Text plates

[eradicator]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Tesse11ation]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[NotRexButCaesar]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Tesse11ation]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[NotRexButCaesar]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Tesse11ation]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[NotRexButCaesar]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Tesse11ation]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[jodokus31]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Tesse11ation]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Deadlock989]

[Moderated by Koub : off topic]

[Loewchen]

I'll lock this until someone has time and ambition to untangle this.

[Koub]

[Koub] OK that was messy. If someone has something constructive and on topic to add to the thread, feel free to to so. Otherwise pass your way, or the thread will be locked for good.

[mmmPI]

This would make labelling areas of your base possible, and the letters should perhaps show on the map as simplified glyphs.

You can already label your base using the map view, adding icons, and texts. I think hoping for those text plate to show as simplified glyphs from map view is too ambitious, it seems impossible to me that something would show up bigger in the map view than it is in the game. And there are multiple zoom level on the map view, which makes it even harder to guarantee readability of those letters.

I think size variations should also be possible, so that labels for major areas of a base can be larger and smaller direction labels can be smaller. When I say label, I mean a row of placed characters of course, just like in the aforementioned mod.

It's true that there is only one size of label when using the map view, unless you want to USE CAPS LIKE THIS, which still makes it uneasy to read the more general name of an area when it's surrounded by many others label. ( ie: RAILWAY AREA (A) , Iron bay 1a, Iron bay 2a , copper bay 1a) Also the existing labels are quite big and when building compact you can lack space to place the needed/wanted notes.

In this context the concrete letters proposed by MassiveDynamic are answering the 1rst part, readibilty from map view, but also prevent annoting compact area.
The system proposed by Qon while more compact is not visible on map view, and with certain settings.

Using a combinaison of both isn't providing a perfect solution either.

I would love this, as it'd bring a lot to factory design and would especially be great on servers/multiplayer, where there may be new players joining who don't know their way around. text-plates is one of those must-have mods but if we could have an implementation in the base game, even better!

Apart for the aesthetic value in single player, there is a practical aspect to it, which is even more important in multiplayer. Not only one could think of this system to help players navigate the map, but also help organize teamwork, space and time planification, or even leave small message on a server. ( like a todoList. )

Another thing for which the ability to add text could help is annoting combinators contraption. Maybe in this latter case having the text as 1 entity for each letter (or 4 ) is a bad solution. Unless you are doing a huge complex design, where you could label "memory" "processor" "decoder" "encoder" and so on, otherwise it is not practical to use more entity to annote something than to build it.

The scale is different for all the uses mentionned, but maybe something (magical ? ) could solve all this at once. For now i'm using differents mods like text plates and attach notes i think it is enjoyable but those mods aren't amongst the most downloaded of all time despite their subjectively perceived usefulness. (the kind of thing people didn't know they needed before they had it ).

[Sad_Brother]

If someone has something constructive and on topic to add to the thread, feel free to to so.

If someone would be so kind to expand factorio logo to full font...
If someone would be so kind to split each letter to parts in order to decrease total parts count...
If someone would be so kind to add blueprint book to easier print proper signs...

I would be glad so see it in the game itself but it may be some mod instead.

[Impatient]

Shoutouts to the mods for getting this thread back on track.

On the topic:

Yes, I +1 the suggestion right away, as I would with every suggestion, which just adds something to the game without changing or taking anything away.

BUT on the meta level, which for me is to make labeling the base easier, I would prioritize some sort of sign entity.

Features of sign entity

- placeable entity
- some resemblance with a sign in the real world
- GUI has two input fields
- field 1 heading/summarization
- field 2 place for unlimited text ( like in blueprints now)
- text in field 2 can only be read when GUI of sign is opened
- heading text is displayed on the sign when GUI is closed ( sign would adapt it's size to accommodate text)
- additional checkbox in GUI for also displaying heading on map as map marker

[Deadlock989]

which just adds something to the game without changing or taking anything away.

But this is the point, isn't it. Factorio currently runs adequately on fairly low power computers and if you added hundreds of letter sprites to the atlas then you just made performance worse for a small number of people. Do you want to be the one that chooses who those people are? Mods, however, can do what they like with no goalposts moved. If a mod blows up your potato, that's just tough luck.

