Make production graphs cleaner

[coppercoil]

TL;DR

Prod2Prod.png (63.38 KiB) Viewed 2183 times

What ?

1. Remove high frequencies in the graphs.
2. Make graph lines smooth.

Why ?

Graphs will be cleaner and nicer.

[valneq]

thing to consider: smoothing out the graphs will remove details that can be very informative

[Koub]

Hands would be cleaner, nicer, and smoother looking without finger, but way less practical .
Functionality >> Looks.
Graphs don't need to look nice, but to inform us what's going on in our factory.

[coppercoil]

Just switch to shorter time scale for details. Large scale already hides short peaks, so smoothing would be not so "destructive" as you think. I mean, graphs hide fine details by now, and players are fine with that

[foamy]

Just switch to shorter time scale for details. Large scale already hides short peaks, so smoothing would be not so "destructive" as you think. I mean, graphs hide fine details by now, and players are fine with that

Problem there is that you can't examine arbitrary segments at high resolution, just the most recent one.

[pichutarius]

My guess, currently it counts how many of each item is produced x minutes ago, and divide by x. Bigger x for bigger timescale and vice versa.

From math perspective, I wonder how to implement smoothing, probably need convolution with bell curve, and therefore cost ups. Its not that easy.

[ickputzdirwech]

The graphs are already smoothed. Anyone remember the old spiky fluid graphs?

Smoother graphs aren’t necessarily less functional. True they include less information. But if they have too many details it’s hard to interpret what they actually represent. Especially if you are interested in long time trends. I think I wouldn’t mind a bit more smoothing.

[Koub]

In that case, like in Excel charts, a feature "average over N points" with obviously possibility to set whatever N positive integer you'd like. Like that when "trend" needed, it's possible, when details needed, it's possible too.

[Taneeda]

+1

My first thought on this topic was "YES, please"

In that case, like in Excel charts, a feature "average over N points" with obviously possibility to set whatever N positive integer you'd like. Like that when "trend" needed, it's possible, when details needed, it's possible too.

Why not add a slider to statistics panel to adjust N between 1..10, with default of 3? Same for electric stats panel...

[ssilk]

Technically this is nothing else than a function that takes more ore less points in a time-frame of the graph and uses the average, instead of each single point. It looks like it is loosing information , but this is in practice used very often, for example to see, if values are rising or falling.

For example when we have the load of the CPU’s in a cluster, then both is very interesting: you want to see, if there are peaks in the load and you want to see a general trend of the load. The first is needed to find events that causes such peaks, and the second is used to see, when it is time to add a new node to the cluster.

But as the stats in Factorio are currently working I don’t see, how that might be useful. To make sense for that graph, you need to see both types side by side.
...

What I really would like to see here are free configurable dashboards. Like with Grafana.


And I would be able to say: when power under x for n seconds raise alarm. Or when pollution is over x turn mines off. Just need to create a new dashboard, add the right values, the type of the graph, set alarms, ready.

But that would cost many cpu-cycles to create, would slow down Factorio significantly. I think we need to live with the current compromise. But I don’t like it.