Friday Facts #237 - Rich & interactive text

[chrinor2002]

What if you could shift+right click or shift-left an object, and then "paste" it into text areas? or possibly pickup an item or even pipet tool it, and then shift-click it in text areas?

[wat3rstone]

another idea with text icons: instead of implementing commands for those items, i think that it would be more convenient to have a 'quick word' where each time you type this word, it would 'autocorrect' to a symbol chosen specifically for that word (which could be modified in the settings), to avoid the extra work of typing up the command if you desire a specific icon.

Ex. you would type "iron ore" instead of [item=iron-ore] and you would receive the same result

[MicFac]

As many people are saying here, they didn't expect that but just like them I think this could be a really nice feature!
Having some way of just dragging items/ blueprints or even recipes and technologies into a text, in the chat for example, would make this much more practical and convenient though.

[redlabel]

What about multi-color nicknames for chat?

[bobucles]

Players should not be expected to remember what internal code names for items and icons are. Basically if a user has to remember a name or type an underscore then it's demanding too much of the average user, even if Factorio users are rarely average. It would be a shame if such a great feature finds itself too cumbersome for players to enjoy.

Anything that involves clicking on something in game or selecting the icon from a menu puts it in the hands of ordinary users. Blizzard games show an excellent example of giving players links that are easy to make and easy to use and are a good source for picking up ideas.

[ixnorp]

I hope this feature will support aliases either via modding or some other sort of easily user accessible interface. Then someone can make a mod where we can just do common items as [item=IronPlate], moddable items like [item=CobaltOre], or custom community tags like [xterm] showing a tiny dude being repeatedly run over by a train.

It looks like the issues about tab completes and path names are well expressed already. I second all of those concerns.

[hitzu]

First and foremost guys, you'd better apply the default font that supports languages with a non-Latin alphabet. The main reason I don't play the game in my native Russian is that the Cyrillic font you've chosen is awful. It's ugly as hell. It's wider than the default Latin version thus making traditionally longer than English Russian translation even longer. 25-50% physically longer if you ask. The kerning is... it's bad, really bad. This font basically throws down the aesthetics of the GUI into the trashcan. The sad thing is that I know it can't be your priority. At least you support Cyrillic unlike Hebrew or Arabic R2L writing.

[HurkWurk]

What about multi-color nicknames for chat?

this would be nice... default the players color to their chat name.

[Ripshaft]

Holy crap that's another gamechanging feature - so freakin sweet.

Obviously there's a ton of ways to improve the ease of use of the icons, which is pretty critical to seeing them widely used by players, especially more 'casual' players. Thankfully we have almost multiple decades of standards related to inserting icons into inline text - really only depends on the potential tech limitations available to the text processing... ideally something like the drop-down and autocomplete features present in most compilers or function heavy programs would be swell, but even failing that it should be doable to have a 'insert icon' button that just essentially provides the pictorial index and pastes the requisite code into the chat...

I'm excited though lol - maybe make signposts that can have any icon on them? (objects in the playing field)

[P4pst]

ohhhh i love it!!!

U guys suprise me every friday with such great idears!!

I am not excited on friday cause of 2 days off work anymore. Since i play factorio i am always hiped for FFF DAY!!!

Keep going!

Btw: how is PAX East going?!

[bobucles]

All the kickstarter patrons that called themselves [item=Green Circuit] are going to have a field day.

[JGomes]

I would like to give a small suggestion regarding to colors.

When placing stuff (assemblers, power poles etc), it would be good if the number indicating the stack amount changed color (to red or yellow, perhaps) when the item is near depletion.

[Aardwolf]

That looks neat! Just be careful if it is this powerful... someone will definitely find a bug like a way to fill someones entire screen with icons or crash due to missing texture or similar through chat

[mrudat]

Hmm. Given item ghosts, I'd suggest that dropping an item ghost/item into a text box pastes the icon; have a ui flow something like the following:

• Open an assembler window
• drag from an ingredient/product stack
[list]
• if it's empty (and has a built in filter to only accept one item type) you get a ghost of the item

[*]you can then drop that ghost/item into a text box to paste the icon.[/*]
[/list]

Anything else that contains icons should yield a ghost of that item when you drag it.

Hmm. Ghost of a lump of coal, causes a construction robot to drop a piece of coal on the ground where you place the ghost?

[Jap2.0]

A few things:

[*] Would [icon=item/copper-plate] sort under "[", "i", or "c"?
[*] Yes, please add easy ways to insert these into the chat - and not just something like a recipe selection box, but also ways for us to do things such as format the text and add coordinates (if that's implemented)
[*] Please do not autocorrect things like "iron plate" to [icon=item/iron-plate].
[*] Will inserting things from, well, however you implement easy-insertion of these things, show them as [icon=item/iron-plate] or just show the icon (I can see benefits to both)?

Thanks.

[Avezo]

Just make sure that when using icons on lists (like train schedule), they stay in-line and keep same vertical spacing with normal text.

[Chaoseed]

This is great stuff! Also, I especially love that a couple of save games are just named "Biter Biter Biter Biter" mushroom mushroom

[wren6991]

The icon tags are a little... verbose. Especially if we want it to be useful in chat.

Maybe give it its own syntax:

Code: Select all

{iron-plate}

rather than

Code: Select all

[icon=item/iron-plate]

Braces aren't commonly used so I don't think you're doing any harm by stealing the extra two characters.

Also, as others have said, perhaps take this as an opportunity to make your prototype names more consistent and concise and then publish a list of changes so that mod authors can just sed/awk their code instead of having to change it by hand

[Brathahn]

Oh boy, i can see the rainbows in the chat from here!

Also Really nice idea to link icons in blueprint names.

[wren6991]

Oh boy, i can see the rainbows in the chat from here!

Also Really nice idea to link icons in blueprint names.

Tell me you didn't write out those tags by hand