Flip Dot Display Pixels

[Moosfet]

TL;DR

Flip dot display pixels, for making alphanumeric displays or bar graphs that are more readable than ones created with lights.

What ?

A one-tile entity that implements a single flip dot, similar to one of the individual flip dots in this display:

flip_dot_display.jpg (100.34 KiB) Viewed 2727 times

I thought there was a mod for this, but searching the mod portal, I can't find it. I think I just imagined it one day and I'm just remembering what I imagined. So maybe someone would like to make it?

Why ?

I'm having fun with number display blueprints, but the displays are so unreadable. Lights are made to illuminate things, not be displays.

The problem with the lights in Factorio is that they're not display lights, they're illumination lights. So they're not like LEDs which only cast light forward (or upward in-game) and they don't have shields around the lights that prevent them from lighting up adjacent things, as they're supposed to light up adjacent things.

I see that there are mods to make the existing lights better for displays, but in doing so, they ruin the ability of the light to perform its intended purpose, by reducing the radius of the produced light such that its only useful for displays. This is akin to surrounding them with a light shield so that they only cast light straight up into the sky.

I like lights as they are, serving the purpose of lighting things up. I just don't like using them for displays because that's not what they're designed to do.

The way this problem is solved in real life is with flip dot displays. You've probably seen them on the highway, where displays have to be readable in broad daylight. They don't rely on producing light, but instead flip little panels that are bright yellow on one side and dark black on the other side, thereby using the daylight rather than trying to compete with it.

So I'd like a dedicated display entity, not something that takes away lights to replace them with something better for displays but worse for lighting things up. A flip-dot entity would be easily read during the day and could be surrounded with ordinary lights to make it readable at night, and I think it'd be cool just in the sense that flip-dot displays are kind of technical things intended to solve a sort-of industrial problem, the exact problem that displays made of lights presently have in Factorio, and so I think they'd be a great fit for the game.

OTOH though, they're also kind of out-of-context for the game, in that this little guy stranded on a planet really has no reason to create such a display unless it's going to say "HELP I'M STRANDED" or something like that. So maybe it would make more sense as a mod, but if so, then hopefully one that I could upgrade-planner the lights in blueprints from the internet to flip-dots, because I'm not smart enough to construct those alphanumeric displays myself.

[mrvn]

That sounds like an idea for a mod. They are just lights with a different graphic and potentially no glow effect. Trivial to make if you can make the graphics for them.

It would also be trivial to remove the glow effect from lights, or make a copy without glow effect. So they don't pollute adjacent lights.

[FuryoftheStars]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/nixie-tubes
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SantasNixieTubeDisplay

The second one has less features, but is supposed to be more UPS friendly.

[Moosfet]

OK, so I made a crappy mod. Here's how it looks, compared to ordinary lamps set to yellow, the most-readable color they have:

flipdot_day.png (342.41 KiB) Viewed 2650 times

Above is day, below is night. Note that they don't light up so there are white lights nearby to make it visible.

flipdot_night.png (391.85 KiB) Viewed 2650 times

IDK if I care to polish it, as it was so difficult to figure out how to get it this far. There's exactly one tutorial for making mods as far as I can tell, and it sucks. It barely explains how to do anything. In particular, it leads you to make one particular mistake that, in searching the resulting error message trying to figure out what was wrong, I discovered that apparently everyone who receives that error message has made that same mistake after reading that same tutorial.
The only thing that allowed me to make any progress was eventually figuring out that the game's own items are written as if they're mods.

I still have no idea why using the upgrade planner to change ordinary lamps into flip dots indicates that it's turning lamps into lamps rather than lamps into flip dots. I can't find any other reference to the lamp image in the game files so IDK what I'm failing to change that's making it show up that way, and of course it needs its own technology and I didn't bother following the rest of the tutorial to give the item a name so it's just "invalid key" or something so it's only like half of what someone would expect a mod to be. Also, the flipping dots aren't animated. I don't know if that's even possible, but if you can't see them flip, then they might as well be LCD screens displaying circles.

flip-dots_0.0.1.zip

(24.71 KiB) Downloaded 47 times

IDK, I might decide to finish it later just because the idea of making better images with Blender is tempting, but the lack of a good tutorial has left me feeling like I'm done with it, so I'll post it here and maybe someone will search "flip-dot" someday and care to finish it. I don't want to post it on mods.factorio.com because it's kind of a turd and, if it does get better someday, I don't want people's first experience with it to have been an experience with a turd.

