Friday Facts #240 - Factorio-data & Fast pipe replace

[Unknow0059]

Why has the pipe sprite for when you're placing them been the vertical version for so long? It's frustrating to look at.

It would be cool if it changed from vertical/horizontal based on the last one you used. If it were like that, it could even be done with corner ones.

[mathturtle]

...
I will say one quick not about the quick replace. It would be REALLY nice to have a hotkey(holding shift) to enable or disable quick replace (underground/splitter -> belt at least). When building complex structures with a lot of stuff around, it gets really annoying to have a belt move you and you replace half an underground, or when belt weaving, weaving the undergrounds, then running to place the belt quickly, to only replace the undergrounds just placed.

Its a nice feature to have, but having it always on has its own quirks.

An Upvote Button, my Kingdom for an Upvote Button! aka, Hotkey to enable/disable (CTRL?) please

+1

Can you add this please?

[deer_buster]

Someone just commented to me that they would like to see splitters and undergrounds replace belts, but not the other way around. I would definitely be happy with such a solution!

Yeah, you almost NEVER need it the other way, but almost always need to replace a belt with splitters/undergrounds....maybe a hotkey to enable the reverse...

[bripi]

I will add my "huzzah!" to the underground pipes fast-replace. It's an idea who's time has come.

I see a lot of people grumbling about fast-replace on belts, but let's face it: that's a *personal* control issue. Don't be so reckless with the mouse! Sure, you'll make mistakes, but that's the point of making mistakes, is learning from them. Laying down 50 belts only to slam thru your own splitter is on *you*, not the devs. Control yourself!

[Dev-iL]

What happens to the pipe contents during fast replace? Will they be lost or transferred to the new pipe?

[rldml]

FINALLY!!!

I've understood something about modding in factorio.

Now i can die in peace...

Greetings, Ronny

[Ojelle]

Someone just commented to me that they would like to see splitters and undergrounds replace belts, but not the other way around. I would definitely be happy with such a solution!

Yeah, you almost NEVER need it the other way, but almost always need to replace a belt with splitters/undergrounds....maybe a hotkey to enable the reverse...

I second that! Or make it an option! Lovely in one way, hatefull in the other.

[miturion]

Yes, I am not a fan of the fast replace either. Not for belts and especially not for pipes. My refineries are a very dense area of pipes. Having to pay attention to not accidentally replace a pipe is a nightmare for me. having to drain an entire pipeline is no fun.

It's not even the accidentally replacing of belts/pipes, but the fear of doing it wrong so I have to dubble check. Especially in multiplayer where there is always a bit of lag.
So in the end it does not even make it faster. This is definately not a QoL improvement for me.

The suggestion to let splitters replace belts but not the other way around, and underground pipes replacing straight ones but not the other way around sounds a big improvement to me.

[Lubricus]

Thinking about fast replace pipes some more. It could be quite bad, fast replace a underground pipe with a normal pipe have a big risk to make the pipe auto-connect where it shouldn't and mix fluids. Then you have to place pumps and tanks to clean the pipe or delete everything and restart the building.

It's quite common that i place underground pipes where normal pipes would have auto-connected where they shouldn't and mixed fluids.

[Sir3n]

It would be REALLY nice to have a hotkey(holding shift) to enable or disable quick replace (underground/splitter -> belt at least).

I HOPE very much that there will be a toggle-off option

I agree that dragging long lines of belts can get annoying at times with fast replace. I actually use the mod Belt Legacy to avoid screwing over my belt system when dragging long lines of belt at crazy speeds with full exoskeleton suits on concrete. By the time i realise i ran into some splitter or underground belt of some kind, its kinda too late.

I think the best solution for this is to make fast replace work like so:
Dragging will try to keep whatever belt/splitter/underground belt that is in place the same but of the speed you are holding. Clicking actually replaces the same way fast replace works currently in the game.

Note the cursor start position in the image where i try to illustrate what i mean:

Belt.png (2.61 MiB) Viewed 7425 times

Basically, whatever you click has the current fast replace applied to it, everything else you drag onto will keep underground belts and splitters the same but upgrades / downgrades the colour.

The same would work if you held a splitter in hand:
If you click the splitter on a belt, you replace that particular belt section. Anything else you drag the splitter onto will remain whatever they were, with the colour changing to match your splitter.

Whatever you click onto is important. After that you can freely drag down the belt line and not screw up your whole base.

I believe this makes the most sense for what you do most often in the game.

