Friday Facts #318 - New Tooltips

[BlueTemplar]

[...]
Very interesting. I'm brand new to the game, so I'm curious, did the default text size decrease in 0.17 compared to earlier versions? If so, I wonder why they would do that?
[...]

(For settings text at least) While the upper case height stayed at 10 pixels, the lower case seems to have gone down from 8 to 7 :

That's only a -12.5% difference, but it seems to have a disproportionate effect if you were borderline like me ?
(You can try out the old versions yourself : https://factorio.com/download)

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[...]
the ratio for nuke power heat exchanger of 103/s fluids is a bit confusing. the 6x exchangers to 10 turbines is the closest ratio. and will probably be the common for small ratio reactors. although the use of the wiki will probably still be common place with the strange ratio.
[...]

Hey, who said that nuclear power was supposed to be easy ?

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[...]
as for upgrading tiles, i have successfully placed a blueprint for concrete to replace bricks by simply shift clicking, and the robots pickup the brick and place the concrete, with out the use of the upgrade planner, even though it might make sense to use it, it doesn't work the same with tiles as entities.

That's only one use-case. Also, it's inconsistent with how the other *prints do work on tiles.

[Illiou]

[...]
Very interesting. I'm brand new to the game, so I'm curious, did the default text size decrease in 0.17 compared to earlier versions? If so, I wonder why they would do that?
[...]

(For settings text at least) While the upper case height stayed at 10 pixels, the lower case seems to have gone down from 8 to 7 :
[img]
[img]
That's only a -12.5% difference, but it seems to have a disproportionate effect if you were borderline like me ?
(You can try out the old versions yourself : https://factorio.com/download)

When I first opened up 0.17 I was also quite disappointed by the font legibility. It had seriously worsened compared to 0.16. It seems like the smaller size is only part of the reason, the other thing I noticed is that the render quality degraded. There is a lot of things (magic almost) that go into making text legible at these small sizes with so few pixels available for each letter, like aligning text to the pixel grid, subpixel rendering, proper kerning and also just the font itself. And it seems like 0.17 doesn't do that very well, for example a lot of the vertical lines are kinda between pixels.
Then again size and rendering quality are probably connected here since the smaller the size the more crucial those rendering tricks become for the text to stay readable.

Achieving this in a game is probably not trivial but I would certainly like to see improvements to the font rendering quality/size. I actually wanted to open a thread regarding this after 0.17 came out but I haven't played 0.17 much so far, so I forgot.

(And I should mention that I have perfect eyesight and don't need glasses -- the default size is still not comfortably readable)

[kbk]

Last another inconsistency: Consumption is "41.2/s of 60/s". But Health is "200/200". Steam output is "41.2/s of 60/s". But Power output is "618 kW / 900 kW". Shouldn't they all use "of" to be consistent across the board?

Health should also get a bar, I guess, and since tooltips are now quite verbose on what's what Consumption and Output could both be renamed to some universal term like Rate and done with string templates like 'Rate: $count/$max [$itemname] per second' or 'Rate: $count of $max [$itemname] per second'. Driving everything under one ruleset also looks best to me.

[Illiander42]

Lets not forget the multi-output recipes in all this, shall we?

[alefu]

Can we have item stack size in tool tips please?

[ashkante]

You guys are hands down the best game studio I've seen yet.
I figure I've gifted over 20 copies of Factorio over the years and everyone I've gifted it to loves the game!
The amount of thought and polish being applied here (consistently!) is mind boggling.

Please don't stop!

[TheRaph]

Just now my idea to let bots do more than one job:

As far as I know the object to be build (maybe a belt) searches for a free c-bot to do the job. (I've had read that in this forum times ago.)

As far I've learned, there is kind of a list with entities to be build. Every tick a limited amount of objects from this list would assign to a bot to do the job.

I don't know how you solved it, but I think there is also kind of a list with free bots and coordinates, so it could be checked which one is the nearest.

Now imagine to set up a separate list for every item type which is buildable AND stackable. Every bot which has start a job and currently no item inside will be swaped to that list (depending an which item to obtain and build). So if an object should be build, it will first search its own list, and than the "free bot"-List. the nearest bot will be chosen.

