Fixing the power bars.

[bobucles]

The three bars on the power graph are currently junk. It is impossible to know when your system is healthy, unhealthy or spiraling towards catastrophe because it presents information in an unreadable manner. I'd like to propose new rules for displaying the power bars:

1) The power supply bar is scaled to the total max production of all energy suppliers (engines, solar, turbines). This scale does not change unless the number of suppliers change. All suppliers are automatically part of the electrical system and knowing if they can produce or not is vital info.

2) If steam production is capped out but not at max, there is a steam shortage somewhere. Color code the production bar yellow for a minor shortage and red for a severe shortage. Knowing if your steam system can output at 100% (either it can or it can't) is vital info.

3) Do not count accumulator charging as demand. Do not count accumulator supply as production. Accumulators are storage. They are neither producers nor consumers.

4) Color code the accumulator bar. Green for charging, yellow for discharging and red for insufficient power (system overload). This makes the accumulator bar more handy.

That's pretty much it! Here's a quick 4800 hour MSPaint of what the power graph looks like with these changes:

factorio fixed power.jpg (59.92 KiB) Viewed 6550 times

The steam only system is very easy to read and understand. The system starts off good but it grows too big for its engines. Eventually your fuel runs out and your production bar immediately reveals that production is no longer optimal.

factorio fixed power 3.jpg (121.13 KiB) Viewed 6550 times

This solar power system is also not too difficult to understand. You can probably write an essay over whether the dusk power bar should be yellow or a dark nighttime green but the rest is pretty easy to understand.
- At dawn your solar panels over produce and charge accumulators. How much am I over producing? Oh easy, I'm producing 80MW but only using 40 MW.
- At noon everything is fully charged.
- At dusk your solar panels turn off and switch over to accumulator power. The color of the production bar (Healthy but solar is turning off) is up for debate.
- Oh no! A night time biter raid turned on the laser turrets and overloaded the accumulators. That information is immediately visible.
- The rest of the night is peaceful and awaiting the next dawn. How much power am I producing? That's right. It's night time. I'm not producing power.

[Hedning1390]

Deja vu...

Well, this post is a lot better than your posts in the other topic. I don't agree (as you know) that the current ones are unreadable, but I do agree that this would be an improvement. Well done!

[Zavian]

I also think this is an improvement over the current version.

[Koub]

I'd like to add the information "Last max accu charge", with the max charge accus achieved during last ingame day, like in the picture below (ph34r da photoshop skillz)

factorio fixed power with local max charge.jpg (128.46 KiB) Viewed 6531 times

On second thought also with the last minimum (Sorry, but no patience to edit again, you get the idea ).

So that on a glance, I can see if my accus were emptied during last night, and if were they filled with last daytime

Note to myself : I'm thinking of merging this with the previous thread on the same topic, which is still active.

[bobucles]

Feel free to merge it. I just didn't want to dominate the discussion too hard because that was more a question about understanding the current system and this is a suggestion about changing it.

accumulator charge

A single number might not show the kind of data you want or be messy because it isn't tracking the right type of time frame. Do you want to know the highs and lows over 1 day, 2 days, 5 days? The graph can show that kind of info better. It's not the kind of immediate data that needs to clutter the main bars.

[Ghoulish]

The power bars need changing, the current system is less than intuitive. I've always been of the opinion that this is something that works (all be it in a poor way) So would end up getting changed late on in the development cycle - as there is more important things to change or fix first, I really do hope that now we are late on that it's time to update it.

viewtopic.php?f=80&t=25233 Frequently suggested topic, many ideas.. FE;

I like it. Makes more sense. You know you need to build 1.9MW worth of energy production, instead of "a quarter-ish of a progress bar"

I sincerely hope that we don't have a case of deja vu after 1.0 lands!

[adjl]

I'd mostly just like to see some denominators. Present satisfaction as current demand/max demand (or current draw/current demand, as the bar currently shows), production as current supply/max supply, and accumulator charge as current charge/max charge. The numbers as they're presented now really aren't very informative, especially where satisfaction and production are always exactly the same number. The way I see it, the power screen should answer the following three questions at a glance:

1. How much power am I using?
2. How much power do I have?
3. How much power do I need?

The way I see it, the power screen only really answers #1 without further analysis. #2 requires you to add up the potential production of all of the listed producers (which is easy enough math, but still not immediately obvious). #3 gets even more complicated, especially where the screen only lists machines that are currently drawing power. Adding denominators wouldn't be perfect (in particular, it wouldn't do much to indicate a lack of steam, which is pretty critical), but it'd be a start.

