Auto turn trains when placing them

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henke37
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Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by henke37 »

Trains can be placed in one of two directions. Similarly, the train track is often signaled to allow passage in one of two directions.

As such, I think it annoying when I end up placing a train on a directional track and it's in the wrong direction.

So have the initial direction of the train match the signaled direction of the track. Sure, no need to remove the ability to rotate the train before placing it or even after placing it. Those are nice and useful features for non obvious stuff. But for 99 % of the cases? You want the train to drive in the direction the track is signaled.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by BenSeidel »

+1

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by walljaik »

thats lazyness and u loose the fun of a train crash.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by zytukin »

+1


walljaik wrote:thats lazyness and u loose the fun of a train crash.
Except, the train won't move due to having 'no path' and any approaching trains will stop due to red signals.

Tekky
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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by Tekky »

I respectfully disagree with your suggestion.

First of all, in Factorio, you don't place whole trains, but rather individual locomotives/carriages. Also, trains can be bidirectional, if you place a locomotive on both ends facing different directions.

Therefore, the game has no way of telling whether you placed the train in the wrong direction or whether you will be adding further locomotives to make the train bidirectional.

It may be true that most trains in Factorio are unidirectional, because the game unrealistically puts bidirectional trains at a significant disadvantage (see this thread for further discussion on this topic). However, in my opinion, this is not a reason to make the game assume that you want to place unidirectional trains, but rather a reason to get rid of the unrealistic disadvantage of bidirectional trains.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by BenSeidel »

Tekky wrote:I respectfully disagree with your suggestion.
what is the matter with the suggestion?
Their suggestion does not prevent you from placing locomotives facing the opposite direction as the rail is signalled, they even say so in the OP:
henke37 wrote:Sure, no need to remove the ability to rotate the train before placing it or even after placing it.
They are just asking that it "snaps" in the signalled direction when you initially cursor over the track.
You could even go further and flesh out the idea by saying that pressing "rotate" while holding a locomotive in your hand changes the orientation from "forwards" to "backwards" on a single direction rail track and just keeps the current behaviour on a bidirectional track.

It would reduce time it takes to place a personal transport train down as I am always pointing it in the wrong direction.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by Tekky »

My main point is that this suggestion is effectively asking that the game should assume that you want to build a unidirectional train and not a bidirectional train. For the reasons described in my previous post, I don't think the game should make this assumption. Even when building a train on unidirectional track, the game should not assume that the train being built will be unidirectional.

When building a bidirectional train with several locomotives on unidirectional track, I don't want to have to press the rotate button every time I want to place a locomotive facing the "wrong" direction. Rather, I want the game to remember the orientation of the previously placed locomotive. Otherwise, the game would behave very differently when building a bidirectional train on unidirectional track, compared to building a bidirectional train on bidirectional track. This would be confusing. I prefer consistent behavior.

As a side note, I would like to point out that, in reality, most modern locomotives are symmetrical and don't have a front or rear end. They can drive in both directions just as fast. Therefore, all of these issues with locomotive placement orientation would be solved if Factorio made its locomotives symmetrical. I have discussed this issue a bit further in this thread.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by BenSeidel »

Tekky wrote: I don't want to have to press the rotate button every time I want to place a locomotive facing the "wrong" direction
Are you honestly telling me that you never have to rotate a locomotive? because that is what it is sounding like. It's not about wrong or right, it's about common use case vs corner case.

Also, the double headed vs single headed trains aren't really a topic here, more what is the direction you build the trains from. Sure, you may have to press an additional rotate in the rare case, but in the general, it will remove a key stroke.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by greep »

Even in the worst case scenario Tekky it's going to be right half the time, which isn't much worse for your scenario than if it was not implemented. Meanwhile everyone else is happy.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by Tekky »

BenSeidel wrote:
Tekky wrote: I don't want to have to press the rotate button every time I want to place a locomotive facing the "wrong" direction
Are you honestly telling me that you never have to rotate a locomotive? because that is what it is sounding like. It's not about wrong or right, it's about common use case vs corner case.

Also, the double headed vs single headed trains aren't really a topic here, more what is the direction you build the trains from. Sure, you may have to press an additional rotate in the rare case, but in the general, it will remove a key stroke.
You quoted me a bit out of context.

I am not so much complaining about how often I would have to press the rotate button when building a bidirectional train. My main concern is rather that the behavior of the game would no longer be consistent.

For example, when building a bidirectional train with three locomotives on both ends, the game would behave very differently, depending on whether the train was being built on unidirectional or bidirectional track. Let me illustrate:

In the case of building the train on bidirectional track, you would build the train as you do now. You would rotate the first locomotive, if necessary, and then place it. Afterwards, you place the next two locomotives without having to rotate them, since you can safely assume that the game will remember the orientation of the last placed locomotive. Then you would place all cargo wagons. Afterwards, you place the first locomotive facing the other direction. Since you can safely assume that the game remembers the orientation of the last placed locomotive, you know that you have to press the rotate button once for the first locomtive, but not for the next two locomotives that you want to place.