Example:
16 belt-tiles and 4 inserters are placed by blueprint.
Limit ist 10 bot assigns per tick. (Its not true but just for example.)
100 bots are available in near robo port.
The first belt searches for a bot. First ist searches the "belt bot list" which is empty.
Then it searches the "free bot list" and chose the nearest free bot.
This bot will get the job and swap on "belt bot list".

The second belt searches for a bot. First it searches the "belt bot list" and find a bot, which can do a second task in the same job.
Then it searches the "free bot list" and gets a free one. Booth are in the same far away, so it chose the first one from "belt-bot-list"
This bot will get the second task.

Same for third and fourth belt piece.
Now the first bot is full and will be deleted from "belt bot list" because it isn't free anymore.

An equal thing will going on for 5th to 8th belt and a second bot.

And then 9th and 10th belt will assigned to 3rd bot.

Tick end here and bots start to move.

Next tick.
The 11th belt will search for a bot. It finds one in belt-list and one in free-list (the 3rd one in this example).
But as the 3rd bot has moved one tick its further away than that one in free-list. So it chose the free-list one (4th bot).

12th to 14th belt will find the 4th bot too and chose it.

15th and 16th belt together will chose a new bot (5th one).

The 4 insertes will not search in belt-list instead they search in inserter-list and choose bot number 6.

That means it is one search more per object to be build, but will save FPS on other place, because of less bots moving.


There may be an extreme corner case where you have only one free bot and two similar things to build far away from each other.
So this one bot will be chosen for booth tasks. It start to get two items travel to one end of map to build first object and then travel to other end to build second object.
Meanwhile there would be an second bot available, but not chosen, because job is already assigned.
But that's a corner case ... and it already is present now, because sometime I've to wait until a far away bot will cut down a tree, the constructing bot with Item has also to wait ...

[dRaMaTiC]

@Devs: Wow! That tile batching is so much better. I like the tooltips too! Thanks for that fridayfact... and

Tile batching!

rofl! Made my day!! Thx

[Reika]

Something I want to say about the entity tooltips, specifically for fluid, in regards to this image:


Please tell me that the "exact amounts" of fluid contents are still shown for entities, not just a fill bar. So for example I can see that a storage tank has exactly 227.4 units of liquid, or that a refinery has 0.3 units of oil in the input.

Two of the entities you showed - boiler and steam engine - do not have this, and I am not sure if that is a specific change to those two entities, or a more global change.

The offshore pump in that image (and all current tooltips prior to this FFF) have the kind of thing I mean.

The reason this matters is twofold.
Firstly, knowing the exact amount allows us to ensure that we never mine up a pipe or other entity that contains more than what we consider an "acceptable loss". In cases where fluid spillage has other effects - like with one of my mods, which makes fluid spillage often severely polluting and sometimes dangerous - the desire to avoid such spillage is even stronger.
The second reason is that watching the "Rate of change" of the fluid level gives some indication as to how a setup is performing. I often identify issues by noticing, for example, that the input fluidboxes on a chem plant only go up by 15 units/s when the output is going down at 25 units/s.

[Twinsen]

Please tell me that the "exact amounts" of fluid contents are still shown for entities, not just a fill bar. So for example I can see that a storage tank has exactly 227.4 units of liquid, or that a refinery has 0.3 units of oil in the input.

Storage tanks, pipes and a few other entities still show the amounts. For boilers and steam engines it's not very useful(or arguably not useful at all) and it was competing with other more relevant information.

[Reika]

Please tell me that the "exact amounts" of fluid contents are still shown for entities, not just a fill bar. So for example I can see that a storage tank has exactly 227.4 units of liquid, or that a refinery has 0.3 units of oil in the input.

Storage tanks, pipes and a few other entities still show the amounts. For boilers and steam engines it's not very useful(or arguably not useful at all) and it was competing with other more relevant information.

I can understand it not being very useful and thus hidden on boilers and steam engines, but your phrasing ("these few, plus a few others, still show them") implies there are more entities that no longer show such values. Do you happen to have a list of which entities do or do not show them?