As a tangentially-related idea, I'd love to see total power draw (and production, for that matter) included in the resource list for blueprints. That'd be handy, especially when paired with more precise information on available power.

[Hedning1390]

This suggestion accomplish what few others have done: Providing more information without cluttering the screen and/or taking up more space. There is always going to be pressure on providing more and more information, and looking at each individual case you may agree that it is good information to have, but in the end it just turns into a jumbled mess and getting the information you really need starts taking longer. The only way I would improve this suggestion is to add 20% lines on the bars so it is easier to see the percentages at a glance.

[csdt]

I really like the corrected maximum of the bars.
About the colors, I'm not sure what a good scheme would be (when the should be red or yellow). This part needs some thoughts.

I would add 2 things: the signed power of the accumulators, and the drain consumption (no numerical value for this one).

Power bars example

power.png (422.28 KiB) Viewed 6413 times

I would think that the power taken from the accumulators is more useful than the energy stored, so I priviliged the power. But swapping the energy and the power would also be fined.
The crucial point here is the power of the accumulators are completely seperated from both the production and the consumption, but still visible (and has a sign).

For the drain consumption (the power required by machines when idle), I think just make a two color bar is enough and the precise (numerical) drain power consumption is not needed.

I don't think the last minimum and the last maximum energy in the capacitors are required as this information is far easier to read from the plots.

What do you think?

[bobucles]

The difference between the satisfaction and production numbers is the accumulator charge rate. In this case the two numbers are half redundant with each other and the only time they are different is when accumulators are in play. It may be better to show a different set of numbers:

- Total consumed
- Accumulator positive/negative
- Accumulator storage
This will show all the important info in 3 numbers and not require ANY thinking on the player's end.

[csdt]

While I agree that the 3 powers (with the right sign) should add up to zero making some information redundant, I have the feeling the 3 are equally important.
So I'm not sure one should be discarded.
Maybe a matter of taste here...

However, I would say that the maximum of the consumption bar (named satisfaction) should probably be the power that would be consumed if all machines were on at the same time (without accumulators of course).
And similarly for production: the maximum should if all generators (except accumulators) were producing at full rate.

In that case, satisfaction might not be the best name, and consumption would be a better option.

[bobucles]

While I agree that the 3 powers (with the right sign) should add up to zero making some information redundant, I have the feeling the 3 are equally important.
So I'm not sure one should be discarded.

Without accumulators the power produced and consumed will ALWAYS be the same number. There is a good argument for saying these numbers at least partially overlap in role.

The only reason that power produced is different from consumed is because accumulators are doing things. There are multiple ways to show this info but maybe showing "energy consumed" and "accumulator +-" might be best. I'm partial to "produced vs. consumed" but that means doing MATH to know how hard the accumulators are working.

However, I would say that the maximum of the consumption bar (named satisfaction) should probably be the power that would be consumed if all machines were on at the same time (without accumulators of course).

That's not useful information. There are so many things in the game that do not consume power 100% of the time and there's absolutely no way for a player to know what their % of total maximum demand SHOULD be. Miners, inserters, and any assemblers that don't have exact perfect ratios will have idle time and thus not be using 100% power demand. Let's not forget laser turrets which are gigantic energy drains for only a fraction of the time.

The current "factory is working at x% power" is probably the best way to show the energy consumption bar. There are a few inconsistencies that need to be addressed (beacons screw up this number) but it is good information to have.

And similarly for production: the maximum should if all generators (except accumulators) were producing at full rate.

This IS very useful info. All electric producers can be reasonably expected to operate at 100%. If they can't it almost always means something is wrong (or the sun is going down). Showing % of maximum capacity lets the player know if they have a massive energy surplus or is suffering a fuel shortage or is is near their maximum capacity. It's vital info to have.

There is ONE exception to this rule. When the player is using boiler steam in their steam turbines, the steam turbines will max out at 1.8MW instead of the full 5.8MW power. It is fair to consider this an error in energy generation, but it also may be deliberate on the player's part. Since turbines don't have a menu it may be best to just treat the turbines as always 5.8MW producers and let the player deal with the consequences of their odd setup.

