Factorio Forums

The new GUI looks... fantastic. I'd say more but it wouldn't do justice to how good it is.

Have a few thoughts about this one (didn't read through all 7 pages of posts before writing this, so some or all of this could already have been mentioned):

1st: I'd love to have the option to switch GUI's (I don't know how GUI-Elements are implemented, so i don't know how difficult this would be), especially with Trains.
Why?
Well, when playing Angels/Bobs/SpaceX you have quite a lot Train Stations to scroll through (I just made it to electronic circuit boards and i already got ~100 Train Stations), and the new Design seems to be harder to scroll through really fast, since there are less stations shown at once.

2nd: Besides my 1st, i love how it looks (I just don't care much for the looks in this game^^)

3rd: Love the temporary feature. Would love it even more if i could get the LTN features and a PAX-Feature (some button and the nearest train drives to me and let's me get in to drive somewhere) in vanilla.

4th: I personally think, this shouldn't be implemented before the high-res textures are all in. As stated in 2nd, i love how it looks - but i think it is two different styles ("cheap looking complex game" and "Comic style complex game") which don't go that well together.

5th: As partially stated in one: It would be great to have a low and high-res version to choose from (ideally in-game switch, but separate installs would be fine by me too).

player8472 wrote:Have a few thoughts about this one (didn't read through all 7 pages of posts before writing this, so some or all of this could already have been mentioned):

1st: I'd love to have the option to switch GUI's (I don't know how GUI-Elements are implemented, so i don't know how difficult this would be), especially with Trains.
Why?
Well, when playing Angels/Bobs/SpaceX you have quite a lot Train Stations to scroll through (I just made it to electronic circuit boards and i already got ~100 Train Stations), and the new Design seems to be harder to scroll through really fast, since there are less stations shown at once.

2nd: Besides my 1st, i love how it looks (I just don't care much for the looks in this game^^)

3rd: Love the temporary feature. Would love it even more if i could get the LTN features and a PAX-Feature (some button and the nearest train drives to me and let's me get in to drive somewhere) in vanilla.

4th: I personally think, this shouldn't be implemented before the high-res textures are all in. As stated in 2nd, i love how it looks - but i think it is two different styles ("cheap looking complex game" and "Comic style complex game") which don't go that well together.

5th: As partially stated in one: It would be great to have a low and high-res version to choose from (ideally in-game switch, but separate installs would be fine by me too).

Full HD is planned for 0.16, this is planned for 0.17.

.

I am a little late to the party... I don't know if those have been asked (7 pages are a lot to read) but...
Suggestion 1: Option to name/rename trains, just like stations it would be nice to name them for their purpose and/or sort them in the "list" of trains.
Suggestion 2: Like our beloved KoS always mumble, there should be a way to set filters clicking and dragging inside the wagons.

Unrelated: Are loops still evil?
Totally unrelated: Can we get faster long handed inserters too? haha
We love you devs, and your game, of course. hahahaha

It would be great if...

We could change the default wait condition parameters, maybe allow for shift copy/paste within the UI. I rarely use the default wait condition setup.

First off I would like to add my voice to the idea of having stations and wait conditions be Drag & Droppable. The borders of the icons used for stations and wait conditions, as well as how they sit relative to one another in the list in the UI examples, leads me to assume that they are able to be switched around using drag & drop. If that is not something you intend on implementing you may want to change the UI so as to not lead players to that assumption.

Secondly, I would suggest a check box for displaying stations not on the network. I regularly will have 15+ rail networks with at minimum 5 stations each. While having the non-network stops indicated, I still need to scroll through 75+ stations to find the one I am looking for. Being able to check a box on the train UI and have only the stops on the network be displayed would be so so helpful.

Finally, something that has never made sense to me was that only departure settings can be set on a train yet both arrival and departure settings can be set at a specific station. When setting up my trains, if I could set conditions for when a train will travel to a specific station, that would be very helpful. Now, I know that this can kind of be achieved through combinators and circuit conditions. However, I would have to program every train to go to every station and have it then leave immediately if the circuit condition is met. Or I can disable the station for all trains, so No train could go to that station until the circuit condition is met. I would rather be able to program a train to only go to specific stations if specific conditions are met.

