Friday Facts #280 - Visual Feedback is the king

[DanGio]

Really good changes

I love all of them, especially the toolbar, armor equipment toggling & how we'll learn features & shortcuts with this toolbar.

[m44v]

Great FF.

I'm going to add my support for a disable logistic request toggle.

[Sad_Brother]

My humble opinions:

"+Add wait condition" looks like placeholder. Any way to hide it? May be player could drag condition from some "palette".
Control-Click add temporary station. Like "move here" command. Could this key combination become "move here" command in other situations?
Map view centered on the current locomotive before dragging. You could keep it locked on locomotive while it still shown, keeping its relative position on screen. Just more options for players.
You skip disabled and unaccessible stations. But not unneeded currently stations (enough fuel for ex) and too busy stations (more trains move to it than can be served). It seems it will have to wait.
"The stop in different train system" should not be even counted in this particular system. Am I wrong?
"Visualisation of the AND/OR condition precedence". Is it really obvious for you? For me is not.
"Toggle personal roboport"... I hope it will collect all bots in off state, not to leave them uncontrolled.
"Toggle exoskeleton"... Add second leg, please. Strange icon imho.
"Let us know what other quick tools would you like to see added to that list". I think "Undo" should have "Redo" counterpart. Just in case.
You can make quickbar wider than 10 cells limit even if last cells would have no shortcuts.

Great efforts, thanks1

[B4SK3]

Always love reading the FFF. This time though, for the first time ever, my jaw dropped. I had to stop or I'd start drooling. LOVE this new UI already. Can't wait to start a new rail world!

[Gabrol]

Is it possible to add icons to train stop names?

[chris13524]

The visualization for the precedence levels make no sense to me. (and what the precedence is actually, I have no idea)

conditional stations

Does this mean that we would be able to dynamically add stations to the train or reprogram it (remotely?)? I'd like to see the ability to implement a logistic network (provider stations and receiver stations) with combinators.

[BHakluyt]

We can toggle personal roboports and exosuits... Awesome guys! Now just the spidertron and roboports for cars and my Factorio wishlist will be pretty much completed. You Factorio devs are really the most awesome people in the world!!!

[BHakluyt]

Is it possible to add icons to train stop names?

This was shown in an earlier FFF...I hope it's still happening...

[Jonathan88]

Toggle Personal Roboport....


I love you.

I didn't spot that the first time through... Factorio never fails to find more things to fix in an already perfect game!

[Klonan]

Is it possible to add icons to train stop names?

Yes:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-237

[QGamer]

Your idea to visually show and/or precedence is great!
But the UI you show is not so great. It is not obvious if the "or" falls in between the grouped areas or inside the second one.
The UI you had shown us is easier to understand, yes, but it is still not understandable enough.
Do something like this:

Mockup of something easier to understand

Factorio_Train_GUI_Mockup.png (62.15 KiB) Viewed 6367 times

I need some easy way to see where the groupings fall, and how the groups are nested.

Also: I just noticed: "passenger present" is a valid condition! That's pretty cool.
Thank you for taking the time to care about us players and our understanding of the game.

[Amarula]

Another amazing FFF! I am loving all the goodies announced today - 0.17 is going to be totally awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[Jonathan88]

You guys are absolutely amazing, these improvements are fantastic, so much more than anyone could expect. The new GUI looks amazing, I can't wait for the update.

You consistently surpass expectations, every area you improve works incredibly well. This is top notch work and you are creating something incredible.

+1 couldn't put it better myself

[GaryTsukla]

So, quick question... with the new checkpoint feature, does that mean that I could create a waiting station... where trains just wait... they don't do anything.

In the case where: if all stations on the route are closed (due to circuit conditions or whatever), then the train will just go to the checkpoint and wait there?

That might make for some interesting layouts. You could have an oil train that waits until a station has enough oil to pickup, before it heads over there... without having to wait in (and thereby blocking) the unloading station, it could wait at a checkpoint instead.

[Ghoulish]

Great to see the UI coming together in the recent FFF. I'm very happy you have added a toggle for the exoskeleton and roboport, it's such a needed feature

I'm itching to get my grubby little hands on 0.17, I guess there's a couple of people out there waiting too

[promarbler]

I think the "+" in the button text of the Train GUI should be bigger.

I also think that each station name and its wait conditions should be boxed together. If you glance in the middle of a train list, it looks rather ambiguous as to which station the conditions belong to.

Other than that, I like the improvements to the GUIs so far.

[Mike5000]

A lot of great work this week but I'm not so sure about this:

So we show the inaccessible train stops ... at the bottom of the list.

With train stops continually enabling and disabling the list is either going to be an obsolete snapshot or else stations are going to be jumping around in the list.

The color-coding is good but please have a single alphabetic sort of station names.

[KryptoNiteX]

A quick tool i've wanted for a really long time is ''Logistic Toggle''.
Just a simple button to tempoarily remove/disable logistic item requests, it's really annoying when i want to refill an outpost that is not connected to my larger logistic network, with walls, turrets and repair kits etc. the logistic robots i have at that outpost always fill them back into my inventory, which makes it pretty much impossible to refill the outpost, unless ofcourse im the flash (Hint; I'm NOT!)

A quick fix i've been using lately is this ''Logistic supply toggle'' mod, but you need to remember to toggle the requests back before quitting the save, otherwise all of your previous requests will be deleted, which is really not ideal.

So therefore i would love to see a button in the new tool bar with this function (that doesn't delete my requests upon forgettting to press the button before i quit & save).

[Loewchen]

If waypoints are just train stops, how do you address the penalty for driving through a train stop without having it in schedule? If you keep it as is, all trains without this waypoint would avoid the route.

[quyxkh]

What is the use case for waypoints? I've never felt like I needed to build one.

One is to make bypass routes for long, slow-accelerating trains. You can play combinator-and-signal games to get that effect but it's a pain, and near as I can tell can't be made to work at all if train length isn't the only criterion. Short trains can zoomzoom around and not worry much about intersections, long trains can't do that, you want them going around any hint of congestion not through it, with cross traffic never allowed to interfere. To make an express route, double (or more, depending on the length of the cross-traffic trains) the express train's braking distance, wire any cross traffic signals closed if anything in there's not green.

This update's going to be absurdly awesome. Still think it's polishing away too much, there's interesting texture and annoying rough spots and of course 'fI, 'fI Were King I'd make all those calls my way, but there's just so much awesome coming it pretty much drowns all that out.

@Loewchen, I think it's just "put not-that-waypoint stops on the other switch exits".