GUI: Tooltips in Options menu (Specifically Graphics)

[Industrial Madness]

TL;DR:

Make it simpler for players to make an informed decision on Prettiness Vs Performance
(Yes, I did just use word ’Prettiness’)

Long version:

I think it would be helpful for a tooltip to appear when hovering the mouse over different options in the menu, giving a brief description of what they do; and if applicable what effect they have on system resources and game performance. For example anyone who’s ever played a computer game can guess what the options “full screen” or “show minimap” do but it’s not implausible that even after finishing the tutorial a new player may still be wondering what “Show grid when game is paused” means.

But the main point of this suggestion is aimed at options like:

• - Enable tree sprite mipmaps
  - Allow linear filtering for icons
  - Allow texture compression
  - Video Memory usage

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe a large chunk of the player base is not entirely sure what effect these have or what their Pros and Cons are. It’s pretty obvious ‘Video memory usage-high’ uses up more video memory than ‘Low’ but “does this increase performance by keeping some visuals buffered or decrease it by using up more system resources?” etc.


That’s about it. Thanks for reading

[Rseding91]

I added support for tooltips in most of the options menus for 0.15 a little over a month ago

[moon69]

There are quite a few without tooltips in "Graphics Settings -> Advanced".

It's confusing which should be enabled for low spec systems and which for high spec.

In particular, what the factorio do these do?

• Enable tree sprite mipmaps
• Allow linear filtering for icons
• Optimize sprite atlas packing
• Low VRAM mode (this one appears obvious at least!)
• Allow texture compression

Cheers,
Moon

[Rseding91]

There are quite a few without tooltips in "Graphics Settings -> Advanced".

It's confusing which should be enabled for low spec systems and which for high spec.

In particular, what the factorio do these do?

• Enable tree sprite mipmaps
• Allow linear filtering for icons
• Optimize sprite atlas packing
• Low VRAM mode (this one appears obvious at least!)
• Allow texture compression

Cheers,
Moon

I guess we can add tooltips but none of those options are specific to Factorio - they're all graphics-related terms you can simply google search. "mipmap", "linear filtering", "sprite atlas", "texture compression" in google will tell you what each of those things are.

[Engimage]

I guess we can add tooltips but none of those options are specific to Factorio - they're all graphics-related terms you can simply google search. "mipmap", "linear filtering", "sprite atlas", "texture compression" in google will tell you what each of those things are.

While those are really not specific I can definitely tell you that most of players do not know what they are.
There can be a little explanation on recommended values and the impact those options hav eon graphics quality, performance and resources like VRAM.
It is never a good idea to send people googling if you want to show your respect (which people really need). Ofcource it is an obvious path for a smart person but you know... Not all people are smart enough.

I am all for implementing a button "recommended" which will set values to recommended for this particular hardware based on in-game analysis. You already do get hardware parameters like VRAM etc (we see it in logs) so this is a really desired feature.