As it is now:
Train 1
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 Wait until Iron Plate > 5,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 Wait until Iron Plate > 4,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 Wait until Iron Plate > 3,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 Wait until Iron Plate > 2,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Train 2
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 Wait until Iron Plate > 2,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 Wait until Iron Plate > 5,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 Wait until Iron Plate > 4,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 Wait until Iron Plate > 3,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Train 3
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 Wait until Iron Plate > 3,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 Wait until Iron Plate > 2,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 Wait until Iron Plate > 5,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 Wait until Iron Plate > 4,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Train 4
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 Wait until Iron Plate > 4,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 Wait until Iron Plate > 3,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 Wait until Iron Plate > 2,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 Wait until Iron Plate > 5,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Train 5
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 Wait until Iron Plate > 5,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 Wait until Iron Plate > 4,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 Wait until Iron Plate > 3,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 Wait until Iron Plate > 2,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

With this setup every train is going to every stop, regardless of need. This creates an undue level of traffic at each station and across the network.

It would be much better if I could do something like this:

Train 1
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 If Iron Plate is < 10,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 15,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 If Iron Plate is < 5,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 If Iron Plate is < 4,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 If Iron Plate is < 3,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 If Iron Plate is < 2,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Train 2
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 If Iron Plate is < 2,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 If Iron Plate is < 10,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 15,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 If Iron Plate is < 5,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 If Iron Plate is < 4,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 If Iron Plate is < 3,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Train 3
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 If Iron Plate is < 3,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 If Iron Plate is < 2,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 If Iron Plate is < 10,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 15,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 If Iron Plate is < 5,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 If Iron Plate is < 4,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Train 4
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 If Iron Plate is < 4,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 If Iron Plate is < 3,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 If Iron Plate is < 2,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 If Iron Plate is < 10,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 15,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 If Iron Plate is < 5,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Train 5
Go to Iron Plate Drop 1 If Iron Plate is < 5,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 2 If Iron Plate is < 4,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 3 If Iron Plate is < 3,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 4 If Iron Plate is < 2,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 10,000
Go to Iron Plate Drop 5 If Iron Plate is < 10,000 Wait until Iron Plate > 15,000
Go to Iron Smelter Wait until Cargo Iron Plate = 6,000

Being able to program train schedules this way would allow me to keep rail traffic to a minimum under normal demand conditions and stagger my plate supply to the stations in need when there is a shift in demand.
It just never made sense to me that you could set departure conditions with the trains but not arrival conditions. If I can do one, I should be able to do the other.

When I first saw the new UI I audibly went "wooooaaaaahhh!" because it looks real nice. Upon reflection, however, I think if you're going to go with this "shades of grey" window panel style, I think you should allow the user some freedom in color choice. I'm certain mods would allow it if you didn't but it's worth mentioning that maybe I want a nice dark green or dark blue instead of the greys being offered.

I've been taking a bit of a siesta from Factorio but I've never lost my kind of ... i dunno just general zeal for the game - I mean I feel like it'd be fun to just jump right back in, if I didn't have other stuff to do. Don't think that's ever happened with any other game... and I've been around since the c64 was freakin hard core. You guys do good work, is what I'm sayin =p

on that note... looks sweeeeeet! Though while the control click feature is neat, I think having a dedicated passenger train and passenger stops is still less of a hassle in the long run - which would work even better if you can color lines or stops.. oooh! What if there was a limited palette of stop/line colors, and you could include stops in one of those colors, and use that to sort stops?... ffs now I'm already planning my next game, darnit.

Keep up the good work!

In the event that you are revamping the Train GUI in any case, might you be able to include GOTOs in the preparation plan in light of option leave conditions? This would be so decent.

I'm loving the new GUI! One thing that I think could be changed is make the blurred background slightly more opaque to reduce clutter in densely built areas.

Train related it would for certain setups (regular passenger transportation would be the most significant) be pretty nice if it was possible to have total-time based schedules. This means that a train always tries to do one full "circle" of the schedule in the same amount of time. And if for example due to network congestion it arrives "late" at a station it stops for a shorter period of time than if it arrived "on time". Basically what real passenger trains do.

Though i guess this would be too much work both gui- and mechanically wise to be worth it for such a limited usecase .

Another thing I want to add to the suggestions, now with the possibility of adding circuits to stations and disable them with conditions we should be able to determine if the train will skip a disable/unavailable station(default now) or wait in the current one until the other one is enabled again.

eradicator, you can do this with the circuit network already today. I tried this once (with limited success, though) to avoid traffic jams. You need a wire to all stations. Then you put a time signal on this wire with a relatively long cycle time, e.g. 60 minutes (or: infinity). Then you use a modulo operator for individual stations and set the leave condidtion to "AND time = xy".

