Factorio Forums

Hi,

I have a gui with a number of elements (for train stations and trains). I want to be able to hover over a gui element (usually a piece of text like "xyz station" or "abc train") and that should show a minimap of either the train or station position.

There seems to be no rich text element for the minimap, so using the regular tooltip seems out of the question.

I looked into using the on_gui_hover and on_gui_leave events and I can open and close a frame relative to element.gui.screen or element.gui.center. But it seems impossible to open a frame right on the location where the text element that I am hovering over is located. I tried element.gui.relative but that does not show anything and calling my_popup_frame.bring_to_front() crashes with "Only elements in 'gui.screen' can use bring_to_front".

Any ideas? I just ran out of ideas (and claude code did as well)?

+1

This seems like it should be moved to (or opened as a new) modding interface requests since there is currently no way to do it
(and at least one person confused it with one, as almost did i )

Just being able to position elements at the cursor in some way would go a long way. I've worked on multiple mods where this would be useful.
For example anything that tries to replicate combinator GUIs will run into the issue of not being able to display "connected to" tooltips Replicating that tooltip is not that hard, and i quickly did it to demonstrate, however it is not possible to actually position it where its supposed to be So those tooltips are just not present in mods such as https://mods.factorio.com/mod/utility-combinators and https://mods.factorio.com/mod/disk

It'd also allow for cleaner guis in some cases, where stuff could be displayed just on hover instead of adding more buttons that activate certain elements or just leaving that functionality missing, such as with minimaps as outlined in the original post.

There are also other relevant topics asking for more ways to use tooltips, which are quite old viewtopic.php?t=77339 viewtopic.php?t=106528.

+1