Ghost entities in 2.0 are hard to distinguish

[djungelorm]

TL;DR

Some ghost and real entities are very hard to distinguish by colour, making manually building a blueprint difficult. I think the graphics need to be tweaked to make this clearer.

What ?

Can you tell these assemblers apart by colour?

assemblers.jpg (154.14 KiB) Viewed 513 times

They are:

Top row: all assembler 2, Bottom row: two assembler 1 and an assembler 2 (on the right)

I suggest the graphics need to be tweaked to make these easier to distinguish. The blue hint added for ghosts hides the entities colour. Reducing the saturation of this blue might help. Maybe half way between what we have now, and the grey ghosts of 1.1?

Specifically, I find it hard to tell assemblers, inserters and logistics chests apart. Here are some images comparing 2.0 and 1.1. In 1.1 the difference is obvious, in 2.0 not so much. The assemler 1 and 2 look identical, and the assembler 3 is only slightly yellower. I find telling long handed and fast inserters apart quite difficult. Regular inserters and bulk inserters both look yellow. For logistic chests: the blue hint makes the active provider blue, and the passive provider purple!

factorio-2.0.jpg (141.82 KiB) Viewed 513 times

factorio-1.1.jpg (147.8 KiB) Viewed 513 times

Why ?

I think this is necessary because manually building a complex blueprint involving different kinds of assemblers/inserters is difficult. It is too easy to replace the ghost with the wrong entity (without mashing Q to use the dropper for every entity).

[BlueTemplar]

I doubt a reasonable compromise can be found in this case, how about instead a global setting (that can be also configured locally per-blueprint) ?

EDIT : Especially considering how it's also a performance issue on low-end computers :
viewtopic.php?p=621589

Also, for reference :
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-380
( Ctrl+F Ghost shader )

[djungelorm]

I'd be happy with a global setting to choose between the old or new appearance.

Thanks for the link to the FFF. For me personally, I find distinguishing entity types to be quite important, and didn't have a hard time spotting ghosts vs non-ghosts with the old visuals. But if this change is popular I'll happily concede! I agree finding a reasonable compromise may be impossible.

Re. distinguishing ghosts and non ghosts - a really clear way to do that would be to show an icon over them, similar to the icons used to identify entities missing items when using construction bots. This could be toggled with a keypress, or maybe toggled along with Alt mode. That would make the ghosts really obvious. If such a feature existed, then maybe the devs would be willing to make the colour differences for ghosts more obvious - as the icons would solve the issue of distinguishing ghosts and non-ghosts?

[BlueTemplar]

One issue might be that (IIRC) ghosts can have icons too... also might become even less readable with an icon overload ??

[Kyralessa]

This is the first time I ever noticed that the assemblers look different in any other ways than just color.

[Shadow_Man]

Yes, bring back 1.1 ghosts, make an options in the game settings for ghosts opacity and tint.

[coppercoil]

Possible solution: color differences (not all colors) can be expressed stronger in a blueprint.
For this, need to calculate average colors for all assemblers (inserters, chests etc), calculate difference with the required assembler type for each pixel. Larger difference -> larger opacity in the blueprint.

[Vulkandrache]

I am still just as floored as i was on the first announcement that this change made it into the game.
It what universe are the new blue ghosts clearer and better to see?

[Koub]

I am still just as floored as i was on the first announcement that this change made it into the game.
It what universe are the new blue ghosts clearer and better to see?

They may be harder to distinguish between ghosts of different but very similar buildings, but I absolutely prefer the new ones, because I can tell apart actual buildings from ghosts far more easily than with 1.1.

[SerAaron]

I am still just as floored as i was on the first announcement that this change made it into the game.
It what universe are the new blue ghosts clearer and better to see?

yeah they're how it looks by default in AAI industry/SE except you could toggle it off. Now it's part of the basegame and there's no toggle, and AAI industry no longer includes that option

everyday im checking for mods to revert this because they look so bad

[sunlis]

I tried to make a mod to fix this, but it's a bit tedious to find good color values since you have to restart the game to try new settings.
I have some example images in the repo's readme, but in the handful of settings I tried I wasn't able to get a satisfactory result.

https://github.com/Sunlis/ghost_tint_setting

Someone more motivated than I might be able to find a set of colors that does regain some contrast.

One thing that might be worth trying would be to clear out the "overlay_layers" list entirely rather than adjusting color values as I've done.

[Vulkandrache]

The red/blue swap is already miles better.
Now we just need to get rid of the distortion effect and i can look at ghosts again
without getting watery eyes.