Factorio Forums

What?

When two resources are close together the map overlay often priorizes the bottom-right resource instead of the resource below the cursor.

Figuring out how to select the stone patch here was quite difficult:


Expected behavior

The resource directly below the cursor should be highlighted.


Why?

In a very old post Rseding once said:

Rseding91 wrote: Thu Jan 11, 2018 7:06 pm When a patch is highlighted the game doesn't un-highlight it until you move the mouse a ways away from it

But this is not what i observe. There are several cases where the game actively changes the highlight even though the cursor is still clearly above the currently selected patch.

Double highlight flicker when moving mouse straight down.
Bottom-right copper selection box overrides still selected iron
Stone selected while mouse never leaves iron. Iron selected when stone should be, Stone only flickers.
Observation

The selection-box shape of the stone patch is really weird and difficult to observe.
The behavior is also quite different when comparing a fresh map and the slightly progressed factory in the savegame.
This is what it seems to be in the savegame:


Reproduction

All gifs are straight unedited recordings (speed up by about ~30%) from the game (including the "expected" one...). Just move the mouse accordingly. There seems to be some timing / start position components to some of the behaviors.



Map

This happens with the starting area ore patches.

All gifs with drills have been taken on this savegame.
All gifs without drills have been taken on the same map, but before building anything.

TL;DR So what?

This is probably low priority, or might even go to NaB again..., but i think it at least deserves some polishing (that's what 1.1 is supposed to be, right?). As far as i can tell even just making the "selection box" of non-singular ore patches smaller should make the behavior much more intuitive.

IMO the showcased behavior can be explained when one assumes the trigger point not at the tip of the mouse pointer (upper left) but somewhere in it's center or even in the lower right.

I personally don't consider it worth tinkering with; there's a radius around the cursor that the game searches for resources to highlight. This causes some bias depending on what order the radius is searched and so you get stuff like this for mixed/close patches.

I think that's fine. More (probably buggy) logic will still never give a 'perfect' result.

If one of the other developers wants to sign up for tinkering and all the associated fixes/future issues related to that tinkering they're of course free to do that.