Text plates

[Deadlock989]

When someone says “it’s not a good idea, but I still want it”, who am I that I challenge that wish?

Which is why this subforum is 93% gibberish.

I played some more, tried Titillium Web as the font (this is the one used across most of the Factorio gui). Made the text "frames" vanish when there is text (and return when there is no text), with the idea that they can be re-highlighted on mouse-over/alt-mode or when the plate gui is opened so you can still see what space you're working with.

But the kerning issue turns out to actually be a major one - look at the way W and A next to each looks like total shit. You can't just have a fixed spacing between letters regardless, because letters with sloping/curved sides need adjustments. Every proportional font does this. So I think this is where I drop the idea because I'm not dicking around with trying to extract kerning table info from a TTF. Some fonts have thousands of entries in the table, covering every possible character combo. All of that would be done automatically by just rendering the vector font but I've got no interest in that.

Untitled.jpg (546.59 KiB) Viewed 1590 times

[Sad_Brother]

It looks good.
I did not see WA until read about it. Not a problem.

[nosports]

i see no problem there ....

Yes the WA is noticable, but far from shit.......
at least its the currently best - so deal with it

[Koub]

I agree that the kerning thing jumps in the face. I can understand people saying something is better than nothing, but I also fully understand a potential mod creator not to wanting to produce a result that doesn't meet his/her standards. I hate when my boss explicitly requests me to do something despite the fact I consider of inadequate quality what I'm able to produce.

[Deadlock989]

It's solvable - but would take much more effort than I am willing to spend on it. The W/A combo is one of the worst but there are plenty of others.

I mean, there's already a perfectly decent text plates mod on the portal. I was just curious about whether you could get around the requirement for monospaced sprite fonts on a fixed grid. Turns out you can but it's several unexpected additional hoops to jump through.

[foamy]

I'd love an implementation in vanilla somehow because the mod is just so handy for labelling stuff. Sure, there's the map, too, and that's nice, but I like the physicality.

One possibility, that could avoid the monospacing issue, would be to have specific sizes of entity -- 1x5, 2x10, etc -- which you could just freely enter text for, rather than placing letters individually.

[ssilk]

Foamy, that’s the other direction, I would call that the “sign”-idea.

One that’s very similar: viewtopic.php?p=19040#p19040

Other stuff
view topic.php?f=80&t=4682 Planning (Signs, Cloning, Ghosts, Blueprinting and more...)
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=63023 Commenting combinators
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=56214 Comments on Deciders, possibly other entities
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62279 Combinators information

When someone says “it’s not a good idea, but I still want it”, who am I that I challenge that wish?

Which is why this subforum is 93% gibberish.

Well, the problem is: I nearly almost (about 93%) cannot decide which will never come into vanilla and there where 2 or 3 cases, where I was 100% sure, but it had been implemented. Only the devs can do that, but I want them to develop and not to sort out stuff here.

And the next problem is, that if I refuse all those suggestions (with a good reason etc) in all their consequences nobody would write any suggestions.

But the strategy of this board is to collect ideas. There is a lot of strange ideas collected here and some - I would say about 1 or 2% found a way into vanilla. These one percent is 1000 times more worth than the 93% of gibberish.