display all items waiting to be constructed/missing material

[factoriouzr]

display all items waiting to be constructed/missing materials instead of just the ones you are close to or timing out displaying them all in the bottom tooltip beside the status bar.

it used to work this way versions ago, and I find it really annoying that the game just hides this information from me on what I need to craft or look into why it's not being made/made fast enough. This information is really useful to know and it's hidden from the player. Restore the full tooltip of all items needing materials as a minimum, but also add a proper GUI to show all logistics information. In this GUI show all things in the logistics network that is actually useful (instead of the hover one that shows the logistics items now that gets cut off and is useless once you get mid-late game). In this GUI allow searching as well, and also add the items that are missing construction materials as well.

Thanks

[Loewchen]

This is not a bug report, make a development suggestion.

[factoriouzr]

This is not a bug report, make a development suggestion.

This is a bug because it used to behave this way and now it's broken. It doesn't display all the items pending construction.

Please move it back to it being a bug.

[Loewchen]

What GUI in what version are we even talking about? Be precise.

[factoriouzr]

0.14.17 Exhibits this and I think 0.14.19 (the latest one) and probably all of 0.14.x

[factoriouzr]

Why was this marked "not a bug"?

It used to be that all items needing to be constructed were marked on the big map and they all showed up in the tooltip of the icon beside the toolbar. Now both of these are broken and only show up if you walk near them, then when you walk away they disappear after a while.

This is completely broken in my opinion. I don't have any clue if there is anything that still needs to be constructed somewhere else.

I wonder if this happens all the time or only when you don't have roboport coverage over an area and you use your personal construction bots. Or maybe it's due to a bug in the research tree where I have construction and robots researched at the start of the game, but I don't have all the prerequisites, but I do have everything researched for construction bots and to allow repairing by construction bots and I have personal roboports. Even if one of these is the cause, I think this should be fixed as you can enable research selectively via console command or mod, and even if you don't enable any research, you can always start with personal roboports. Or you can construct things outside your network with personal roboports and miss some ingredients and when I walk away, I still want to know what I'm missing and where on the map. It's completely useless when this info disappears. Then you have no idea what you are still missing and where in your factory. You could potentially have thousands of missing items in random locations around your large factory. Having to walk across your entire factory is tedious and boring. Plus you can so easily forget what you needed where or miss a spot in your factory.

[Rseding91]

Things to build and deconstruct don't generate alerts if there's no roboport in range of them. It has always worked that way.

[factoriouzr]

Things to build and deconstruct don't generate alerts if there's no roboport in range of them. It has always worked that way.

Ok, perhaps I always just happened to have roboports near then then .

I would like to propose this as a suggestion for improvement then. Given that using blueprints is very popular and we can do it from the beginning of the game, it would be nice to at least be able to toggle the display on the map on and off and get a summary screen (like production screen) to see what items we need that we put down ghosts for.

[Rseding91]

That information isn't known without touching every single ghost in the map which would waste CPU time. It's only generated as roboports iterate over the ghosts in their area 1 per tick. That's why you'll notice you don't get an alert for every single item but only some of them over time.

[factoriouzr]

That information isn't known without touching every single ghost in the map which would waste CPU time. It's only generated as roboports iterate over the ghosts in their area 1 per tick. That's why you'll notice you don't get an alert for every single item but only some of them over time.

Why not use an event handling mechanism. Generally it's bad to iterate over things if you can just listen for changes. When a ghost is placed, it obviously has a representation in memory, so add it to the things needing materials list (ie. have a global list per player force). You would also have one list per network. Then when a robot decides to build it you already know which ghost you are going to build/fill in so you have a reference to it already, and just remove it's item to build from the global list. No additional work or iteration required.

For that matter, the way I would implement robot building is to have hashtable of all items needing to be built with the key being the item type and the value being a queue of actual instances needing to be placed (1 global hash table, and 1 for each separate network), then when a ghost is added, you just hash table look up the entity being ghosted (eg. blue inserter) in each network affected (1 in global) and add the ghost to the queue. When a robot gets an item it does a hash table lookup for that item, if the queue is not empty, picks the first thing in the queue and goes to build it. When the robot removes the ghost, it removes the entity form all affected networks. There is no iteration in this approach and all updates and lookups are constant time.

[Rseding91]

That information isn't known without touching every single ghost in the map which would waste CPU time. It's only generated as roboports iterate over the ghosts in their area 1 per tick. That's why you'll notice you don't get an alert for every single item but only some of them over time.

