Symbolic View of Circuit Network

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EditorRUS
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Symbolic View of Circuit Network

Post by EditorRUS »

TL;DR
Add a less-beautiful-but-more-plain view for circuit networks.
What ?
Not only is working with circuit networks painful for your fingers now, fiddling with wires, but also pretty darn straining for your eyes as well.
Red and green wires blend together, you can't see where anything goes and the so-called "detailed mode" is not intuitive at all when it comes to circuit networks. And barely helpful too.

Take a look at this and tell me what you really see here.
Image
What a mess of wires! They are all over the place.
Too easy for you? Well then, have fun.

This is one of a more complicated parts of our current factory:
Giant image
Can you tell at a first glance which one of those power poles is disconnected from external circuit network?
I bet you can't.
Answer
Just so you know, this is a rather simple system of production control, that is, I control what and how many of each kind of things is produced.
Control board
Basically my point is this: working with circuit network now becomes complicated really fast and there is barely anything you can do. Of course, you can try to organize things neatly and stuff, but what's the point really? You work with something that could and should have been improved a long time ago.

I therefore propose an alternative view of circuit network-related things for "detailed mode".
Who knows, maybe working with circuits SHOULD look like circuit design after all.
Like this
Why ?
Dealing with circuit networks now is a pain. It's difficult enough to even get started and it becomes straight up impossible for a beginner to deal with circuit networks when it gets slightly more difficult and leave sane.
This will also allow players to debug their networks more easily and, *gasp*, maybe even understand someone else's network!
The game that does this right
This whole idea is actually a part of a more global idea of "doing one thing at a time".
There is a game called Prison Architect that does this right. When you need to build a power network, you enter "utility" mode and you become an OCD technician. You don't care about there being a riot in your prison and half of your staff being killed, you only care about this broken generator and that there is a cut in your wires and DID I REALLY CONNECT THIS TOILET IN THIS CELL WITH A BIG PIPE? PFT~... it's easy to see where everything connects and it is straightforward to work with this system.
Or when you assign a route to a dog patrol. You don't even care about people anymore, you only care about that this zone is a kitchen and there are already 5 dog patrols here.

Building a prison becomes streamlined, you do one thing at a time and you do it efficiently.
This could be done to Factorio. Thank God devs implemented a small feature of map view to see the power grid: it becomes very easy to find where things are disconnected and fix them. You can just as easily keep multiple power networks now too! But that's done in map view, not on a local scale.
My idea here is implementing the same thing, but for circuit network and for it to work in player's view instead.


Also, this idea cannot be implemented by mods for apparent reasons. Well, unless there is something I don't know.

DerGraue
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Re: Symbolic View of Circuit Network

Post by DerGraue »

If you press F4 there is an option that shows you the circuit network ID and the number of entities connected to that network directly on the connected entity. It's not exactly what you suggested but it helps a lot for more complicated setups.

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ssilk
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Re: Symbolic View of Circuit Network

Post by ssilk »

Cool suggestion: Eatable MOUSE-pointers.
Have you used the Advanced Search today?
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I still like small signatures...

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