Friday Facts #191 - Gui improvements

[Enderbsd]

400+ hours played.

+1 love the proposed changes!

[tamanous]

600 hrs played. (+ 100-150 for forums/wiki/excel)
Found myself in every situation you mentioned. Annoyed most by: shift clicking inventory.

Love your ideas. Would definitive play with this this GUI if had a choice!

[Cazadore]

you know what i like the most about the "equiptment" tab ?

the free space for all the weapons the game has to offer, and more with mods.

i would love to run around like the duke or the doom guy, switching around between 10 different weapons with tab and dish out the pain. and i mean, we allready got a rad powerarmor...

id like to be able to have the smg, the auto shotgun, the flamethrower and the rocket launcher on me. but need to prepare which weapon to use because i can only slot 3 of 4 weapons at once.

[gyro2death]

God, reading this make me want to work with you. If only everyone was so logical in choosing to move forward instead of trying to dance sideways.

[redlabel]

OK Crazy Idea:

WHAT IF we merged Inventory and Crafting Menu??

How this would work is you would access your inventory as a crafting menu, the items you have would be highlighted somehow (three levels: stuff you don't have and cannot craft, stuff you don't have but can craft, stuff you have). There would be a little number saying the items that you have of that. Also there would be a number on top saying how many inventory slots you have left on your inventory and the number can become red /get a warning when your slots left drop below 10 or so.

[Rivsung]

I like the proposed changes with the exception of the weapons. I weapon swap as I clear bases so I like to see my ammo inventory at a glance not just the single weapon I have equipped. Perhaps the option to add an optional quick bar or change the display of a quick bar (similar to WoW).

[Ranakastrasz]

When you fire your weapon, it should have combat information pop-up on the bottom right of the screen similar to what it looks like now, and last for ~60 seconds. Also if you take any damage.
Ideally, after combat ends, have it set your weapon back to the left-most one, so you always know what weapon is selected, either via it being visible, or it being the default.



As for dropping everything but your hotbar into chests, well, allow all-transfer to transfer everything, except for items in filtered slots, since there would be no benefit for doing so anyway.


Allow us to save/load filter settings somehow.




Not sure what else to say, aside from, This is Exciting!

[AlastarFrost]

I really like the proposed changes, some possibilities that would come up with this that I would like too:

- Have more research tiers for quickbar size. The first would expand it from 1 row to 2 rows, additional research could add more quickbars that you can switch out (little arrows on the side). This would allow for a factory, train, combat etc specific quickbar.

- If you have an extra character space, maybe we could have a specialized inventory for combat items (expandable with research). This would only hold ammo and capsules/grenades, so that you can carry some bang with you without cluttering up the main inventory. Its kind of annoying to either carry multiple stacks of grenades with you or have to run back to the chest before you can fight. If you are worried about players hauling giant amounts of ammo for turrets around this way, consider having ammo belts for turrets and magazines for players (which actually makes more sense given the different types of feeding mechanism). Only player ammo would go into that special inventory then. You could even limit player combat items to only that inventory, which would put some constraint on how much grenades you can carry (and an incentive to expand that combat inventory)

- It would be nice to build directly into a blueprint which you can then place. Basically a blueprint editor. That could be one of the tabs of the inventory. This could allow players to set up complicated parts of he factory without actually placing the items besides what you already have (which makes me often scrap stuff that was already built by accident when i get it wrong).

[Bi0nicM4n]

OK, I'll go straight to the point with this.

Advantages I see:
- No one is taking away your inventory space. Main inventory will be increased to compensate for the slots lost in the shortcut bar
- Relevant item counts
- No more random items appearing in the quickbar as you craft them
- No more items moving to different slots when they get depleted and re-crafted
- No more using the quickbar to carry things around
- No more “will this be crafted to inventory or to the quickbar?”
- Guides the player to make proper shortcuts.(This is a very important point)
- Player is in full control of the quickbar instead of the game trying to be “smart”
- Managing 1 inventory is simpler than managing 2 inventories

Disadvantages I see:
- The granularity of 2 inventories is lost. Putting your entire inventory in a chest while keeping your toolbar inventory is no longer possible
- People don't like change

You know, instead of getting rid of toolbelt's inventory slots, you could always make the game less "smart" by prohibiting automatic item placement into quickbar by making quickbar slots always filtered. That way the benefits bolded in the quote would still be available, and none of those disadvantages. The number of items would be off, but honestly, I've never had any issue with this. When you're running out of belts working on an outpost, you have to return to the base to resupply either way.

Of course there might be some reason for why this solution could be or was discarded. Is it technically too much of a hassle to make filtered slots *in quickbar only* behave like you described?

P.S. I'm all for filters in the main inventory, btw. It's been too long without them already.

[JOndra91]

I guess I like those improvements more then I dislike them. While it was comfortable for me to see everything with just one key, the hassle with quick trash was just annoying.
Otherwise hotbar being only for shortcuts is actually pretty nice and so is ghost building, but I would still like to see menu that contains all ingame items (even those not unlocked by research) just for early planning.

Also a quick switch to designer mode could be useful. It would be something simmilar to what factorissimo does (switch to virtual surface), only you have all items, instant placement of blueprints but you couldn't get anything from there to real (game) world, except blueprints. This way, making factory designs would be more intuitive.

