TL;DR
I find myself straining to find items within a grid by their tiny icon. What about a more text-based approach?What ?
The GUI is heavily invested in the "grid of icons" ui element. Examples:- your equipment grid
- the crafting recipes grid
- your logistics grid
- you trash slots grid
- the trunk space grid of a vehicle
etc etc etc
but perhaps there might be an alternate textual UI. Specifically, a scrolling, searchable, text list (with a larger font size!) rather than grid of icons.
Your equipment grid might look something like
Code: Select all
ITEM AMOUNT ICON
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Copper ore 50 WOODEN CHEST ICON
2) Copper ore 3 IRON CHEST ICON
3) Iron ore 3 REPAIR PACK ICON
Code: Select all
ITEM CAPACITY ICON
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Logistics/wooden chest 3 WOODEN CHEST ICON
2) Logistics/iron crate 3 IRON CHEST ICON
3) Production/Repair pack 3 REPAIR PACK ICON
Why ?
I get fatigued by visually searching through icon grids, especially the "trunk" space of vehicles and the logistics grid. The equipment grids and crafting recipes are a little better, because at least they keep their order and can be searched. But the trunk space of vehicles and the logistic grid have no sort-iness so it's just a mess trying to find what you are looking for. The logistic grid is even worse because it has teeeny tiny numbers over the icons, many of which differ only in color. This problem compounds as mods are added, many of which recycle art assets with a shade of color to distinguish the new icon.I really love Factorio but, as someone who spends a lot of time writing code, it's important that I'm not literally hurting my eyes trying to read the UI. I'm sure the designers are aiming for a mouse-driven, non-scrolling, graphical UI but IMHO Factorio is just way to complex for that paradigm. The icons are just too similar, too small and too numerous to discern between and often font sizes are so small I must resort to holding my laptop screen 6 inches away from my face, especially as I start to fade from a late night binge session. And these are not the only places where exceptionally tiny text or icons cause me to strain- the statistics on the production menu charts are too tiny for me to read easily- but these are the cases that cause me the most grief.
In summation, if I am going to play factorio into the wee hours ( and you know I will!) I need a UI that causes less eye strain.
I have searched for a mod that might accommodate this need but I suspect this is outside the purview of modding. If I am wrong please let me know, because I would love to implement it if it's possible.