Paint for Factorio / Whiteboard on Factorio surface

[kaZ]

"A picture is worth a thousand words."

My thought is to implement a toolbox (brush, pencial, some color, different thicknesses, words, ...) which give's the player/s the ability to directly draw anything onto the surface of factorio. These drawings vanish after n-minutes.

Via ingame-chat or ingame-chat in addition with some third party voice-chat the occurence of a transmitter receiver problem is very high. An implementation of this could close a missing gap in communication because the receiver can just see what you're talking about.


Some advantages:

1) draw tactics in mp while attacking biter bases (text-chat too slow, voice-chat better, but still leads to missunderstandings "XY you take the three bases below the spitter base to the right side of the tree which is close to the rock under the blablabla..." "sorry what?!??!? )
2) explaining an anysized build of assemblers to other players
3) support for own plannings before building
4) ...

This idea would be incomplete without giving you a PICTURE, just imagine the white surface in the picture is the surface of factorio http://3meter5.de/wp-content/uploads/20 ... t-Look.png

[tobsimon]

I like it.

Have you mainly thought about the world or the map for these tools? In the world, I see less use for it, because of the scale and less ambiguity of spoken words. On the map however, I would very much like to designate areas, write comments like "I left my car here", mark biter bases as dangerous etc. pp.. This stuff should not vanish. It should stay until edited deleted.

As a bonus, the area designation should be used in alerts ("building in area 51 is under attack") and to sort train stations.

[kaZ]

I thought about the surface ("world"). The rest you're writing might be presevered better in an own thread since it is an similar but still another idea (-> map// still could be merged at some point, but I don't see that yet). I would like to discuss, if any interest, just about the thing I've written in yellow

[tobsimon]

I hear ya, I don't like derailments either.

I wonder if these tools shoud be in-game items, which the player has on the belt and can place like any other item.
If not, another type of interface is needed, probably mouse only and collapsable.

[ssilk]

I've added this on viewtopic.php?f=80&t=4682 Planing (Cloning, Ghosting, Blueprinting and further...