[DaveMcW]

Lamps were originally designed to show pixels clearly, but they have been nerfed repeatedly.

lamps.png (2.71 MiB) Viewed 2646 times

[aka13]

Makes me cry every time i see it, give me back my readable lamp displays D:

[Moosfet]

I have to agree with those changes though. The game was originally just way too dark. I actually wrote a program to brighten the game's graphics and made a post about it a few years ago: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=58290 Here's two before-and-after pictures: https://imgur.com/a/C5PNs

Anyway, you look at those lights in the 0.12 image and just think about how you're looking at something that's being illuminated by broad daylight and it makes no sense. They're too dark. Also, for as bright as the lights are, they're failing to light up anything around them.

I'm glad they came around and brightened the game up, as before I couldn't stand to play it without my image-brightening program, which was annoying to use because I had to revert all of the images to apply an update and then re-brighten them afterwards, which took like 20 minutes. It's nice to have the game just be bright enough by default now.

The circuit network boxes don't help, but I agree with that change too, as those little boxes are a nice touch most of the time. They're terrible for displays though, and I think it's reasonable to think that, if you were building a dedicated display machine, you'd build it in such a way that the box is concealed inside. So I removed the boxes.

In general though, I just don't think the lamps should be display pixels. You'd never say "I want to make a big light-up display that shows the time, so let me go get a bunch of street lamps and stick them all right next to each other..." They may be on the ground rather than on a pole, but the lamps in Factorio are meant to be like street lamps, illuminating a large area. If you wanted a lamp for a display, you'd make a totally different kind of lamp.

It does make me wonder though, since you'd never want red or green lighting for street lighting, why do the colored modes of the lights have a glow radius at all? They could light up just the lamp itself, like the 0.12 lamps, and work fine for displays, while the non-circuit-connected version continues to be a bright wide-area lamp. Also, why does the lamp box have to be white, or at least shiny iron? Factorio man could totally paint it black, and when given a color signal, the off version of the lens could be a dark version of the color, as if it's a color filter.

Ugh, now I want to make a mod that fixes the regular lamps too. ...except that I'm 99% sure that there's no way to change the color of a lamp that isn't turned on, so I think I'd ultimately be disappointed with my implausibly-dark considering that they're illuminated by sunlight lamp lenses. At least with colored lenses I can imagine that there's just not much light that makes it through the filter and then back out again, but no one puts a black filter on lights, so it wouldn't look correct.

Oh, I also made it so that feeding my flip dots the black signal makes them orange, because I hate that Factorio doesn't have orange, and what else is black going to do? Although, now that I think about it, I could probably just add an orange signal.

flipdot_orange.png (1.13 MiB) Viewed 2635 times

[MEOWMI]

I do agree it would be very good if "lamps screens" were more readable. So many nerfs to them for so little reason. I get that the sprite was remade several times and that it quite possibly was an oversight, but it would definitely be a good change. Something as simple as darkening the glass would probably do the trick.

[FuryoftheStars]

There used to be a mod called Darker Unlit Lamps, which for some reason was moved to Better Lamp Contrast, but lacks details.

There's also Schall Lamp Contrast.

I'm also noticing that Schall Lamp Contrast was comparing itself to the old Inlaid Lamps mod as well, so here's the updated version of that one as well: Inlaid Lamps Extended

[mrvn]

The lamps are there to brighten up the surrounding area at night so you can still see when you walk around. They certainly aren't made for displays so don't complain if they aren't optimize for a use case they aren't made for.

Those orange dots look nice. The wires might be bothersome though. Maybe look at nixitubes to see how they auto-connect to neighbors.

Overall though it might be cool if the devs would add a circuits controlled display prototype that has a table of int -> image. The GUI would allow selecting the signal to display and then it's simply a table lookup to pick the right image to display. Mods could then make numeric displays providing images for 0-9. Or Ascii or if they do want to go crazy they could make an emoji display.

