Factorio Forums

Here's the problem: When driving around in the car, it goes fast enough that you need to see quite far ahead, so I zoom the camera out a lot. Especially when travelling to the right or downwards because then the gui blocks some of the land ahead. But at that scale, dead trees and sometimes small rocks become hard to spot and I crash into them quite a lot.

Solution: The original Grand Theft Auto was a top-down game and focused heavily on driving. While you were stationary, the camera was centered on the vehicle. But as your speed increased, the camera would pan ahead of your direction of travel, showing you more of what was in front of you, and it would pan further the faster you went, until at very high speeds your car would be just on the edge of the screen. I think the same thing should be implemented in Factorio as it would make driving long distances easier. You don't care about what is behind you, but you do need to see further in front the faster you go. Even on the highest level of zoom I don't feel like I can see far enough ahead, especially when travelling east where a large portion of what is in front of me is blocked by the gui.

+1 I support this idea

Seems like a great idea. I believe this stands to benefit those with low performance computers the most since zooming out can have a huge performance hit.

11/10 idea

How often i crash into other trains because i see them too late...
I even activated the show_train_braking_distance only to find out that it doesn't work for a player controlled train (probably because the game wouldn't know which way i want to go at an intersection), but i guess one could use this as a guideline to how far ahead the camera has to pan.

This was the only thread on the subject I could find, but it's still a good idea.

The car's niche is off-roading, since in built areas you're better off either laying rail or just sprinting down a paved road in an exoskeleton. Having to slow down below top speed, or else zoom way out and lose the ability to distinguish terrain scatters from solid objects, makes the car less fun to use in its primary role. It's especially notable because of how much fun trains are by comparison.