Why not use an event handling mechanism. Generally it's bad to iterate over things if you can just listen for changes. When a ghost is placed, it obviously has a representation in memory, so add it to the things needing materials list (ie. have a global list per player force). You would also have one list per network. Then when a robot decides to build it you already know which ghost you are going to build/fill in so you have a reference to it already, and just remove it's item to build from the global list. No additional work or iteration required.

For that matter, the way I would implement robot building is to have hashtable of all items needing to be built with the key being the item type and the value being a queue of actual instances needing to be placed (1 global hash table, and 1 for each separate network), then when a ghost is added, you just hash table look up the entity being ghosted (eg. blue inserter) in each network affected (1 in global) and add the ghost to the queue. When a robot gets an item it does a hash table lookup for that item, if the queue is not empty, picks the first thing in the queue and goes to build it. When the robot removes the ghost, it removes the entity form all affected networks. There is no iteration in this approach and all updates and lookups are constant time.

Robots don't spontaneously just "get items". If you tell them to build something they need to know what you want to build and then they need to go find an item to build it. That takes time as there can be multiple overlapping logistic networks each with different items and available robots. When you build a blueprint you put down some 500-1000 entities that the robots need to build. Some of those entiites might not be in one network or maybe in no network.

Then there's the player roboport that moves around so you can't say "well it's not in a network, just do nothing with it until a new network is built".

The item to build a particular ghost is already known by the ghost - that's essentially free to check on the ghost. You simply don't know what all ghosts are available to be serviced by what robots in what networks. If at creation every ghost figured all of that information out the game would freeze every time you built a blueprint.

[factoriouzr]

There seems to be something weird going on with items waiting to be constructed. They sometimes seem to count up to whatever seems to be missing, say 300 of 4 types of items. Then they go down really fast, the count back up. Not sure what is causing it as all is within roboport coverage. Maybe the roboport runs out of power?

Also the notifications for the number of turrets engaged with the enemy doesn't stay up as long so when I hover over the destroyed warning I can see what was destroyed but it says there are no turrets attacking. So I start to go over thinking there will be a breach as no turrets are engaged with the enemy and then the notification disappears.

There is also often a destroyed sound effect that gets played after the notification that something was destroyed disappeared.

This is all under 0.14.x.

I hope all this notification is improved in the next version (0.15) with the combat rework as the notification is too basic and disappears too quick. It's also hard to tell what areas are properly defended (ie. have turrets) and which don't when there are multiple attacks.

[Rseding91]

There seems to be something weird going on with items waiting to be constructed. They sometimes seem to count up to whatever seems to be missing, say 300 of 4 types of items. Then they go down really fast, the count back up. Not sure what is causing it as all is within roboport coverage. Maybe the roboport runs out of power?

Also the notifications for the number of turrets engaged with the enemy doesn't stay up as long so when I hover over the destroyed warning I can see what was destroyed but it says there are no turrets attacking. So I start to go over thinking there will be a breach as no turrets are engaged with the enemy and then the notification disappears.

There is also often a destroyed sound effect that gets played after the notification that something was destroyed disappeared.

This is all under 0.14.x.

I hope all this notification is improved in the next version (0.15) with the combat rework as the notification is too basic and disappears too quick. It's also hard to tell what areas are properly defended (ie. have turrets) and which don't when there are multiple attacks.

There are no plans to currently change anything about alerts for 0.15.

[factoriouzr]

There seems to be something weird going on with items waiting to be constructed. They sometimes seem to count up to whatever seems to be missing, say 300 of 4 types of items. Then they go down really fast, the count back up. Not sure what is causing it as all is within roboport coverage. Maybe the roboport runs out of power?

Also the notifications for the number of turrets engaged with the enemy doesn't stay up as long so when I hover over the destroyed warning I can see what was destroyed but it says there are no turrets attacking. So I start to go over thinking there will be a breach as no turrets are engaged with the enemy and then the notification disappears.

There is also often a destroyed sound effect that gets played after the notification that something was destroyed disappeared.

This is all under 0.14.x.

I hope all this notification is improved in the next version (0.15) with the combat rework as the notification is too basic and disappears too quick. It's also hard to tell what areas are properly defended (ie. have turrets) and which don't when there are multiple attacks.

There are no plans to currently change anything about alerts for 0.15.

Thanks for the reply. Could you guys discuss improving this as part of the combat rework. I think the alerts go hand in hand with combat (for the combat ones lol, but it's the same system of notification) and they really need to be improved.

Speaking of GUI improvements, are there any plans to give a proper logistics network status window that is searchable as currently the hover over chest status is always cut off. I never use that thing as I can barely see any of the items in my network.