[Moosfet]

Hmm, probably no video player here, but they move now.

flipdot.mp4

(463.95 KiB) Downloaded 56 times

I had to make them out of power switches instead of lights. So they also use no power, come in only one color, and you can use them to connect two separate power networks. However, the animation is cool and the sound that the power switch makes is kind of appropriate. It just doesn't always play it, I think because it's busy playing a silent ogg file for all of the ones nearby that are on but not moving and it maxes out the number of sounds.

flip-dots_0.0.2.zip

(235.07 KiB) Downloaded 45 times

The old lamp style is still in there too.

I might actually have to put it on the mod portal. I still hate it but it mostly works.

[mrvn]

You can set how much power lights use. No need to use power switches. That will mess up the map view when you turn on the power networks and probably costs UPS.

[Moosfet]

It's not causing any issues on my test map. The power network looks exactly like usual, and the switch-based flip dots are the same color as the ordinary lamps, so there's no visible difference at all. ...which makes sense since there's no copper wires attached to them, so they're not really doing anything.

Anyway, I don't want the lack of power usage, in fact it seems like a defect, but the switch doesn't use power and I can't change that. I'm using the switch because it's the only circuit-network-controlled entity that plays an animation when it turns on and off.

IDK if it'll cost UPS, as the switch isn't really doing much. It is still playing the sparkly animation, as there's no way to turn that off, but I made it play one pixel from its textures, a transparent one, so that you don't see it. However, I don't know how great the lights were either. Just because I set the glow radius to zero doesn't mean that the game isn't still wasting time rendering a zero-radius glow. Also, they used power whenever turned on, whereas an actual flip dot would only use power when flipping, which is also incorrect power usage.

Overall, I like the animation and the sound when the dots flip, so that's my favorite one, but if they're too much UPS, the upgrade planner can convert them to the lamp-based flip-dot or to ordinary lamps. They even keep their circuit network configuration, which surprised me.

[T-A-R]

gates.png (964.7 KiB) Viewed 2530 times

The closest vanilla gets are gates. Gates can be controlled like lamps in displays and have the benefit of nice sliding sounds. They have no color, nor they show up on the minimap. Power switches and signals are basically the only vanilla entities that can be used for map-view readable displays.

map display.jpg (2.84 MiB) Viewed 2530 times

[mrvn]

Ahh, you actually want an animation as the dots rotate. That is indeed something the LEDs can't do. So power switches or gates are your choices for that.

As for map visibility... I have never studied that but isn't that something specified in any prototype? I've seen definitions of map colors in other prototypes before. Although you would want different colors for on and off. That's something not every prototype has I bet, if any. So maybe you could use gates (since they have no pointless sparkling animation) but add map colors to it?

[mrvn]

You should include a screenshot of the minimap with the signals and display something.

[T-A-R]

Using the signal overlay in mapview, a display can be viewed in het mapview.

map display2.jpg (470.27 KiB) Viewed 2450 times

bp_mapdisplay.txt

(7.37 KiB) Downloaded 38 times

Similar the Wires overlay can show power-switch states on the first cable segment connected to them. With a little creativity and enough patience, diagonals can be made for more complex shapes or forms.

map display3.jpg (96.83 KiB) Viewed 2450 times

wiresegment.jpg (61.2 KiB) Viewed 2443 times

Edit:

So maybe you could use gates (since they have no pointless sparkling animation) but add map colors to it?

That would certainly give more options inside the vanilla graphic set. But when you consider modding, you need to combine two parts (rail-signal, switch-pole, wall-segment) and that will never build as easy as a single tile entities like a dimmed lamp. flipdots or nixie tubes are nice alternatives if you look outside the vanilla scope. Hiding a rail signal (and a rail to snap on) inside a flipdot would make it readable both in map and engineer view, as the rail signal display is hardly readable from engineer view.

Edit2:
Bar graph could be built with wall gates under the lines for multi view:

powerswitch-bargraph.jpg (52.25 KiB) Viewed 2430 times

[mrvn]

Very cool. The signals are probably more in line with the Dot Pixels. But lack the animation as they flip. Can't have it all.