coexisting new and old belted logistics building styles

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golfmiketango
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coexisting new and old belted logistics building styles

Post by golfmiketango »

On balance, I think the shiny new 0.16 feature in which belts, splitters and undergrounds instantly replace each other with a single mouse click is an improvement over the 0.15 interface.

However, it is a little bit on the "dangerous" side. A misclick while holding any of these items could have devastating consequences if, for example, you were working on a really complicated balancer or belt-weaving design, and, for that matter, for those of us not new to the game, it's going to take a while to unlearn the assumption that, for example, we can left-click-drag to paint belts in-between a line of splitters or undergrounds without destroying the existing structures.

Even so, as I said, on balance, I think it's an improvement, so I certainly wouldn't recommend the old behavior simply be restored to solve this problem. But what might be good is if there were two building modes, one of which worked like building in 0.15, and one which works like it does now in the early 0.16.x releases. An obvious way to achieve that would be a modifier key. For example:
  • While not holding shift, building belts, splitters and undergrounds within the "reach" range works like it did in 0.15
  • While holding shift, building belts, splitters and undergrounds works within the "reach" range as it does now in early 0.16 releases
  • Outside of reach range, everything stays as it is now in early 0.16 releases
I guess precisely the above has another problem: it takes away the ability to issue robotic building orders within reach range which is actually very useful. How exactly to solve that I'm not sure. Control could be used instead but this might interfere with people's keybindings or something... Caps Lock might be a clever way to toggle such a behavior but might have annoying side-effects... Alt is difficult to hold down on most keyboards in tandem with WASD movement for people with bigger hands, I suspect (I can do it fine with my thumb, but it does feel kinda carpal-tunnel-inducing).

Anyhow it seems my idea needs refinement but something like the above seems desirable as it would let us safely run around our base holding a belt in our hand, without it being analogous to holding a nuke in your hand while running around in combat.

Zavian
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Re: coexisting new and old belted logistics building styles

Post by Zavian »

As I said in viewtopic.php?f=23&t=54987#p323863
I actually feel that you shouldn't be able to replace splitters/undergrounds with belts whilsts running/dragging the mouse. Let players fast replace them by clicking directly on them, but not whilst running/dragging. That would solve almost all the accidental cases of replacing things whilst upgrading belts.

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