Seamless SpaceMap Navigation (For controller users)

[funnyduck99]

TL;DR

Through zooming in/out allow seamless navigation of Planets and Platforms through the Space Map.

The Problem

Factorio is a game that is designed primarily for mouse and keyboard play, but some people prefer to play on controller (like me). I have an idea to make switching between Planets and Space Platforms a very seamless experience for controller players. As it is right now to switch our remote view location, we need to click a planet/platform in the list on the top left of the remote view screen, or use a button combo to move up or down one. These both have problems. What if our list is very large? If our list is large it requires scrolling and that is very inconvenient especially if you switch places frequently. Also this is a problem for the button combo to change platforms because you cant see which one its on, and you would still need to scroll.
Also when people play on handheld devices, the screen area is very limited. And through these changes we could optionally free a large amount of the screen.

I want to clarify that this suggestion is primarily aimed at controller users, and can be optional toggle.

My Solution

I believe I have come up with a set of changes that will make this experience so seamless for controller players, and it revolves around the spacemap.

SpaceMap.jpeg (85.64 KiB) Viewed 237 times

The game already has a view that shows all the planets and platforms, we can leverage this to make an amazing navigational system. What if we were able to zoom in on the planet/platform to enter that surface's local map?

ZoomVulcanusIcon.jpeg (82.39 KiB) Viewed 237 times

VulcanusMapZoomOut.jpeg (77.79 KiB) Viewed 237 times

We just zoom in and it brings us to the max zoomed out map of that surface. This would work the other way around too, we can zoom out and when we get past the max zoom out level, we enter to the space map.

This will cover planets very well, but what about platforms? Well when a platform is moving, the map already knows:

PlatformMotion.jpeg (127.04 KiB) Viewed 237 times

As you can see it shows itself on its path to other planets, it can detect when the cursor is over it, so when we zoom into it we can enter its map like the planet.

But what about platforms in orbit? I have a solution to this too. Currently like you can see in the image below, we have 2 yellow rectangles around each planet.

YellowRects.jpeg (71.69 KiB) Viewed 237 times

My proposal is to instead draw one for each platform. So if we have 1 platform there is one, if we have 4 platforms then 4 would draw, ect. And we can make it do the cool surface preview like it does for the platforms that are in motion. If there are too many platforms in orbit there isnt enough room for them, we can add another layer. Similar to how cookie clicker draws their cursors when the circumference of the cookie is full:

CookieClicker.jpeg (323.14 KiB) Viewed 237 times

Zoom in speed: the one issue I can maybe find with this proposal is the zoom in speed. Maybe it would take too long to be viable. I think that this could be easily remedied by making zoom in/out have an acceleration so you can have your precise zoom controls but also zoom very quickly too. Think kind of how our mice do this.

If we include these changes we can also allow the option to completely disable the GUI to switch between surfaces. All that functionality would be possible entirely through zooming in and out in the remote view. This will be extremely helpful for handheld players.

Conclusion

I came up with these changes because I played Space Age entirely on my steam deck, and found navigating between surfaces to be a chore. I also didn't like having that menu constantly in the remote view taking up so much screen real estate. I believe these changes would significantly improve the Space Age experience for people playing on handheld or with controllers.