Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

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Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by foodfactorio »

TL;DR what
Hi, i would like to suggest adding 3 buttons to the Mod Settings GUI screen, so that we can easily Find, Collapse and Expand the sections within each mod. This is for the screen that appears from the main menu after launching the program, but also for within the actual game we are playing.
Why ?
players will usually be adding more and more mods to their game, either to try, or to permanently compliment vanilla factorio.
but each mod can have some settings, and some have "a lot" of settings. :)

The "FIND" button, would be similar to other gui screens in factorio, with the little magnifying glass icon in the top right of the window, which can also be activated via Control+F

The "+" and "-" buttons would allow us to Expand, and Collapse all of the individual entries which are part of a particular mod. The mod name in bold would still be visible with the + and - icons, but all of the 10 or 100 entries in some cases, will be collapsed until the "+" icon is clicked again.
please see some screenshots to show this as examples:
mod_settings_gui_when_having_lots_of_mods_with_many_entries-1.png
mod_settings_gui_when_having_lots_of_mods_with_many_entries-1.png (1.42 MiB) Viewed 4917 times
and if the "-" button is clicked in the Overmind mod example, all of its 100 entries would be collapsed, because when people set their options, they usually will not need to change anything, until next time the mod is updated for example.
mod_settings_gui_when_having_lots_of_mods_with_many_entries-2.png
mod_settings_gui_when_having_lots_of_mods_with_many_entries-2.png (1.51 MiB) Viewed 4917 times
Another cool feature would be to (only) have the small "+" / "-" button, for every mod larger than x lines, (to avoid showing the icons for no reason), or to also have option to always expand any previously minimised mod.settings.group, IF that mod has just been installed or updated. (this way, players can add or update their mods, and then when they click to view the Mod Settings window, they can easily find and see the settings for any new or updated mod, because its settings.group will have been expanded and visible). :)

thanks for rsedding (i mean thanks for Reading) :)
(also me from the mod portal - im not dustine lol) = https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Dustine/ ... ssion/9108
my 1st Mod Idea :) viewtopic.php?f=33&t=50256

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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by bobingabout »

Rseding.

Also, I agree in that one big long list isn't the best way to do things. Though I have seen better suggestions, like each mod having it's own tab.
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by foodfactorio »

hi bob, thanks i forgot about tabs.

maybe there is a way to merge both ideas in the sense that tabs are used, though if a mod has just 1 line entry, maybe a few different mods can all fit on 1 page just to reduce the nummber of different tabs while a mod only adds 1 option?
(also me from the mod portal - im not dustine lol) = https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Dustine/ ... ssion/9108
my 1st Mod Idea :) viewtopic.php?f=33&t=50256

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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by Koub »

I know people are used to tabs, but I prefer a list on the left side. I find it more readable (à la Skyrim menus) :
For the ignorants
[Edit] : Typo
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by foodfactorio »

hi koub :)

lists are good too, i guess 1 thing that could be a problem with lists for mods, is that some mods have longer names. (especially german words which are made up of lots of words stuck together).

if it was using the "+" and "-" toggle buttons from the idea above, (to hide the "content" of each mod, but still keeping the mod "name / title" shown) then maybe this could be a way to still have a neat list aligned to the left of the screen, but without actually minimising the visble area.

(a bit like the save a game and load a game, has the save name restricted to a fixed column width) -- but you or the devs kindly added a mouse-over roll-over so i can see the full name again :)

before this savegame name rollover, trying to figure out which save to load, was like taking an arrow to the knee :D
(also me from the mod portal - im not dustine lol) = https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Dustine/ ... ssion/9108
my 1st Mod Idea :) viewtopic.php?f=33&t=50256

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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by Koub »

What I dislike about tabs is when you have a potentially unlimited numbers of tabs. some people out there play with literally tens, maybe even one hundred mods.
Do you imagine 100 tabs at the top of your window ? Whereas a 100 items list, alphabetically sorted on the left seems totally usable.

