Simple Ship Drive

[erronius]

I would really like to have a "manual" ship drive mode, i.e. something like a dropdown menu where I can just select a destination and the ship/platform will go there and stay there. I know that it's possible to do this in the current UI, but I find myself sometimes forgetting to cancel the previous destination and my ship leaves me when I didn't want it to. I know automation is the watchword of the game, but exploring space does seem to have some reasons for manual control. Like, I have a fancy new fast spaceship and I want to take it everywhere. The current user experience is bad because it makes the very simple option (ship go THERE) more complicated than it needs to be.

TLDR: Manual space platform navigation feature, when enabled it will select destination from a list and go to there.

[AileTheAlien]

Maybe a button that adds a temporary stop, similar to CTRL-clicking when you're looking at a train? Then you wouldn't need a schedule.

[Lochar]

Run it as an interrupt, with Signal = [Planet] and leave condition is fish = 1337? Then just put a constant combinator on the ship, wire it up, and turn it on when necessary.

[erronius]

I'm not saying there aren't ways of doing this, of course. It just seems like it shouldn't involve weird circuit work to say "ship, go to Fulgora and stay"

[LCStark]

I'm not saying there aren't ways of doing this, of course. It just seems like it shouldn't involve weird circuit work to say "ship, go to Fulgora and stay"

You don't have to do any weird circuitry. Have empty schedule and use interrupts only:

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Or if you want to have a ship with a schedule, you add an empty circuit condition:

11-09-2024, 02-40-06.png (46.22 KiB) Viewed 422 times

I can see how that second one could look clunky, but I guess that's caused by wanting to have an automated ship but sometimes use it manually. Have a separate ship for manual travel and the first option is exactly the "go to and stay" you'd expect.

[erronius]

Thanks, I'll try out interrupts. However, my point very much remains.

Keep in mind there's a substantial number of players who have come back to the game recently who haven't even finished the base game of "launch a rocket". Those players (and even a lot of people with more experience) do not know what an "interrupt" is. It would be so much simpler and more intuitive to have something like a "manual drive" option where you just select a destination from a dropdown and it goes there.

[mmmPI]

I would really like to have a "manual" ship drive mode, i.e. something like a dropdown menu where I can just select a destination and the ship/platform will go there and stay there. I know that it's possible to do this in the current UI, but I find myself sometimes forgetting to cancel the previous destination and my ship leaves me when I didn't want it to.

You can use something like this with a dummy signal that you never provide so the ship never moves after a trip , and you just click the destination when you want to move :

manual.jpg (58.05 KiB) Viewed 331 times

[erronius]

I'm really not looking for further workarounds. This thread is to suggest the idea that there should be a VERY SIMPLE manual ship drive mode. If you don't agree, that's fine, feel free to post why this isn't a good feature to add to the game.

[mmmPI]

I'm really not looking for further workarounds. This thread is to suggest the idea that there should be a VERY SIMPLE manual ship drive mode. If you don't agree, that's fine, feel free to post why this isn't a good feature to add to the game.

I think there is no way to make it simpler than it currently is already, since you can create the dropdown menu yourself by placing the station in the schedule with condition that is never met

[LCStark]

What do you think about this:

11-09-2024, 19-22-55.png (9.3 KiB) Viewed 309 times

Add a "Go to" button to the "Stopped at X" window. If you click it, you get a dropdown list of planets. Clicking on one of them automatically adds the empty interrupt into the schedule.

[erronius]

To be honest I don't like anything to do with "interrupts". This is more of an advanced programming concept. I get that a lot of Factorio players are engineers/software devs (me included) but that's not everyone.

Edit: I don't like anything to do with interrupts *as a solution to this issue*. It's great that they exist to do interesting things for those who want to use them.

[LCStark]

This way the player wouldn't have to care about interrupts. They'd be automatically added to the schedule and if the player didn't want to interact with them, they wouldn't have to. They'd auto-add on go-to press and clear on reaching the target.

This has the added benefits of using a system that is already in place instead of having to spend time to develop something new, and if the player wanted to learn something about scheduling and interrupts, it would give them a way to observe something working first before trying to make one of their own.

[Koub]

I think there is no way to make it simpler than it currently is already, since you can create the dropdown menu yourself by placing the station in the schedule with condition that is never met

Haven't been able to play Space Age yet, so I don't know what the interface looks like for space platforms, but if it's more complicated than with the "Automatic/manual" switch from the locomotive menu, then there's a simpler way : a switch that sets the platform on manual until the switch is ... switched to Automatic.

2024-11-10 21_59_22-Window.jpg (26.62 KiB) Viewed 226 times

[mmmPI]

but if it's more complicated than with the "Automatic/manual" switch from the locomotive menu, then there's a simpler way

It's the same as "Automatic/manual" except it's called "Automatic/Paused thrust"

[erronius]

It actually works (as far as I can tell) the exact same way as trains, which is great in some ways. The new train logic is powerful and offers a lot of flexibility. However, there is no simple way to tell a train to just go to a particular station, short of doing things described here.

Here's why I think that works for trains but not for space platforms.

Most importantly, a train generally can't be destroyed on its way from one place to another. So there's no worry that if you send a train somewhere accidentally it might blow up on the way. Second, train trips are generally shorter in duration than trips between planets, so it's going to be easier to just call the train back to where you want it. Lastly, there could be dozens or hundreds of stops a train could potentially reach, whereas there are only... 7? possible destinations for a ship (and even those are unlocked/discovered).

[mmmPI]

I hope with some further progress it will become more clear that space platform are not meant to be destroyed more often than trains driven manually.

It is a good point to note that the limited number of possible destination for a space platform makes it easy to have a list of them in the schedule with a condition that won't be met, and just click it to drive the ship manually.