[MrBadDragon]

Yay, this will make paving large areas so much more pleasant!

For bluprinted entities, could the reservation of multiple jobs per bot be done more efficiently as well?
First bot to get a job to place an entity checks if there are any others in the same blueprint and grabs as many as possible.
Blueprints are often relatively limited in size and scope of the item types placed, but also likely repetitive, so maybe there are some benefits to this?

I second this. Typically bots either pave the ground, or assemble blueprints which makes perfect sense. I would be happy with batch building if it only existed on new blueprints, however the trade-off must come when your entities are spaced in blueprints. Maybe start with things like inserters and belts which typically have neighbours?

[Sloppyjosh]

Perhaps combine the bot improvements with the closest first mod?

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ClosestFirst

[foamy]

The tile batching looks really nice. Looking forward to seeing it in-game and I hope it can be extended; one of the nice side effects might wind up being less robots in general to worry about if the robots you have can operate more efficiently.

Although I thought module insertion did already make use of robot cargo capacities? If not it's certainly a prime candidate.

[MicFac]

The tooltips look great!
I think there should definitely be a tooltip on recipes with catalysts (I think that's only Coal Liquefaction and Kovarex Enrichment Process in vanilla) saying that they have catalysts and what that means.
Also it might be useful having a tooltip that shows when productivity modules can be used on a recipe. Maybe that tooltip could "unlock" when modules are researched.

[gGeorg]

Please tell me that the "exact amounts" of fluid contents are still shown for entities, not just a fill bar. So for example I can see that a storage tank has exactly 227.4 units of liquid, or that a refinery has 0.3 units of oil in the input.

Storage tanks, pipes and a few other entities still show the amounts. For boilers and steam engines it's not very useful(or arguably not useful at all) and it was competing with other more relevant information.

When I design the new Atomic power plant, I need to check the amount of water in the particular heater. Becouse of water supply shortage and water flow mechanic. I would say its quite important for creating new designs see the actual status of the entitities.

[Katharsas]

Playing on peaceful should disable all health tooltip information. Maybe even in general for anything that is not walls or turrets. Since you cannot really tank attacks with other building's health anyway.

[BlueTemplar]

Ah, but you totally can !

[mrvn]

Playing on peaceful should disable all health tooltip information. Maybe even in general for anything that is not walls or turrets. Since you cannot really tank attacks with other building's health anyway.

You can still drive into things or shoot them. Next peaceful only means aliens won't attack first. And even if you disable aliens other players might attack you (multiple forces for player-vs-player). And last mods might have pollution or nuclear radiation cause damage.

[mrvn]

Something I want to say about the entity tooltips, specifically for fluid, in regards to this image:


Please tell me that the "exact amounts" of fluid contents are still shown for entities, not just a fill bar. So for example I can see that a storage tank has exactly 227.4 units of liquid, or that a refinery has 0.3 units of oil in the input.

Two of the entities you showed - boiler and steam engine - do not have this, and I am not sure if that is a specific change to those two entities, or a more global change.

The offshore pump in that image (and all current tooltips prior to this FFF) have the kind of thing I mean.

The reason this matters is twofold.
Firstly, knowing the exact amount allows us to ensure that we never mine up a pipe or other entity that contains more than what we consider an "acceptable loss". In cases where fluid spillage has other effects - like with one of my mods, which makes fluid spillage often severely polluting and sometimes dangerous - the desire to avoid such spillage is even stronger.
The second reason is that watching the "Rate of change" of the fluid level gives some indication as to how a setup is performing. I often identify issues by noticing, for example, that the input fluidboxes on a chem plant only go up by 15 units/s when the output is going down at 25 units/s.

I figure anything that displays an items icon (like the water drop on the offshore pump) will also show the amount over the icon (again like the offshore pump).

For the boiler and steam engine (and the like) why not show the amount too like this?

consumes-water.png (9.67 KiB) Viewed 6904 times

The hight of the icon seems about 2 lines of text so nothing is lost there. Worst case the tooltip gets a bit wider but screens are wider than high so there should be plenty of space there.