Factorio Forums

TL;DR

The temporary train GUI already does dynamic path finding to the cursor, add a tooltip with the pathcost.

What ?

Add a new debug option ie show-rail-path-cost when activated and the player holds down ctrl (to setup a temporary station) whilst in the locomotive gui the game shows a tooltip with the path cost of the path that is rendered in the window.

e.g.

Why ?

Its currently not possible for a player to see the pathcost of various rail paths around a factory, as the factory gets more complex this can create weird problems that are very hard to solve without knowing why a train is taking a particular path.

Finally

I am a c++ developer by profession and would be happy to attempt to implement this if I can be given source access. It could be a fairly straight forward change but experience tells me there are 1000 reasons why this may not be the case!

I was under the impression that a way of displaying train path costs in game was desired, but it needed to practical.

More detail of how I think this will be useful:

For a developer debugging train pathing issues such as this one. The devoloper would easily be able to see whether the pathing cost past the train waiting at a signal is constant or being reset or working as intended.

Its now very popular to have multiple stations with the same name, this would allow the player to debug issues in game relating to why a train is travelling to one train stop over another when they have the same name.

Specifically I am currently building a megabase and am using multiple stations with the same name and I am having some issues understanding the finer details of the train pathfinder.

Agreed, this would be useful for the reasons Stevetrov outlined above. Would have been convenient for some of the other weird issues I encountered when designing some train routing systems in the past.

So true! Great idea!