In other news I have figured out a way to get around the monospaced font limitation. These are proof-of-concept graphics, I'm not married to the style or the font yet, it was just for development. You can see that some characters (e.g. the punctuation) is much narrower than a tile.

Untitled.jpg (119.19 KiB) Viewed 3784 times

The basic gist is: have big blank plates that merge together when placed, allowing you to have arbitrary widths of in-world text fields. (You could do the same for height as well and have multi-line text but I don't really see the need for giant essays in your base.) Then clicking on any single plate lets you draw in letter sprites with the rendering API, and you know from your clever external scripts how wide each letter is in pixels, so the number of letters per tile can depends on the width of the letters used rather than sticking to a fixed number of letters per tile. Thanks to "ghost tags" you can even make them blueprintable.

Limitations:

- Large sprite atlas overhead (but actually slightly lower than the Text Plates mod because some characters are now narrower/smaller)
- No international language support unless you take the trouble to do it - i.e. no accents, umlauts, non-Roman alphabets. I'm not qualified to design for Cyrillic, Greek, Urdu alphabets. So I guess I can put another notch on my Anglocentric bedpost
- Kerning isn't factored in - this is when between-letter spaces are adjusted for specific letter pairs to stop them looking off - not touching that with a bargepole

A different approach that would be really light on the texture atlas would be to just use the text rendering API to write yer actual font onto the plates. That's a huge atlas saving but there are two big disadvantages. One is that a vector font can't be textured so it isn't ever going to look as interesting or "realistic" as a sprite. The other is that there is no way currently to know what the bounding box of a rendered font object is so no way of making sure it doesn't overrun the designated area apart from conservative best guesses.

Tedious stuff to solve which I will probably never get around to:

- What happens if you take a plate out of the middle, splitting a merged line of plates in half
- What happens in the opposite situation but both of the merged halves had their own text
- What happens when a biter eats the plate at the left side which contains the text data, destroying the whole sign, and your bots then rebuild it

etc. etc.

[Impatient]

... Do you want to be the one that chooses who those people are? ...

No, I don't want to be the one. And I am not. But still I say, I would like to have that in vanilla.

Is this a contradiction

Someone might reply, that this is an obvious contradiction. It is not. It would be, if I was part of the dev team and if I had knowledge about how many more sprites there can be in factorio and how much strain they put on a machine and that it was a fact, that those sprites put too much load on a machine. But nothing of that is true for me. I am viewing this request solely from the perspective of a user. I say what I would like, without caring about the technicalities. It is up to the game designers and programmers to decide if it makes sense from a design perspective and if it is justified when considering the technical implications. This is how feature requests work. And it is good that way. That separation of wish/request from evaluation and decision is a very important principle behind feature requests. Otherwise no one without knowledge about the game engine would be able to file a feature request. And those who have would be hampered to a larger or lesser extent to develop ideas by their constant evaluation of the technical implications. Deadlock, I think one of the reasons for your reaction to my opinion is, that you ran into exactly that trap. After all the modding you have done, you are thinking more like a developer than a user.

I did a quick search on the web for articles which back my view on the topic. Interestingly wikipedia has close to nothing dedicated on the topic of feature requests.

Thus here are two links to pages where companies explain their feature request process.

https://knowledgebase.agridigital.io/hc ... s-it-work-

https://inedo.com/open/feature-requests

It becomes very clear, that the customers have to make no assessment of the implications of their requests at all.

[Deadlock989]

It becomes very clear, that the customers have to make no assessment of the implications of their requests at all.

And that's why the hit rate of threads in this subforum is 7% or less.

[ssilk]

First Deadlock: awesome job. I like it.

And that the hit rate in this sub board is so low has many more reasons. But compared to similar boards I already was “in”, I think this one is astounding high.

I mean: there are the sticky posts here, they explain very detailed what’s a good suggestion an what’s not. But people make always the same mistakes. And besides that me or you cannot await that everyone has the needed technical background.

And in the end it doesn’t matter. When someone says “it’s not a good idea, but I still want it”, who am I that I challenge that wish? (Ok, sometimes I cannot resist, but during the years I tend to be much more comfortable with those opinions )