In the case of building the train on unidirectional track, you must build the train differently. In the following example, I will assume that the train is being built against the track direction, i.e. from front to back in respect to the track direction. The first locomotive of the train can be placed without first having to check whether it has to be rotated. The next two locomotives and the cargo wagons can also be placed without having to rotate them. So, up to now, both trains have been built exactly the same way, except that the first locomotive could be placed without first having to check whether the rotate button must be pressed (which is an advantage). However, the next three locomotives must be placed very differently. Since the game will always "assume" that you want to place the locomotives in the track direction, you must hit the rotate button every time before placing every single one of them.

So, in the example above, the total number of rotations necessary would be 1-2 when building the train on bidirectional track, and 3 when building it on unidirectional track. Therefore, this suggestion actually increased the number of rotations necessary rather than decreasing them. However, as I have already stated, the additional number of rotations necessary is not my primary concern.

My primary concern with the suggestion is that the behavior of the game would no longer be consistent. Personally, I would find it annoying if the game behaved very differently depending on whether I was building a bidirectional train on unidirectional or bidirectional track.

I agree that the suggestion would be great if one could assume that most trains were unidirectional. However, I am against making this assumption.

In this thread, I have pointed out that Factorio, in its current implementation, places bidirectional trains at an unrealistic disadvantage. Therefore, I proposed that Factorio should get rid of these disadvantages, in order to make bidirectional trains more popular.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by BenSeidel »

Tekky wrote:Since the game will always "assume" that you want to place the locomotives in the track direction, you must hit the rotate button every time before placing every single one of them.
No, that does not need to be the case. It could auto-snap to a direction until you rotate it, then it keep the direction until you clear your cursor. How about something even more extreme and get the locomotive to snap its back-side to an existing train (unless you have previously rotated it). That would mean that at most you would need to rotate it once (if you are building it on a single-directional track from the back-end). Is that not an improvement? Or do you put locomotives in the middle of your train?

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by henke37 »

You guys missed an obvious fact: The game won't do this when the track lacks signals or is signaled for bidirectional traffic. The only situation where this could guess wrong is when you build a bidirectional train on a monodirectional track. That seems like a rather rare situation.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by Koub »

henke37 wrote:You guys missed an obvious fact: The game won't do this when the track lacks signals or is signaled for bidirectional traffic. The only situation where this could guess wrong is when you build a bidirectional train on a monodirectional track. That seems like a rather rare situation.
You guy missed an obvious fact : This topic was dead since February. :lol:
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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by mrvn »

So we resurrected it.

I like the idea. And the appendage of snapping a locomotives end to an existing train.

I would like to add another one: When placing a train near a train stop snap it so the locomotive stops at the train stop. That already happens if it faces the right direction. But the direction should snap too unless the cursor was manually rotated. It is highly unlikely you want to place a locomotive at a train stop facing the wrong way. The train would never stop that way later so why would you want to place it like that initially.

So in summary:
  • Near a train station auto turn and snap the locomotive to the train stop.
  • On unidirectional tracks auto turn the locomotive to face the right way.
  • To build bidirectional trains on unidirectional tracks one should start at the front (in the direction of the tracks), get used to it.
  • Rotating the cursor disables any auto turning, in case you really want to build your train backwards.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by olafthecat »

Why would you not want this! :?
It is too good to not implement!
You could just have an option to turn it off if you didn't want it.
Gonna start playing again with 0.16 build.
That's all.

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impetus maximus
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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by impetus maximus »

i don't see the appeal. :|
also, is it really that labor intensive to hit the R key?

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by Ranakastrasz »

This would be a small but reasonable addition. It would not hurt any playstyle, an would make things slightly more convinient.
+1
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Train should face proper direction on one-way rails

Post by Ardagan »

Current state:
When you place train on any rail it seem to face last direction you had it facing (more-or-less).

Proposed:
When you place train on one-way rail, it should face towards direction of rail traffic.
By one-way rail, I mean rail that has semaphore on one side only. This explicitly specifies direction which trains will move on this rail segment.

-----------------------------
This is minor quality of life improvement, but can be really handy.

Sample use-case: I have one-way rail network connecting my whole base and I mostly navigating it by placing train and choosing proper station. Every time I place train, I have to choose proper direction based on rail.

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Re: Train should face proper direction on one-way rails

Post by Tekky »

This has already been suggested in the following thread:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41385 Auto turn trains when placing them

EDIT: Now that the threads have been merged, my link above now points to the current thread.
Last edited by Tekky on Thu Dec 27, 2018 5:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Auto turn trains when placing them

Post by Koub »

Nice catch Tekky
[Koub] Merged into older topic with same suggestion.
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