Highlight changed/matching items in player inventories

[dewiniaid]

Sometimes -- particularly when my inventory is cluttered -- I have difficulty trying to find items that I already have or just finished crafting. Thus, I'd like to suggest a few quality-of-life improvements to the inventory as an option:

When opening the inventory:

Highlight new item stacks that have been collected since the inventory was last closed. Changes to quantities of existing stacks should not be highlighted.)

Highlight newly hand-crafted items, even if they add to an existing stack. (If I'm crafting by hand, I'm likely to want to use the item I just crafted.)

Highlights could be turned off permanently via a config options, or temporarily turned off by closing and reopening the inventory (which, because of the "since the inventory was last closed" limit, causes existing highlighting to be "forgotten")

When filtering recipes:

Mockup of item filtering -- black squares @ 50% transparency

inventory_search_suggestion.jpg (102.34 KiB) Viewed 3872 times

Apply the filter to inventory contents as well by dimming all squares that do not contain a matching item. This allows Ctrl+F "iron pl" to be used to quickly find iron plates in the inventory, and ctrl+F "ore" to find all the rogue ore you've managed to accidentally grab that should be in the smelters (even though there's no recipe that matches "ore")

[steinio]

I like this dimming instead of highlighting. I always oversee the orange one.

Greetings steinio

[ssilk]

Steinio: dito. That looks much better. I don't know: in game you cannot do that, it would be constantly flashing.

[dewiniaid]

I like this dimming instead of highlighting. I always oversee the orange one.

Greetings steinio

I always miss the default highlighting too, but the idea here is that the dimming only applies when it's very clear you're looking for something -- it's too sharp of a difference otherwise and would be visually jarring when, say, mousing over the crafting window.

That said, the background grey could stand to be made darker -- which would allow the existing highlight to stand out more without being jarring. The current problem is that the highlight orange isn't particularly saturated and is roughly the same brightness as the grey. Fixing this would help for colorblind players as well (though red/green wire, belts and inserters are a far bigger problem for them currently AFAIK).

[dewiniaid]

Today's FFF reminded me of this post, so I'm bumping it so that it might get some attention with the upcoming UX overhaul.

[eradicator]

I'll add some bump power: *bump*

That diminishing view would be a really nice feature. When looking for something i often hover over the thing i want in the crafting view and then try to locate the orange highlight in the main window. And even with the difficult to see orange that's still faster than manually searching the inventory for me. (I'm not color blind, just really bad at finding stuff with all the tiny grey-brownish building icons.)

[Engimage]

I totally agree about dimming being much more comfortable

[Coffee2Code]

Dimming would be very, very handy for this.