Friday Facts #318 - New Tooltips

[pleegwat]

Could you post a tooltip example of a complicated recipe with multiple items, such as the uranium processing one?

[conn11]

I do very much like the new style and the cleaned up informations, looking forward how they do fit in the overall game. Maybe by linking related tooltips (e.g. roboport and powerarmor) we can establish some kind of in game factoriopedia for uninterrupted factory growth.

[EnerJi]

@Twinsen Have you thought that with the multi-tooltip solution for several recipes + mods or GUI above 100% in relatively small resolutions (1080), it could happen that the tooltips get taller than the height of the screen? As they are tooltips that appear on hover, you cannot hover them to scroll them.

I'd suggest that in that case user scroll wheel movements are intercepted (avoiding other interactions like watching your inventory in the map view to change map zoom) and redirect them to scroll such tooltip.

Please don't do auto-scroll!

HTH

I second all of this. I currently play on a laptop with the UI set to 200%, and I would prefer to play at 225%, except too many tool tips get cut off at the bottom of the screen. These new tool tips look great, but if it results in more of them getting cut off the screen that will actually be a step back in terms of usability.

I wonder if you have data on how many people play at what monitor size, resolution, and UI size? When I loaded up the Factorio demo for the first time, everything was so small that I could not even find a setting to increase the font size. I had to resort to Google in order to discover that there was a setting that increases text size, which helped immensely. Without that setting I would not be able to play Factorio (and would not have purchased it).

(Side note: I did not make the connection that the "UI size" setting would increase text size. I was looking for a setting which said "font size" or "text size" or something more along those lines.)

Thanks.

[irbork]

Steam engines will have max temperature of the Steam. That means you cannot connect them to heat exchanges any more. Will they blow up if you connect them anyways?

[Twinsen]

But please. For the love of god. Consistent capitalization!

Yeah, this one was tricky. In order to properly support mods, I have to use entity names or fuel type names. They are capitalized. I decided that forcing lowercase is too hacky and adding an uncapitalized translation for every entity is overkill.

[Inglonias]

The new tooltips are gorgeous. Job well done.

Tile batching is also really nice. I had to wait a good long while just to concrete over my nuclear reactor in my last factory.

I also agree with enabling batch construction for belts. At least a good thing to try.

[Boogieman14]

Apart from belts, I'd imagine walls could also be a likely candidate for batching.

[VuiMuich]

I don’t know how expensive this might get with really big blueprints, but what about fracturing a blueprint internally into chunks withe the amount of bots varying size entities of the same entity.
This could happen on blueprint creation and be stored in the blueprint so it’s only expensive once.

Plus (could probably get expensive with massive bot numbers) a bot could check against a threshold vs. available bots in a certain radius on item pickup it it is sane to stock up and do all alone or team up.

[Mooncat]

Since you are talking tooltips, I have just added a suggestion regarding the tooltip for ammo slots, hope you can review it: Show acceptable ammo on ammo slot just like fuel slot

[Unknow0059]

As a relatively inexperienced Factorio player, the tooltips will significantly make gameplay better in terms of understanding entities.

[gGeorg]

Standardization of tooltips is great.
However they look now a bit overcrowded. So much information and numbers could repulse new player(s).

Is it possible to make a newbie friendly tooltip, and the proper(proposed) hardcore one?
Is it possible to re-think value of some information? (althou is interesting know the total power of the grid, is it needed to show on every generator? ; althou is interesting to know angle speed of an inserter - user would be more interested in thrutput per second)

When you play with load of the robots,
- did you solve the issue of the unpredictable oversupply by robots?
Example: Set a request box for one coal, you receive anything from 1 to 50 (about) coal. It would be sooo great for tuning of supply systems if you can relay that you get what you asked for.
- did you solve the issue of removing logistic robot's cargo from the logistic network warehouse system?
(this one is real killer for robot based islends, like deliver on demand outposts)

Keep swiming

[Charidan]

I'm unsure of what the "standard" use case for bots is considered to be if you assume that entities aren't being built next to each other. The main thing I use bots for is placing solar panels and batteries in big clumps.

I can understand limiting the "vision" range of bots (no sense trying to batch builds on opposite sides of a base) but if you gave them a constrained radius of maybe 1 to 2 times the width of the entity being placed, or maybe just 10 tiles because some entities in mods are huge, it should remain relatively efficient.

You also don't need to sample every tile: because the entities are not 1x1 you can use Battleship logic to sort a checker pattern etc to see if it contains a ghost. This logic could easily be overcomplicated and lose its effectiveness, so probably a naive look at the smaller of width and height and picking the top left corner of each "square slot" of that size is an acceptable acceleration.

I would really enjoy if bots could build my solar panels faster than one at a time.

------------

Related: Do bots currently batch deconstruction? I'm thinking specifically deconstructing forests could be a candidate for batching.

[IanRaven]

How will multiple output recipes tooltips look like? Or recipes that involve probability?

[purdueme91]

If you guys are polishing up the GUI, I want to add this as a suggestion.

With electricity, you never know what your surplus or deficit is currently running. You just have a yellow bar that you have to guess how many steam engines to add and it never seems to be enough. Or how much demand can I add without expanding power. So you just double it which is not so easy with some of the more complex mods.

Seems like you could make it a lot cleaner and understandable with a digital readout of 3-4 values: Current demand, current supply, max supply (or surplus/deficit). Not sure how you would figure max demand.

[seludovici]

Will the new batch tile building also apply to landfill?

[BattleFluffy]

I love the new tooltips, and the way the information is all organized together into categories. :>
Tile batching looks awesome!

[factoriouzr]

Since you guys are working on the GUI, can you please fix up the blueprint library. It has so many bugs. You can't put blueprints into the library at the position you want, and they just go to the bottom as an example. Makes it really hard to work with the blueprint library and get any type of organization.

See the following for more information:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=77064

[Deadlock989]

Since you guys are working on the GUI, can you please fix up the blueprint library. It has so many bugs. You can't put blueprints into the library at the position you want, and they just go to the bottom as an example. Makes it really hard to work with the blueprint library and get any type of organization.

See the following for more information:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=77064

Change the record mate.

[Jap2.0]

First off, this is amazing. All of it.

Now, my few bits of feedback:
- Why moving consumption and not drain for bots?
Nevermind, I'm confusing myself by knowing too much: I assume "Moving consumption" is drain (energy/s) + consumption (energy/tile)?
- While we're on tooltips: can we please get resistance back on some items? Walls, in particular?
- "Current" or "used" output might be more clear than just "power output", I'm not sure.
- I agree that the offshore pump looks kind of inconsistent with the rest: none of the rest have resource icons, and to follow them it would have "generates water" (although I don't think generates would be the best word there).

[jamiechi1]

but in game you will notice that they are slightly transparent and the also have a blurring effect

Please, please if that's anything like MSWindows™ Aero Glass add a "not transparent" setting somewhere. It has horrible readability for my shitty eyes.

Other than that the tooltips look really nice! I hope moddability of tooltips is also considered.

We've been using transparency with blurry background in the technology GUI tooltips for a while now. If your eyes have no problem in the tech tree, they won't have a problem anywhere else.

I have issues with transparency in the entire game. There really does need to be an option to completely disable it.