And I'd say even more so with languages like German, where you might have very long words (which would compell having very long tab names, reducing the number of tabs you an display on a single line).
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by foodfactorio »

i just checked how many mods are currently enabled in my latest save, and it is exactly 100 (it was 101 last week) :)
(17 of them are yours, bob) :D

ok i can see how tabs could get a bit much...

If the mods were instead listed on the left, could the player still use the mouse to scroll up and down?

and would it be possible to have different colours for each mod name listed? (for example, to quickly show which mod has been updated and has new settings)? (maybe a background (or border) or even text colour?
(also me from the mod portal - im not dustine lol) = https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Dustine/ ... ssion/9108
my 1st Mod Idea :) viewtopic.php?f=33&t=50256

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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by eradicator »

Hrng. Can't find the old topic on this. I already suggested (felt) ages ago to have a list of mods on the left (like the current mod management gui) and tabs for categories within a single mods settings. Tabs would be defined by the mod author and be something like "Combat", "Resources" etc.

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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by foodfactorio »

what did you think of the "Find" search feature of this request?
is that something that is still possible, now that mod settings is a .dat file

if Find can be implemented on mod settings pages, just like it is present on some other gui screens, i think it would be really helpful, even if nothing else changes on the Mod Settings gui in the meantime.
(also me from the mod portal - im not dustine lol) = https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Dustine/ ... ssion/9108
my 1st Mod Idea :) viewtopic.php?f=33&t=50256

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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by Rseding91 »

"Find" seems like a good idea. I'm not a fan of tabs in tabs for organizing the settings. The "one big list" view works very well to display settings. Adding tabs in tabs just ends up very quickly with the "organizing" taking up more visual real estate than the actual settings and quickly turns into a "click through the tabs to find what I'm looking for".
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by eradicator »

I did find the old mockup and even if you ignore the tabs on the right side there's still a few valid points. The tabs were mostly meant as a means to give mod authors the option to have "sub-headlines" in their settings, because with mods that have a lot of settings it gets difficult to navigate.
forum__mod_setting_menu.png
forum__mod_setting_menu.png (72.92 KiB) Viewed 4571 times
  • Quick jump to the settings of the mod you care about. Because if you have 20+ mods it's tedious to have to scroll half of them every time you want to change a setting in the "middle" of the list.
  • Per-mod resest. Because resetting all mods settings (and consequently having to attempt to restore them all from memory) just because one mod is acting up is.... suboptimal.
  • A second group of "advanced" settings that are intended for experienced players and can be hidden to un-clutter the menu for inexperienced users.
While a find features is certainly a great idea, it's only good if you already know/remember what you're looking for. So my suggestions are aimed more at the browsing/exploring of settings i don't know yet.
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by Rseding91 »

I've still yet to have anyone convince me an "advanced settings" section is actually good. All it does is split settings into multiple areas. People who don't know what settings do tend to not use them making an "advanced" section pointless. Those that want to change settings even when they don't know what they do aren't going to be deterred by an "advanced" checkbox.
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by eradicator »

Rseding91 wrote:I've still yet to have anyone convince me an "advanced settings" section is actually good. All it does is split settings into multiple areas.
Not a seperate area, Simply hidden from the list when the checkbox is off.
  • Normal Setting 1
  • Advanced Setting 1
    (not shown in list... (forum can't really hide lines...))
  • Advanced Setting 2
  • Normal Setting 2
Rseding91 wrote:People who don't know what settings do tend to not use them making an "advanced" section pointless. Those that want to change settings even when they don't know what they do aren't going to be deterred by an "advanced" checkbox.
I disagree. If a mod adds 30 settings, 25 of which are fine-tuning of numbers (advanced) then showing only the interesting 5 settings makes the list a lot easier to navigate. The target isn't "people who want to change things they don't know" (as there's nothing wrong about that). The point is making the menu less confusing for those people who don't care about super-fine-tuning a mod but might still want to change more obvious settings. I.e. a mod that adds lots of range settings might have a numerical "long reach range" setting and a "enable long reach" checkbox. Normal users won't care about what the actual range number is as long as it's "long enough" for them, thus hiding the number makes the menu easier to browse. Any mod that touches ore generation or has large amounts of control-stage scripting is also a frequent offender of this. Just imagine how it'd look like if the base game had all settings all in a single list (graphics, video, map generation, etcpp). You surely don't believe that would be a better solution than the current one? But that's the dillema mod-devs face. I'd really like to add lots of options to everything. But cluttering the one list i get with 50 settings that only 1% of users will ever use is not something i'm willing to do.

