able to select the color of the station text.
It would also be nice to somehow highlight in this list the current station where the train is right now, for example, highlight it in bold text.

Why ?

This will make it easier to find a station in the list.

I’m not sure if I understand the why, because I would have trouble to see e.g. a black station name on black ground.

No, really: I can barely see the true color of a stop and how should that improve anything, if I made the list of stations colorful? I don’t see the real link from a color in the list to color on a stop. There is no useful user experience.

Or in other words: if colors would make timetables/schedules more useful, don’t you think they wouldn’t have been invented yet and used in many examples ? But there are none, not for flight information systems, trains, busses, you cannot find any information system, that uses more than let’s say two or maybe in very, very rare cases three colors in one schedule, because the UX of that would be really bad.

Hint: how if you change this suggestion to: “I want to see extra symbols in the schedule”?

Anon2k wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 25, 2021 12:58 pm

Add a color component to the station name so you can quickly find them in the list.

This is already in the game ! => https://wiki.factorio.com/Rich_text !!
it's not super easy to use as you need to type in the color and you have to start over when you want to edit a textbox because the formatting code disappear once you validate.

but you also have access to symbols and icons ( like ssilk propose !) using the button just under the research button, next to the "apply change" button. When you edit the name of a station.

i think the place where i see color code used is for subway/underground/metro/tub maps
I do not use it much in game and i don't see it used a lot in multiplayer either, but from my experience, when someone uses it, it's not just a little and then you can't see things because there are too many colors and symbols (on the previous map the names do use very little formatting and are black, but the only thing i can remember is the little M03 M04 in the boxes which is like symbol+color.)

And also maybe i misunderstand the suggestion

I don't care about the color of the stop, though colored stop list would be good. The eye catches color faster, without involving OCR

Wasn't there a rich text syntax to set font color?

mrvn wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 27, 2021 6:24 pm

Wasn't there a rich text syntax to set font color?

Yes, the wiki article linked above shows how: https://wiki.factorio.com/Rich_text

Under "Text modifiers"

Syntax: Examples: All of these result in something that looks like this: Red

Yes, I heard something about rich text feature in Factorio before, and... forgot it after five minutes because I didn't need it at that moment.
I think this is not good that GUI does not even mention for unaware players there are advanced features for some fields. Probably I should create dedicated topic about that, but I'm so lazy today.

NotRexButCaesar wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 29, 2021 6:10 am

All of these result in something that looks like this: Red

That feels like programming in Pascal and reuse the code in JavaScript.

I move this to implemented.

coppercoil wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 29, 2021 6:48 am

Yes, I heard something about rich text feature in Factorio before, and... forgot it after five minutes because I didn't need it at that moment.
I think this is not good that GUI does not even mention for unaware players there are advanced features for some fields. Probably I should create dedicated topic about that, but I'm so lazy today.

The text input fields for e.g. train stop names have a little "icon select" icon on the right side letting you pick out icons instead of having to type in the rich text directly. Every time you see one of those the other rich text features work too.

Maybe the icon selector could include a tab for other rich text features like colors.

That’s a different suggestion. You are free to make a suggestion. But I would prefer not to include this, because it will lead to tons of colored text, “because it looks so much more beautiful “.