Friday Facts #180 - Map interaction

[agkay]

My first post, bought the game almost immediately after it came out on Steam. If you listen to Steam, it says I have 3800 hours. While a not-insignificant percentage of those are valid, it goes to illustrate the amount of time I spend on the pause screen. (I may also have a serious addiction, thank you for this wonderful drug of a game).

While the game is paused on the map screen, I currently may scroll in and out. I have always wished the ability to also pan. In regards to your proposed changes, it'd also be nice to switch the different overlays while paused.

I'm constantly at my desk. My game is constantly open and paused in the background. When I need to take a breather from my work, I tab over and try to plan out: where i'm going; the next rail line to lay; the next biter quadrant to eradicate; which lake to fill in for my perfectly aligned steam plants; where my defensive lines are going to be. The idea of custom tags is exciting- you have a proposal to make them apply to rectangular areas which would play perfectly into that process. If possible, a polygon draw tool could be a little more powerful. Alternative thought, a general markup overlay we can just straight up type or draw on?

Other thoughts:
- Draw rail ghosts from the map view.
- Lay blueprints from the map view.
- Rulers! I have several times tried to resize a small notepad window to perfectly cover a section of my base and move it around on the map to try and visualize how much extra room I'm going to need. Several times more I actually took the effort of taking a screenshot to Photoshop to do more accurate space estimation.

[LazyLoneLion]

Idea/Suggestion:
Let me put a marker on the map and have a direction indicator to that marker outside of the map.

[Mooncat]

aw... a bit busy these days and missed this FFF yesterday. Now there are already 6 pages of comments.

Don't know whether this has been suggested yet:
- make the additional info and tags to be unlockable via research.

[Earendel]

It would be useful if when you mouse over an electrical grid it highlights the connected grid, so you can see what is and is not connected at the time.

Also getting mod support for map click events would be great (mouse_down, mouse_up, where, which mouse button, etc).

[Vinnie_NL]

I really like to see that the map will be getting some improvements too. I found it okay while playing but the suggested improvements that kovarex listed are big improvements. I mostly prefer interaction with the trains and stations from the map. And some specific suggestions from me:
- Selecting a train in map view will show its route according to the current schedule, so it's easier to see if your train travels a much larger distance than expected. I remember one situation like that, and edited one of my screenshots to illustrate my point. The green line is the optimal route across all stations, if I remember correctly Iron #9 and #10 somewhere on the right but not visible on this map. On it's way back it doesn't follow the green line but takes the yellow line, all the way to the south. Why? Because of one short rail missing, which I've marked red. This would be much easier to spot with my suggestion, instead of following each train on the map if it's covered by radar or being in the train yourself.
- Checkbox for rail network to view in the map while deselecting other structures, and making the segments which are occupied by a train a different color, to help fix train network deadlocks.

[MaexxDesign]

Do I have to start a new map with 0.15 because of the new uranium ressource ?

[posila]

Do I have to start a new map with 0.15 because of the new uranium ressource ?

You don't ... uranium will be spawned on old maps as part of save migration.

[MaexxDesign]

Do I have to start a new map with 0.15 because of the new uranium ressource ?

You don't ... uranium will be spawned on old maps as part of save migration.

Great !

[aober93]

Display power poles without power in a different color? And inactive roboports as well maybe?

Display train routes on the map.

[masat]

The clickable trains from map view got me thinking: Will I be able to select the second locomotive on a multi-locomotive train? I always wanted to use the coloring options more but I always forget when I place the train. From the trains menu I can only change the color of the first locomotive, so it was too much of a hassle to recolor it so I stopped using it.

Also: The electric network view looks as horrible as I imagined! I hope I can resist the OCD on that one...

[tk0421]

Just curious if you've ever thought about adding a 45° angle snap. it could lead to some interesting layouts for most multi stage crafting parts...

[Tobi14601]

Is it just me or does the icon for uranium fuel rod (on the map) look a lot like the fuel rod from IndustrialCraft2 (Minecraft mod)?

[StoneLegion]

I really like to see that the map will be getting some improvements too. I found it okay while playing but the suggested improvements that kovarex listed are big improvements. I mostly prefer interaction with the trains and stations from the map. And some specific suggestions from me:
- Selecting a train in map view will show its route according to the current schedule, so it's easier to see if your train travels a much larger distance than expected. I remember one situation like that, and edited one of my screenshots to illustrate my point. The green line is the optimal route across all stations, if I remember correctly Iron #9 and #10 somewhere on the right but not visible on this map. On it's way back it doesn't follow the green line but takes the yellow line, all the way to the south. Why? Because of one short rail missing, which I've marked red. This would be much easier to spot with my suggestion, instead of following each train on the map if it's covered by radar or being in the train yourself.
- Checkbox for rail network to view in the map while deselecting other structures, and making the segments which are occupied by a train a different color, to help fix train network deadlocks.

This x1000 please

[Jelgadis]

Do you have any plan for change legacy item's icons?

Train Stop, Diesel locomotive, Cargo wagon, Lamp, Electric mining drill, Flamethrower turret, Gun turret, Laser turret, ETC
and also (Gun, Armor, Ammo, Tool's Grey Icons in Equipment Slots)

[mexmer]

As for radar. you already have active radar coverage on map, radar active range ends, where FoW stars.

and scan range (eg. uncovering new chunks), don't matter much.

[harvald]

Suggestion:

After clicking train in map view it would be nice to see whole train path highlighted.

[Betep3akata]

Another one vote for the possibility of movement by WASD in the map view.

Thanks for the awesome work!

[LCCX]

The map improvements look most welcome.

Feedback:

- "logistics area visualisation" IMHO does need roboport connections displayed, both to help with off-by-one placement errors and to better visualize bot traffic issues/patterns/paths.

- It would be nice to be able to more easily visually identify separate networks. For example, could the electric network visualisation further highlight a single network when moused over or selected, to differentiate it from electric infrastructure which it is not connected to?

- It would be nice to have a solution regarding overlapping text. For example, is it possible to get something like a toggle between static text and text-on-mouseover?

In addition to this, maybe a search bar in the map window where you can search for specific entities to highlight them.

+1

Another one vote for the possibility of movement by WASD in the map view.

+1

[Ochse]

It also helps colorblind people as they couldn't distinguish the ore types by color so well.

I'm one of these colorblind players. And it would be a great improvement if there will be a way to alter the colors for things on the map. The most problems for me are colors for copper/stone, red lines on green background and mostly all colors for logistic networks (and thats the main thing i using them very rarely).
At present I use mods to alter some colors for me but in multiplayer games without these helpers its a little tricky to spot the same things people talking about...

[Kuristian]

Is it just me or does the icon for uranium fuel rod (on the map) look a lot like the fuel rod from IndustrialCraft2 (Minecraft mod)?

Yup, gotta be the uranium Cell from Industrialcraft!

Update is looking great! Ore patch size sure is a cool thing, I have never thought about it. Does not unbalance the game either, just make it less annoying to estimate how big in density a patch is.