Friday Facts #170 - Blueprint library GUI design and redesign

[DragonMudd]

b) I would like to have the possibility to zoom ( and move shown zoom-in ) the blueprint preview. It happens quite often that i just want to change only some parts on a 2k+ items blueprint. Right-clicking them with the given preview becomes close to impossible at some point.

d) I know there are mods for rotating, flipping, copying etc., but I would like to have this in vanilla.

Yes to both of these please. Need to be able to flip blueprints!

[jackthesmack]

Why not use different tabs for the players?

Naamloos.png

and how do you expect to fit 400 tabs on there?

Same way I fit 400 tabs on my browser at once.

[Diablo]

QQ: is it now also possible to right click an entity at the top of the new interface to deselect entire selection of an entity in the blueprint.
For instance, lets say I have a blueprint with 200 wall sections. Now I have to right click every wall section to remove it from the blueprint. It would be great if that could be reduced to one click by clicking the total amount of walls at the top of the UI.

Thanks

[Rseding91]

b) I would like to have the possibility to zoom ( and move shown zoom-in ) the blueprint preview. It happens quite often that i just want to change only some parts on a 2k+ items blueprint. Right-clicking them with the given preview becomes close to impossible at some point.

d) I know there are mods for rotating, flipping, copying etc., but I would like to have this in vanilla.

Yes to both of these please. Need to be able to flip blueprints!

Any blueprint you would want to flip doesn't support flipping: rails are grid aligned and aren't the same when flipped, train stops can't be mirrored since they're directional, assembling machines with pipes can't be mirrored, and so on.

[aober93]

There is a mod for blueprint mirroring, and it complains about inconsistency all the time, mostly it works tho. But what worth would be an official design ,that mostly works.

Good thing is that a mod exists, and it rarely fails, especially if you dont mirror pipe machines.

[kinnom]

Why not use different tabs for the players?

Naamloos.png

and how do you expect to fit 400 tabs on there?

Same way I fit 400 tabs on my browser at once.

now I'm curious.

[Ojelle]

I don't get the problem with mirroring pipe machines? Just turn those 180°? Or is it something else? Guess I'll have to test it.

[factoriouzr]

This has been a long requested feature. Glad it's getting even more attention for the next 0.15 release.

I do have some suggestions, please see below:


1) Add a dropdown in the left pane to pick "game blueprints" "player A", "player B" etc blueprints

2) Make the blueprint window bigger if it stays in it's current format (which I assume will pop up centered as every other GUI window is right now). The reason for this is that you will have a lot of blueprints, personal and from other players in a multiplayer game, and the game blueprint list will grow big. It would be nice to see more blueprints at once

3) add scroll bars to the windows when you get more blueprints then you can fit onto one screen

4) Add ability to categorize bluerpints/books into sections like "trains", "smelting", "factory" etc. These should be user defined

5) Add ability to have blueprints in multiple sections at the same time such as "game blueprints" and "player blueprints"

6) Add a checkbox beside each blueprint to share it with other players or not. This is useful to avoid sharing blueprints made while using mods that don't work in the current game, and to avoid sharing other blueprints that will just clutter up the shared blueprints view for other players

7) Add a checkbox beside each blueprint to enable or disable automatic blueprint synchronizing. If enabled all changes made to a blueprint book/blueprint and all blueprints inside the book are automatically updated in the player's blueprint library. This is a very necessary feature as synchronizing blueprints will become a pain

8) Add another blueprint section that automatically exports ALL blueprint books and all blueprints in player inventory into another section called something like "my active blueprints" or "all my blueprints from my last game". The idea here is that if you are playing a game and forget to export your blueprints or your latest changes of your blueprints, they will automatically export in real time as you make changes. Then when you start a new game and you realize you forgot to export a blueprint you really needed, you don't have to load that save, configure it's mods if any and export the blueprint. Then change the mods around again and load back the new save. The way this could work is to always export all blueprints and blueprint books in real time as changes are made into this separate category. If the player didn't make any blueprints and didn't edit any blueprints in the current game yet, then the old list is kept. As soon as they make any changes, all their current blueprints override everything in this category. Another option for this might be to keep the last say 100 blueprints that were ever made/edited and sort them by most recent to oldest.

9) It would be great if each blueprint and each blueprint book would store the last 10 or so revisions it had and there were buttons on top of the blueprint book (always visible) and blueprint (visible only in edit mode) for "< back" and "next >" that let you cycle through the revisions of that blueprint and select one you want to replace the current blueprint by hitting the "update" or "select" button. This would be great in case you make a mistake in a blueprint only to realize later. This would also help when overwriting a blueprint in your library only to realize you overwrote the wrong one. In this case you could just select the previous version of that blueprint from your library.

10) Add a favourites section to my blueprints and add a checkbox beside each blueprint to make it favourite or not. All blueprints marked as favourite, will show up in the favourite list.

11) Make the blueprint sharing window pop up on the right of the screen (ideally let the user drag it anywhere they want and remember it's position) and make the player and game shared blueprints panel collapsible. Now the player can just keep the blueprint window up all the time and just pick blueprints directly from this window, use them, then press a button (configurable) or drop the blueprint back on an empty area of the blueprint window to discard it. This would be great to be able to just use the blueprints directly from the blueprint window and save space on the toolbar.

[factoriouzr]

Pls make blueprint mirroring possible.

The best idea of all. It is so annoying doing blueprint again, just because it is the same like one you already have, but in mirror position.

+1

[Daid]

I don't get the problem with mirroring pipe machines? Just turn those 180°? Or is it something else? Guess I'll have to test it.