It would be much more convenient, of course, to do this through the GUI.

However, as I said, I used this with limited success, because my train network was too complex. My train schedule wasn't really working well. I forgive myself, I am no professional planner for train schedules. I do value the job of the guys at Deutsche Bahn better now. RELATIV to my job, their train network is running smoothly.

Bauer wrote:eradicator, you can do this with the circuit network already today. I tried this once (with limited success, though) to avoid traffic jams. You need a wire to all stations. Then you put a time signal on this wire with a relatively long cycle time, e.g. 60 minutes (or: infinity). Then you use a modulo operator for individual stations and set the leave condidtion to "AND time = xy".

It would be much more convenient, of course, to do this through the GUI.

However, as I said, I used this with limited success, because my train network was too complex. My train schedule wasn't really working well. I forgive myself, I am no professional planner for train schedules. I do value the job of the guys at Deutsche Bahn better now. RELATIV to my job, their train network is running smoothly.

Hm. I guess in conjunction with the new train_id that might actually work. Though yea, certainly not easy to set up. Thanks for the idea though. It's certainly worth a try. (Also on a side note i'm always suprised how many other german people are in here :P)

what we need: GUI Opaqueness/transparency setting. why? So when I'm trying to screenshot a GUI for a mod, or demonstration, and want it as clean as possible, I don't have to worry about the world under the GUI, I can just set it to solid.

And other people such as Sigma1 can adjust it to their preference. Also the blur is a nice touch, but the ability to control the blurriness level would be cool too.

I am a huge fan of Factorio and have played many hours.

Factorio reminds me of great games like Rocky's Boots and its sequel Robot Odyssey, which is Alan Kay's favorite game of all time. It also strongly evokes John von Neumann's 29 State Cellular Automataon and his Universal Constructor Machine!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11807250

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neuma ... _automaton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neuma ... onstructor

I enjoy watching other people play Factorio on youtube and twitch, because everyone's style and approach is so drastically different, yet you can easily pick up techniques and adopt them yourself as you see fit. Especially multi player co-op games like when Katherine Of Sky plays with unique kinds of people with extremely different approaches than her!

To that end, and in the spirit of blueprints, I would love for Factorio to support pie menus, in a way that users can design their own custom menus and share them just like blueprints!

Not just one main pie menu that the game controls, like in Eve Online, and not just dynamic pie menus that the objects decide to populate with actions, like in The Sims, but also user editable pie menus that give users the ability to create their own pie menus with any commands and objects arranged any way they desire, and use them anywhere, with the full generality and in-world reification of blueprints!

One excellent application of user defined pie menus is arranging and deploying your inventory. Another is attaching high level actions and controls to objects in the world, like a "pull-out" pie menu for controlling the rate of fuel going in and out of your nuclear power reactor.

High-end design tools like Alias|Wavefront support user defined menus, so any artist who uses it for different tasks can arrange their own set of commonly used commands into custom task-specific "marking menus", which omit uninteresting items they never need use, and focus on making common operations extremely quick and easy to perform.

Here's a demo of pie menus in SimCity, demonstrating how gestures and mouse-ahead display preemption work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA

Here's a demo of pie menus in The Sims, explaining how they're populated with actions from advertisements with the visual programming language SimAntics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs

I've written more about pie menus, spanning from 1988 to more recently, and used them in various games and apps:

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/100

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/98

http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.p ... _Pie_Menus

Check out the "pull out pie menus" that give you immediate feedback in the world of their effect while you are using them, before you've made a selection:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc

I'd be delighted to answer any questions and provide more links, demos and source code, and help you come up with a design for great pie menus in Factorio!

taikodragon wrote: I'm sorry, I must concede you're right. I feel like that makes ORs very hard to effectively use because they operate on an unequal level to ANDs. I can't think of a programming language where ANDs and ORs are not of the same precedent.

C?

http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language ... precedence

11 && Logical AND

12 || Logical OR

And all C derivatives like C++, Java, C#, JavaScript, PHP, etc... But PHP got the associativity of ?: wrong (it should be right-to-left but the genius PHP designer guessed left-to-right and didn't bother to look it up to be sure, and now it's too late to change), so be careful.