All of which would be almost no problem btw if the API offered write access to runtime-per-player/per-map settings btw (as they need to be synched anyway). I could simply make a settings menu tailored to my mods needs accessible in-game directly from my already existing gui and the users wouldn't have to interact with the list anymore.

Here's an example of my mod HCG having mostly settings that most users will never change, that needlessly clutter the list:
example.png
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by Rseding91 »

The main reason mod settings can't be changed runtime is so mods can't mess with a players preferred settings. For example: mod A has setting for something. Player sets it and is happy. Then player installs mod B which on initial setup changes mod As setting because it thinks it knows better. The player most likely didn't ask for it to change the setting and most likely doesn't want it changed - the player just wants to play with both of the mods.
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by Rseding91 »

Additionally: I've had to take a "don't trust mods" stance quite some time ago: if I leave a possible way for mods to abuse or break something they *will* abuse or break it: every time without fail.

I try my hardest to prevent desyncs by making global immutable on_load and people make local variables that they set on_load and then read on_tick to work around it - causing desyncs in the process.

It's the case of "a few bad apples spoil the bunch".
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by eradicator »

Rseding91 wrote:Additionally: I've had to take a "don't trust mods" stance
I still fully agree with that. The API is a huge beast to master and inexperience is sufficient to cause problems. No malice required. (For example when i started modding years ago i definetly did an "on_first_tick" hack, because i simply had insufficient knowledge of the concequences and as long as one doesn't do MP testing the desync problem never shows.)
Rseding91 wrote:The main reason mod settings can't be changed runtime is so mods can't mess with a players preferred settings.
I have no need or interest in changing other mods settings though. Do you think you could allow mods to change their own settings only? Because even disregarding a "cluttered mod settings list" it would be pretty awesome if i could persist "default" settings into new savegames without having to tell the player to do it manually. And the bunch of my-own-settings i care about are unlikely to ever be of interest to any other mod because they don't affect anything in the "world", only user interaction.

(As far as hackarounds go... I've considered to have my in-game settings menu generate a string that contains all the settings and ask the player to manually c/p that into the actual mod settings. But this would ofc mean that the mod settings menu doesn't have any actual mod settetings anymore, only that one field to paste the magic string into..., not a nice solution.)
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by Rseding91 »

I'm not sure what you mean by "persist default settings"? If you want runtime per-player settings to be applied to every world you load then you need to go into the options menu and un-check the "use different settings per save".
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by eradicator »

Rseding91 wrote:I'm not sure what you mean by "persist default settings"? If you want runtime per-player settings to be applied to every world you load then you need to go into the options menu and un-check the "use different settings per save".
I mean that for example: If i have a GUI element that offers some sort of search functionality (i.e. recipe browsing or similar), and that element has some checkboxes (i.e. "show hidden recipes", "show unresearched recipes", etcpp) then i can't persist those settings into another save because i have no write access to mod settings. I have to put a message there to tell the player to manually change it in the mod settings themselfs.

Is writing to per-player/map more likely to happen if it's limited to mods changing their own settings?
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by Rseding91 »

eradicator wrote:Is writing to per-player/map more likely to happen if it's limited to mods changing their own settings?
Yeah, I'll add it to my to-do. It could still be abused by that specific mod but then at least it won't be able to spill over into other mods settings.
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Re: Find, Collapse and Expand buttons on Mod Settings GUI

Post by eradicator »

Rseding91 wrote:
eradicator wrote:Is writing to per-player/map more likely to happen if it's limited to mods changing their own settings?
Yeah, I'll add it to my to-do. It could still be abused by that specific mod but then at least it won't be able to spill over into other mods settings.
Great :D.
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