Oil refineries and chem plants would "flip" from input/output order and thus no longer match as intended.

[SHiRKiT]

Just saying: that preview the devs suggest is still pretty bad. I use foreman with 50 blueprints. I bet the game would poorly represent it.

[OkariDraconis]

To solve the problem with possible long download times for other players blue prints, I'd recommend keeping it as button. And instead of having them go into that players inventory, have it download to their long term blueprint storage. Then just give the player a notification when its done, letting know they can now use that blueprint.

Also, Allow players to save blueprints into folders, like a book mark bar. So they can organize them in some way. Like IE: Starter Blue Prints folder, Mid game blue prints , etc etc. That way they can keep them orginized

[bobingabout]

Why not use different tabs for the players?

While we are at it, lets add books as suggested by @aober93

blueprint_accordion.jpg

Having them as an accordion makes it easy to use multiple books at the same time. (Ok, this has nothing to do with books anymore...)

I must say, I like the direction these ideas were headding.

[Ragnaman]

my 2 eurocents
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=39078

Image from thread:

[Thynix]

Welcome, Norbert!

In the hope it helps, one problem I've noticed with the blueprint GUI is that when editing a blueprint name, clicking the save button for the blueprint (not the save button for the blueprint name) does not save the changes to the blueprint name.

[mdqp]

I really don't get it. Did you ever read just one negative steam review that told the GUI design or the blue prints were bad?
I wish, you would hire someone for late game content. New enemies, maybe bosses, new items, new tech, stuff to find, an interesting world, story or tasks.
Maybe sell it as dlc, or factorio 2 or whatever. I'd give you 50$ for new content, but i do not need blueprint sorting at all.

While I do think having a better system for the blueprints is actually pretty useful (the current system is clunky), I agree that I wish there were plans for more late-game content. Sadly, that's not the direction the game will be going, and we'll have to rely on mods, it seems.

[chronix]

You should be able to click on a component in the top to add/remove all instances of that component at a time. (Like if I want to copy a big smeltery I had to paste, but remove all the old power lines and I'll re-wire it for substations). Also, mousing over these components should maybe highlight where they are, especially modules, sounds useful for very large blueprints. Not sure if there will be a blueprint zoom

[Alanore]

First of all, Hello Norbert! I' already liked your new design. It was very clear green tick is from another world. Sorry Oxyd

I have a diffirent approach for blueprint window. Most of the time if i open my blueprint library thats because i want to see my own blueprints. I don't think we will use shared blueprint window very often. Why not make personal and shared blueprint windows seperate? Make small box bottom of each shared blueprint icon. When we click it we download it to personal blueprint library.

[Mimp]

Welcome Norbert! Glad to hear the UI will be receiving some love.

My desires on the blueprint window topic:

- Organizable by the user, this structure should be modelled after the file system and really should be reflected in the files themselves. Backing it up manually and navigating it outside of Factorio should be nearly as simple. (Bonus points if you can provide an unique file extension and can set up with a file association to use some function of factorio.exe to provide a preview thumbnail in Windows Explorer...) Being able to upload a map with the blueprints is great but it'd be nice to be able to preview/trim/remove that payload before I try to load the map into the game. Likewise, stealing a blueprint from a save without going into the game would be nice.

- Favorites.

- Searches, sorts and filters by keywords, items in the blueprints, their names and even the icons you've chosen should all exist. I want to be able to quickly find that one thing I used that one time, I don't recall what it was but I know it used a stack filter inserter...

- Privacy/sharing options. These should have global defaults the user can set for preferences. I for one, would like to only share blueprints I flag for sharing.

- Game blueprints should have configurable options, admins should always be able to change the library but they should also be able to grant or deny other players the ability to change and potentially access it. As a server admin I trust some great builders to come up with helpful blueprints but I don't want to give them full admin access.

- Floating window that we can use directly. I think factoriouzr suggested this, it sounds ideal. When I know I'm working on oil I can pull up my selection of those blueprints and have them all easily accessible immediately. When I move on to solar it's a simple change of the folder/filter/etc to change gears entirely.

Thanks for reading. To be honest, any improvement to this wonderful game is welcome...

[nullvoid]

b) I would like to have the possibility to zoom ( and move shown zoom-in ) the blueprint preview. It happens quite often that i just want to change only some parts on a 2k+ items blueprint. Right-clicking them with the given preview becomes close to impossible at some point.

d) I know there are mods for rotating, flipping, copying etc., but I would like to have this in vanilla.

Yes to both of these please. Need to be able to flip blueprints!

Any blueprint you would want to flip doesn't support flipping: rails are grid aligned and aren't the same when flipped, train stops can't be mirrored since they're directional, assembling machines with pipes can't be mirrored, and so on.

I have at least two examples of when I do use flipping:

• Building one side of an assembly line (such as Red Circuits in a line with a wire assembler at one end)
• Rail Wagon (Off)Loaders without the rail included.

But isn't the rail objection a bit of a cop out? I agree that any blueprint containing Signals or Stations can't be flipped, but why not those containing only rails (and any buildings with normal alignment)? Then it should be a case of adjusting each position in the blueprint by ±1.

Also, as someone else said, what's wrong with rotating assemblers by 180 when flipping? It is an equivalent motion for them.


Addendum - Idle thoughts on implementing flipping for rails:

After computing the flipped positions naively, take the position an arbitrary rail modulo 2 (in each dimension).
Now subtract that value from every entities' position.
All rails should now be aligned correctly.
(Care should be taken that origin does't change too oddly, but I suspect people won't mind a little weirdness when flipping blueprints)