Glyph's big list of feedback: feature requests and more!

[Glyph]

NOTE: This is an ancient thread, see my "five years later" update for fun here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5319&p=471188#p471188

Original post:

Glyph's list of feedback:

Request: A "mirror" button for blueprint placing. Blueprints could then be rotated and mirrored.

Request: Allow replacing transport belts with splitters, without having to first delete the transport belts. Any transport belt below an inserter ought to be removed when placing. This is especially useful when forking a supply line.

Request: "Pasting" a copied building template (shift right click, shift left click) could work when the original building that is copied gets destroyed.

Request: When using the Z key to drop items onto a conveyor, it is currently possible to be hovering the mouse over part of the conveyor belt and still have the items drop to the side of the belt. This is annoying. Further, when hovering over a belt and dropping items with Z, it would be nice if the game would look for the nearest spot on the belt to drop the item (or maybe on the closest lane being hovered only). And if there is no spot, it would be nice if the item wouldn't drop at all so that you don't accidentally dump items next to a track when intending to put them on the track.

Request: Allow green / red circuits to connect to pretty much anything that moves. This includes all actuators e.g. conveyor belts, factories, refineries, all inserters, etc. The cables will act to turn on/off the things they are connected to in the same way as smart inserters. I'd really rather have boolean output devices (input wire with sensors, output wire with result), so that I could control many things with one logic gate.

Request: A hotkey to toggle powerline visibility on/off and make powerpoles transparent.

Bug: Holding right click anywhere in a ground cell ought to deconstruct whatever building is in that square. Right now, you can be hovering over the correct cell, hold right click, and nothing happens. (Tested with small power lines). If it's possible to have more than one right-clickable object in a single ground cell, then perhaps you could check for that condition and if there is only one object then right clicking anywhere in the cell works.

Request: Allow in-place replacement of small power lines with medium power lines.

Request: Train tracks take too long to destroy given how many you must place to have a useful rails system. It takes far longer to take down a track than to lay it. Deconstruction robots would work but are not the best tool for very long tracks as roboports must be placed along the long track and then destroyed.

Request: Shift-leftclick a piece of armor equipment to try to insert it into the player's currently equipped armor. Just find the first spot that fits, going left to right, top to bottom.

Bug: When holding a module and then left clicking onto another module inside a building, the original module ought to be replaced with the held one. The original may be moved to the player's inventory.

Bug: When right clicking to drop a single item from a stack into your inventory, right clicking on the dark area between inventory slots does not drop the item. The inventory is normally sorted anyway, so it makes sense to right click anywhere to drop a single item. An even better solution would be to have no unclickable spots in the inventory. The GUI ought to guess which square the user is clicking, even if it is between cells.

Bug/missing feature: Can only copy/paste building settings (using shift right/left click) between the exact same building. Manufacturing Machine 1 should be copyable to Machine 2 and visa versa if the recipe is supported by Machine 1.

Request: Conveyor Belts ought to push dead bodies around in the same way that the player is pushed around by conveyors, even if dead bodies don't interract with anything else (except maybe other dead bodies). It would make sense that bodies over a certain size are not pushed around.

[MF-]

Request: Read Read this OR be ignored! before suggesting anything.

[ssilk]

Request: Read Read this OR be ignored! before suggesting anything.

Well, I think this is ok, the most of this stuff is small but quite annoying things, which normally won't be addressed. For example this with the Z-key or the visibility of the powerlines.

And the request for automatic deconstruction was also in my mind.

I like the most of this. But, yes, it would be better to have that as single requests or bug reports - especially the bug reports will be ignored per sure.

[Glyph]

Thanks for the feedback! I'll try and sort this into a number of requests.

[bulldog98]

Request: Allow green / red circuits to connect to pretty much anything that moves. This includes all actuators e.g. conveyor belts, factories, refineries, all inserters, etc. The cables will act to turn on/off the things they are connected to in the same way as smart inserters. I'd really rather have boolean output devices (input wire with sensors, output wire with result), so that I could control many things with one logic gate.

This is possible, but NP-complete (for realistic sizes it will not be computable in realistic time). So I as a developer would limit that to a rather small set.

[Glyph]

Request: Allow green / red circuits to connect to pretty much anything that moves. This includes all actuators e.g. conveyor belts, factories, refineries, all inserters, etc. The cables will act to turn on/off the things they are connected to in the same way as smart inserters. I'd really rather have boolean output devices (input wire with sensors, output wire with result), so that I could control many things with one logic gate.

This is possible, but NP-complete (for realistic sizes it will not be computable in realistic time). So I as a developer would limit that to a rather small set.

Hm with boolean devices could you explain which particular problem would be intractable for larger logic networks? You could end up having infinite-loop calculation problems or (as you say) intractability problems if everything tries to sort itself out in the same game tick, but that doesn't need to be the case. As in minecraft, you can have the signals propagate (but hopefully faster than they do in Minecraft, good god) a finite amount of blocks, or electric poles, or whatever, each tick, to prevent anything crazy from going on (and preventing the user from making a real-time VM inside the game, unfortunately).

I think a good compromise would be to not worry about sensors for now, and instead allow everything to be a wire network actuator just as smart inserters are. More sensors (liquid, etc) could be added later. I would love to be able to turn on/off pumps, or tell a train exactly when it can start again, etc, with the same logic as smart inserters.