You should always use explicit parens anyway, instead of EVER depending on precedence and associativity, because it's SO easy to get it wrong (like assuming && and || have the same precedence, which is an easy sensible mistake to make, but that's just how it is: an arbitrary convention) and it's SO hard to read and understand expressions without parens.

I don't think a game should assume people know AND and OR have different precedence -- it's not common knowledge or obvious (even if for some reason you happen to think of AND as * and OR as +, which also seems pretty arbitrary, and is just a mnemonic to help remember).

I like TheRaph's suggestion for composing trees of expressions with AND and OR groups that you can nest together (and especially his idea that you have to research the AND and OR and other combinations themselves)!

But taking another step back, Ben Shneiderman (a user interface designer who's written many books on the subject) points out that the words "AND" and "OR" are confusing to non-programmers, suggesting the opposite of their actual meaning: linguistically when you pick this AND that, you're picking MORE things, but when you pick this OR that, you're picking FEWER things, which is opposite of the way AND and OR work logically. So non-programmers tend to get confused by ANDs and ORs in database and search queries. It's better if you can frame it as filtering and merging streams of items or possibilities, in conjunction with a more tangible visual data flow / filter / map representation, instead of using abstract expressions with "AND" and "OR".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AyjKgz9tKg

For an alternative approach, check out Christopher Williamson's and Degi Young's and Ben Shneiderman's and other's great work on "dynamic query filters" and "filter flow queries":

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/spotfire/

Here is an example of applying the dynamic query filter ideas from Christopher Williamson's real-world HomeFinder maps to virtual-world SimCity maps, which I called the "Frob-O-Matic Dynamic Zone Filter".

Ben Shneiderman demonstrates Christopher Williamson's Dynamic HomeFinder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X8XY9430fM

Frob-O-Matic Dynamic Zone Filter -- for each tile on the SimCity map, it "ANDs" together the results of a cascade of adjustable min/max range filters depending on different numeric simulation layers like land value, traffic, pollution, crime rate, police station distance, etc:
https://youtu.be/_fVl4dGwUrA?t=3m36s

Degi Young demonstrates visual "filter flow queries", which visually express all possible boolean expressions in terms of flows and filters:
https://youtu.be/-93hwOGA7tM?t=2m19s

SimHacker wrote:

taikodragon wrote:You should always use explicit parens anyway, instead of EVER depending on precedence and associativity, because it's SO easy to get it wrong (like assuming && and || have the same precedence, which is an easy sensible mistake to make, but that's just how it is: an arbitrary convention) and it's SO hard to read and understand expressions without parens.

Logical operator preference is not arbitary. AND "binds stronger" than OR because AND is equivalent to multiplication and OR is equivalent to addition:

a AND (b OR c) = a AND b OR a AND c
a * (b + c) = a * b + a * c

Exactly the same rules from mathematics apply to logical operations like associative property, commutativity and the others.

Faark wrote:I like the new UI showing conditions of multiple stations. But the mock-ups show quite simple train schedules but already have so much stuff displayed. All the buttons and highlights are distracting. I hope that can be made less intrusive. Maybe by not showing all the edit controls until the player somehow indicates he actually wants to modify that schedule? Also i agree with other comments, reordering stations, copying schedules between trains and more would be awesome.

I agree with this and would like to add - the screen looks cluttered and it reminds me of one of the inspiration games to Factorio (yes, OTTD) that has, imao, an annoying & outdated interface which is one of the reasons I don't play it.

I'd rather like the current set of buttons (under the current research) to move to the top left (like mod buttons) but maybe a column instead of a row (so you have the tool tip appear on it's right, not overlapping other buttons),

The mini-map with a button toggle (like F1 or F4, if FFF-191 changes apply which I eagerly await),

The logistics network view can use another column to show more (think how menu items one can have in a network, before one adds mods... ) and I don't mind the longer "current research" window,

For the screens shown:

• * Re-ordering stations and conditions using drag-and-drop,
  * Easier look of conditions (new sub screen with indented lines ? ),
  * Emphasize the selected option with color (I couldn't tell from the first picture which was selected and actually thought it was the fuel until I was the other pictures),
  * Buttons inside the frame (on the top left of small map) will look better, perhaps also as a column with tooltips to the right

I must agree with my fellow Hebrew translator - Dev-il, that R-T-L support is needed (and command him for stellar work in translating the game, within the current limits)


Well that's my two cents, a lot of them, but it's what I had to say on the subject for now