As a side note, underground belt fast replace could use some fine tuning. I mean, look at this:

Belt4.png (886.95 KiB) Viewed 7415 times

I have a mod that aligns the underground belt length with the standard bus of 4 lanes per group so the image is not perfectly accurate but similar behaviour happens regardless of the mod. Trying to drag fast replace underground belt results in horrible belting.

----

For pipes, it looks like it will be rather simple and straightforward since there are only 2 types of pipes: underground and regular. This should be a good change but i think i will have to see the actual effects in game before i solidify my opinion of pipe fast replace.

The potential for issues to arise from pipe fast replace as far as i can tell is if new underground pipes are added later on that have different lengths, similar to underground belts having different lengths.

[Daid]

I don't understand what changed with the prototypes. When I go to the 'Factorio\data\base\prototypes' directory I see them all there.

Nothing has changed, except for the fact that they setup an online location where tools can use/reference them directly. Which is great news for people that build offline and online tools, as before, they had to work with the files directly from the game or from the headless server. Which is kinda harder to setup.

It also makes it easier to reference things when helping people on the forums. For example, if someone has an question about the framethrower, instead of trying to explain where to find the data of it, you can now just link this: https://github.com/wube/factorio-data/b ... gun.lua#L7

Doesn't sound like much, but it's easier, automated, and endorsed by the team.

[Oktokolo]

I like the repo on GitHub. That allows creation of online and offline references and tools without infringing copyright. Wube might be the first commercial game studio to have the balls for such a repo.


Regarding belt/pipe replacement: Common knowledge in UX design is to not have too much options because most users tend to be overwhelmed rather quickly when facing a long list of options in the settings dialog. But Factorio is a rather complex game limiting its user base to people who are generally assumed to be able to customize multiple pages of options to their liking without feeling overwhelmed.
So for this game: If you can provide an options tweaking a behaviour and there might be people who would like to customize that behaviour - then provide options to tweak it.

For the case of belt replace, yes/no choices might not really cut it.
A hotkey for toggling the functionylity as a whole would be a good start. But beeing able to customize what might get replaced would be great too. Some would like to never replace undergrounds and only replace splitters that only have at most one input and one otput connected.

Options tweaking the feature for replacing stuff with belts or pipes might look like that:
Replace underground belts with dragged belts: [ never | orphaned | all V]
Replace splitters with dragged belts: [ never | if less than 2 inputs/outputs connected | always V]
Replace underground pipes with dragged pipes: [ never | orphaned | all V]

[Sander_Bouwhuis]

I don't understand what changed with the prototypes. When I go to the 'Factorio\data\base\prototypes' directory I see them all there.

Nothing has changed, except for the fact that they setup an online location where tools can use/reference them directly. Which is great news for people that build offline and online tools, as before, they had to work with the files directly from the game or from the headless server. Which is kinda harder to setup.

It also makes it easier to reference things when helping people on the forums. For example, if someone has an question about the framethrower, instead of trying to explain where to find the data of it, you can now just link this: https://github.com/wube/factorio-data/b ... gun.lua#L7

Doesn't sound like much, but it's easier, automated, and endorsed by the team.

Aha, ok. Thanks for the explanation.

[ownlyme]

feels like you are keeping all those cool features from us...
release 0.17 already

[einstein9073]

realize I'm late with this, but I just reread last weeks' FFF and had something to contribute. In association with the quality-of-life improvements with belts and underground belts and pipes and underground pipes, can you please improve the user experience with power poles?

If I have some belts in my hands and click-and-drag, Factorio places a belt on each tile I drag over.
If I have some power poles in my hand and click-and-drag, Factorio helpfully places a string of poles at their max range so I have a continuous power wire to my destination.
If I have some belts in my hands and shift-click-and-drag, Factorio (correctly) places a ghost belt on each tile I drag over.
If I have some power poles in my hand and shift-click-and-drag, Factorio (incorrectly) places a ghost pole on each tile I drag over.

Please have the power pole shift-drag behavior act with the same intelligence as the click-and-drag.
I would expect to see a tentative line of pole ghosts form from the start of drag to the cursor, placed and finalized when I release the cursor; but having them behave the same way as normal placement would be fine.

[jcranmer]

Personally, I'd rather more like to see the code that parses the data lua instead of the data lua itself. While it's easy to get a Lua parser stuck on the data, the more annoying part is getting the logic right to properly read in mods (in order, and with the right execution environment), and the especially annoying part is figuring out what data is important. Things like knowing which tables are children of item so you can properly list all items, or understanding all the ways you can specify ingredients of a recipe.