[bulldog98]

Request: Allow green / red circuits to connect to pretty much anything that moves. This includes all actuators e.g. conveyor belts, factories, refineries, all inserters, etc. The cables will act to turn on/off the things they are connected to in the same way as smart inserters. I'd really rather have boolean output devices (input wire with sensors, output wire with result), so that I could control many things with one logic gate.

This is possible, but NP-complete (for realistic sizes it will not be computable in realistic time). So I as a developer would limit that to a rather small set.

Hm with boolean devices could you explain which particular problem would be intractable for larger logic networks? You could end up having infinite-loop calculation problems or (as you say) intractability problems if everything tries to sort itself out in the same game tick, but that doesn't need to be the case. As in minecraft, you can have the signals propagate (but hopefully faster than they do in Minecraft, good god) a finite amount of blocks, or electric poles, or whatever, each tick, to prevent anything crazy from going on (and preventing the user from making a real-time VM inside the game, unfortunately).

I think a good compromise would be to not worry about sensors for now, and instead allow everything to be a wire network actuator just as smart inserters are. More sensors (liquid, etc) could be added later. I would love to be able to turn on/off pumps, or tell a train exactly when it can start again, etc, with the same logic as smart inserters.

The main problem is, that you could have a gate, that depends for it's return value on every other boolean variable. This means in a tick system, that it could need log(#vars) ticks to propagate the real values to that input, which in turn is then updated. It may be the case, that this is not a problem with stuff like „Shut down stuff if I have too much“, but if this is only a short state, then it will need to long, till the stuff is really turned off.

[Glyph]

Please forgive the thread resurrection. I thought it would be fun to revisit my suggestions now, five years later, after much amazing labor by the devs and many (hundreds? thousands?) hours more experience playing. I tell everyone that Factorio is the single most polished game ever, and it's not even released!

Tagging my requests as Implemented (wow!), Not Implemented Yet (but I still think they could be!) or Not Implemented (and they shouldn't be), and now I understand better why.

Idea: Blueprint mirroring.
Not Implemented Yet.
I now understand that mirroring won't always work because not all entities are symmetric (like Oil Refineries), but there are many situations where it would work swimmingly, especially with belts. I see mirroring as a tool to help build bigger blueprints, and I think it shines in making blueprints useful as a tool beyond importing blueprints from the internet.

Idea: Replacing belts with splitters in place.
Implemented!
The current functionality is even better than what I imagined (for example, drag-placing belts only replaces other entities if you replaced an entity with the first click).

Idea: Allow pasting building settings after building is destroyed.
Not Implemented Yet.
Is this not a bug? The behavior does not match what I would expect as a player. I imagine the game is referencing an existing entity when doing the pasting, but in theory it could reference a virtual entity that is created at the time of copying. This isn't something that needs to be persisted to the save file, so maybe it wouldn't be too bad to fix?

Idea: Prevent spillage when dropping items on belts with Z key.
Implemented!
Dropping items onto belts is perfect now!

Idea: More circuit network-enabled entities.
Implemented!
Even the wildest parts of this suggestion such as circuit-connected belts have been implemented. It would be neat (but probably superfluous) allow circuit-connected assemblers (they could also act as sensors, outputting a signal when crafting).

Idea: Toggle power pole/line visibility (or toggle transparency).
Not Implemented (And shouldn't be).
I get why this isn't a thing, although it would be nice aesthetically. It's a little annoying (especially back when I was a new player) to try and see what was behind power poles. I think as an experienced player I have an intuitive sense for "seeing through" power infrastructure, but I'd still like the ability to make power transparent.
There is a mod that hides wires.

Idea: Wider area to select/deconstruct entities.
Implemented!
As far as I know this was improved, but I can't quite remember the old behavior.

Idea: Single click to replace small power poles with medium poles in-place.
Implemented!

Idea: Faster rail track removal before bots.
Not Implemented Yet.
This is honestly still very annoying! It would be great if the game detected that you are removing tracks (or belts, for that matter), and then allowing you to run at full speed while removing them (after the first in the normal way). New players especially are placing a lot of track and then deleting it. Deleting track is tedious and not fun. This change would encourage early rails, which is something I think the devs want anyway.

Idea: Shift-click gear to equip.
Not Implemented (And shouldn't be).
Works with armor. Shift-clicking gear sends it to logistic trash slots, which is the better behavior anyway.

Bug: Replace modules by left-clicking.
Implemented!
This was annoying, I forgot you couldn't replace modules like this before. It has been fixed.

Bug: Right clicking item stack in inventory doesn't always work.
Not Implemented Yet.
This still happens and is annoying every now and then. When right clicking to drop one item out of the stack into your inventory, it shouldn't matter where you right click because it doesn't go to the clicked cell anyway. When moving fast and doing lots of things at once, having this fail sometimes is not intuitive.

Bug: Allow us to copy settings between similar but different building types
Implemented!
This is implemented and very intuitive.

In summary: 7 suggestions implemented. 4 not implemented but I would like to see them. 2 not implemented and probably shouldn't be.

Looking forward to the path to release and beyond!

[conn11]

Remembers me of this ancient arcticle about a 500h megabase (no spm or back than rpm given).

https://www.pcgamer.com/see-what-a-fac ... s-of-work/

Most of the mentioned mods there (like landfill) are solid Vanilla these days.
Excluding for example bp-mirroring and RSO is still a thing.