[bluemonk]

Hi,

I am not sure if the GUI of the electronic network statistics will be reworked or not, but one thing that really confuses me everytime is the way produced and consumed energy is shown.

It is totally un-intuitive that when I produce more energy than I need the consumption bar is bigger than the production bar. Two bars next to each other should always have the same scaling!

Furthermore both bars show the exact same value. This might be right, but showing the same value twice does not add any usefull information to the player.


My suggestion is: Make only one bar. Left is zero. Right is maximum energy that I can produce. Green bar is the energy that I consume. Green bar should turn to red if I use 100% (maybe turn to orange for a specific threshold too). You already do this when you click on a factory and energy level is low.

Basically all this information is already available in the lower barchart and I would probably easily have understood this if the first bar would not be there. It might be enough to remove the first bar and in the second bar add the capacity information. E.g. instead of writing 12 MW write 8 of 12 MW.


TLDR:
- Remove first bar
- add capacity info to the second bar (e.g. 8 of 12 MW)
- Color the bar (same as for factories)

[bluemonk]

And one more thing: It looks like the scaling is completely broke. 20MW = 25% of the bar, Which makes me think a have a lot of capacity left. One second later 22MW = 100% of the bar.

[bobucles]

Yeah, those electric bars at the top are really useless. Here's a past discussion:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=60364&p=362589#p362589

[ManaUser]

I would replace the two bars with "Supply" and "Demand". Supply is the maximum amount you could produce, and Demand is the amount all consumers on that grid currently want. The maximum scale would be whichever is bigger. So if the supply bar isn't full you're browning out, if the demand bar isn't full you have capacity to spare.

[bobucles]

The maximum scale would be whichever is bigger.

The maximum scale for supply isn't the same as the maximum scale for demand.

Your maximum supply is based on how many steam engines/turbines and solar panels you have. Supply doesn't get any higher than that. If accumulators are draining they are still not generating power. They're a storage. Supply in general is a very static thing and there's no reason to treat the bar as a dynamic thing. When steam engines are running dry that is still not a dynamic change in supply. That's a failure in your suppliers and it should be treated as your supply running low, because if it was working at full capacity you would have full supply.

Your maximum ability to demand is based on all sorts of things. Machines can be on/off and laser turrets can create huge spikes. It's okay to treat demand as dynamic, because it is.

[Zaflis]

How's this for an idea? We could rid of the 1 row:

power.png (18.69 KiB) Viewed 5876 times

Maybe the power satisfied bar could have different color on the right side potential power part. For example left side cyan and right side green? The uncolored gray background isn't very clear that there is really more power available.

I mean... or other way around like this:

power2.png (5.7 KiB) Viewed 5874 times

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older thread on the same subject.

[Vegemeister]

And similarly for production: the maximum should if all generators (except accumulators) were producing at full rate.

This IS very useful info. All electric producers can be reasonably expected to operate at 100%. If they can't it almost always means something is wrong (or the sun is going down). Showing % of maximum capacity lets the player know if they have a massive energy surplus or is suffering a fuel shortage or is is near their maximum capacity. It's vital info to have.

There is ONE exception to this rule. When the player is using boiler steam in their steam turbines, the steam turbines will max out at 1.8MW instead of the full 5.8MW power. It is fair to consider this an error in energy generation, but it also may be deliberate on the player's part. Since turbines don't have a menu it may be best to just treat the turbines as always 5.8MW producers and let the player deal with the consequences of their odd setup.

Electricity producers cannot be reasonably expected to operate at 100% of nameplate rating. With perfect ratios, solar+accumulator power is running a deficit if draw is over 70%. Atomic power with non-piped steam (the standard for UPS-optimized plants) has two turbines per heat exchanger, so anything over 83% nameplate is peaking power. And both of those setups are working-as-intended and not an error of any kind. Really, only steam engines can be expected to sustain 100% load.

If the devs wanted to show a meaningful production bar, they could add a power-plant-spec combinator, which would read two circuit network signals for peak and average power capability (presumably supplied by a constant combinator in standard use cases). The electrical network screen would get the peak and 100% tickmarks for the production bar by summing up all the power-plant-spec combinators in that network.