[RamsesIV.]

Yeah! I love the changes... This would be awesome. There is also one thing at this point that I would like to have. And that is multiple tool belts that you chould switch between.
When the tool belt is just full of links, it kind doesnt matter how many of them you have. The reason is that when I build I usually want to have everything I need on my belt. And that most of the time is belts,underground belts, spliters, fast inserters, long hand insetrers, stack inserters, all electric poles, both colored wires, rails, signals, chests , blueprint books, deconstrucion planer and so on. all this cant be fit in one go.. so you always have to rearange it and think what you need right now and if you go back and forth few times it kind of gets boring.
So I would add a possibility to switch between something like 3 tool belts.. it could be another reaserch that you have to do after the tool belt one that there already is.

[BrasilianEngineer]

Finally it has been mentioned to change hotkeys for your 6th-10th items from shift-1-5 to 6-0. I agree with this change.

Please DONT change the toolbar shortcuts from Shift 1-5 to 6-0. This would be a huge step down in usability because most of us don't have fingers that can reach past 6 or 7 from WASD. On the other hand, making the hotkeys re-bindable, sounds like a great feature for those who want to move their hand all over the keyboard.

[Zeblote]

What's with all the talk about being the "bad guy"? The changes are great

[Xeorm]

Wait, what happened to the new UI guy? I must have missed that news.

[Jon8RFC]

2. Personal Logistics - Add checkboxes/shortcuts to enable/disable personal roboports/logistics slots/trash slots .

This is one of those shower ideas I often have, and never remember to post when I'm actually at my computer...thanks for reminding me!

This would be awesome so that if I need to dump my inventory to grab a whole bunch of stuff, I can temporarily disable my logistics requests without having to remove all 30 of them and then add them back in and remember what numbers I had them set to.

On that note, two shower thought ideas for the UI that I'm remembering are:

1. Allow one-time use personal logistics slots. When creating the slot/request, have a checkbox for "one-time use", which tracks the total delivered, regardless of inventory.
2. When hovering over a player, show both logistics "to be delivered" and "currently being delivered", similarly to how it shows when hovering over logistics chests.

Case for #1:
If it takes two minutes to craft and deliver five items, it would be nice to use two of them as they get delivered, and just wait for the other three rather than five more all over again, or if someone drops their items into a chest, so that I don't get a flood of additional items while waiting for that last one. The slot goes back to being blank after they've been delivered, since they're one-time use, and it tracked the total delivered rather than "currently in inventory"

Case for #2:
Rather than hunt through the logistics tab to try and find if an item is available and it may be far away on the mega base or if it's not available at all, I could hover over my character and see "oh, my items are being delivered, I'll wait in range for them" or if I can see they're just queued up, but unavailable (to be delivered status), and I can walk away since there's no use in waiting 3 minutes to see if my items will arrive or not since I don't know if they exist or not.

[DukeAl]

You got me with the shift-click.. I love the proposed changes.
If possible make the ammo count for the equipped weapon also show the total number instead of the remaining stack.

Finally it has been mentioned to change hotkeys for your 6th-10th items from shift-1-5 to 6-0. I agree with this change.

Please DONT change the toolbar shortcuts from Shift 1-5 to 6-0. This would be a huge step down in usability because most of us don't have fingers that can reach past 6 or 7 from WASD. On the other hand, making the hotkeys re-bindable, sounds like a great feature for those who want to move their hand all over the keyboard.

You can reconfigure your quickbar to whatever keys you like.

[pleegwat]

With the quickbar changes, this opens up the possibility for blueprints to not be items. Having blueprints in your quickbar is handy, they have no business being in your inventory as it should always be faster to pick blueprints from the blueprint manager than from your inventory.

[Avezo]

Personally I would like Factorio toolbar to work as an ability bars in World of Warcraft. You can just drag an item or ability and use as default if you wish, but you can also write simple macro and put there if you want advanced functionality.

[AnarCon]

proposed changes looks good imo, bring em on! it frees up some much needed space at the bottom i get annoying over every time i need to approach a biter base from the north and the hotbar is in the way so i gotta go slightly to left or right of the base to get some much needed overview.

two thumbs up for the propsed changes from me

[BluetoothThePirate]

I like most of this. Some important considerations:

To ghost-place items without needing the item, I don't like the idea that you need to set a filter in the hotbar first. What if you just want to order your robots to place a single refinery or train stop or whatever? What I think should happen is that you should remap what shift-click does in the crafting screen. Left-click crafts one, right-click crafts five, shift-left-click picks up a ghost of the item onto the cursor, shift-right-click crafts all you can currently craft. Then you can place a ghost for any item that you can currently build. You can make clicking on an empty filtered slot do the same function if you want.

I'd also hope that, with the new suit and weapon interface, we'll finally get the ability to toggle on and off suit equipment without pulling it out of the suit. A few people have raised this before, but I'd like to be able to make my repair robots stay in the tank and live rather than jump out and die because they can't keep up, or I'd like to be able to make my personal roboport stop stealing all my inventory when I'm in the base and I lay down a few ghosts. Also I'd like to be able to move slowly by turning off my exoskeletons when I'm in my paved base covered in belts.

Anyway, mostly I'm cool with whatever.