zero-cost "planning" placement

[sparr]

Prison Architect has a researchable mode where you can lay down a few types of "plans" indicating where you want to build buildings in the future. That would be very handy in Factorio where I often want to lay out a large area for future pipe/conveyor usage, and want to keep track of that area's boundaries, but don't want to actually place everything yet.

[ficolas]

If you press left button with something on ur hand a ghost entity is created.
However it dissapears after some time.

[Duke Nukem]

If you press left button with something on ur hand a ghost entity is created.
However it dissapears after some time.

All right. So a "fix" (per say) would be to be able to keep it there until you either build what you want, or delete it. But yeah, planning something out like this would take the game to planning levels not even SimCity has achieved. That would be impressive.

[slpwnd]

If you press left button with something on ur hand a ghost entity is created.
However it dissapears after some time.

And also if there is a construction robot and material available for this it will come and build the thing.

Prison Architect has a researchable mode where you can lay down a few types of "plans" indicating where you want to build buildings in the future.

This was really cool, I used it a lot. With the ghost buildings we are one step away from this. So we would have regular building, ghost building, planned buildings (they don't disappear after a while and robots won't build them). The tricky part is the controls for building and for changing the plans to ghosts.

[Sedado77]

Prison Architect has a researchable mode where you can lay down a few types of "plans" indicating where you want to build buildings in the future.

This was really cool, I used it a lot. With the ghost buildings we are one step away from this. So we would have regular building, ghost building, planned buildings (they don't disappear after a while and robots won't build them). The tricky part is the controls for building and for changing the plans to ghosts.

It can be a lot less tricky, if you just put a "brush" option, and (lets say) 3 colors. green, blue and red. You can then plan by "painting" the squares... not like the "ghost" buildings.
This would be like in prision architect, in the way that you have a color for structures, one for belts and one for... whatever. You choose what color to use for whatever you want, AND you could make this color schemes not to dissapear when you build, so you can put it "behind" (or "under") the structures for better understanding (for one self) where one type of factory starts and another ends, or what belt is goint towards the research...

I don't know if i'm explaining myself...

Anybody wants to contribute a little more?

[syneris]

Ghost building is really cool (I love blueprints too) and very helpful. A translucent image of the actual item you want to place is much nicer to look at then simple color shading zones (which there already is a lot of). You can also press alt to toggle detailed information that shows you what each factory is building, up to 4 different items in chests, and other useful tidbits.

[Sedado77]

Ghost building is really cool (I love blueprints too) and very helpful. A translucent image of the actual item you want to place is much nicer to look at then simple color shading zones (which there already is a lot of). You can also press alt to toggle detailed information that shows you what each factory is building, up to 4 different items in chests, and other useful tidbits.

Yes, you have that, but what I meant is new overlay. I don't know how your fact is, but mine has, for example, 4 A.M (am=assembly mach) building gears, and only 1 of them goes to research (this one is dedicated)... but when i switch saves (I am currently playing 4 diferent saves, 2 at home, 1 at work and one in the laptop) I usually forguet with one goes to research, having to walk all the way to the research area and follow back the (mostly undergound) belts is a bit tedious (a LOT)...
Also, you can use the markers to know where to end your wall (f.ex) instead of building the vertical till half the distance, then de horizontal, then a little more vertical, then a little more horizontal, and then delete all the wall because it was 2 spaces to the left of where it shoud have been...
STOP LAUGHING!!! I KNOW YOU DID IT AT SOME POINT TOO!!!!

Then again, it is not NECESSARY, but USEFULL!!!

[TGS]

I think the main issue with the 'ghost image' concept that we have now is that it is actually for a separate purpose. That is for construction robots to (re)build things. So what would be better is to have a separate Ghost mode that is pretty much the same but does not disappear and does not interact with the construction bots at all, that instead of having a purple 'timer' bar on the bottom it could have a light blue timer bar but last a configurable amount of time (IE in the options). That way you could lay down 'plans' the same way as with the ghost mode buildings but instead they are for no purpose other than planning. They should still need to expire that way if you don't use them they don't sit there indefinitely until you go along and right click them all off. But yeah. That would be neat.

[syneris]

The tricky part is the controls for building and for changing the plans to ghosts.

Shift clicking a ghost plan to confirm it for construction? Actually, (insert ghost build hotkey here) again to confirm. Might need to work with blueprints as those are mainly just a collection of ghost buildings. I believe you can create blueprints from ghost buildings, so this just adds that much more functionality to a single feature. Right now, you can't ghost build for planning if you are near a roboport(s) that has the resources.

Ghost build your design to make sure everything lines up properly, create a blueprint of that design, use blueprint to issue construction. Spending a circuit to clear a blueprint for reuse sounds much better than mining up everything because of positioning mistakes.