Friday Facts #408 - Statistics improvements, Linux adventures

[Eternal]

Oo this is lovely... i didnt understand shite from all that but im certain is important...
now...

i want more hotbars.... even in WOW i had like 8 or so....

and i want to play next Torio... so please give us , like u always did.... alfa - beta - gamma - tetha... NOW! ... pls

[Tooster]

current item list under the graph shows two collums of items. Problem is, the second column which shows items in the middle of the list.
...

I agree with the point this guy makes, but his proposition isn't really better. I also think that current statistics item list waste quite a bit of space.

I would instead of wide tiles consider using square tiles (without this kind of progress bar) and instead add some colored "bar" on the left that displays the color.

Statistics enhancements proposals:
- consistent item colors across production and consumption bars (Currently most produced item is blue, second produced item is orange etc.) So when most produced are steel plates and most consumed is coal, then they have blue color on graph which is confusing.
- highlight plot line on item hover
- Compress each item to a single tile, so that instead of fitting only two column you can fit a whole grid.
- A slider for time frame instead of so many buttons with fixed intervals
- Some way to superimpose production and consumption graphs of items on top of each other

[Siarhei]

Factorio, probably, the only one game, which works perfect on MacOS with multi-monitor configuration.
(it allows to choose default monitor, cursor doesn't left monitor, Dock doesn't disappear, etc)

special thanks to: annoying notification about game mode doesn't appear in debug mode

[Eternal]

Why are you still showing in FFF screenshots that the quality names have not yet been renamed due to popular request. It has been written by Kovarex months ago in an FFF, that a rename would be considered if a good alternative suggestion is made. Has no such suggestion yet been made by the community? Or are these names there to stay? A clarification from Wube would be appreciated. Typical fantasy RPG item quality terms are not suitable for Factorio's industrial theme.

WTF...

[gGeorg]

if my production comsumption ratio is 120%, I produce more and 80% means i have been low on power. It is really hard to get that information right now as they are spread in two different graphs and there is no sum of all sources.

We even wrote a mod to export that information from a replay with graphs looking like that:im
(Blue Capacity, Red Consumption)

Yes, agree. More usefull than proposed "Battery charge graph"

[yuraSniper]

Maybe a bit off-topic, but would it take much effort to add anchors to different section in the blog posts, to make it possible to link only a specific section to someone?

[Terrahertz]

Oh perfect timing, received threats from M$ a couple of days ago: My PC is to old and cranky for their fresh, hip and new Windows 11. So I should go and just buy a new one and already upload everything to OneDrive OR ELSE. The phrasing was pretty odd, like they cannot imagine you using your PC after Win10 Support is over, maybe there is a reason why they don't have to imagine that, like Win10 no longer booting to protect the user from their own decisions.

My PC was built with a dual boot option, seems I'm going to make use of that in the future.

Good to know that one of my favorite games will acompany me the day I'm switching over.

Nice Stats btw

[Serenity]

Can we have four digits of precision when the numbers are in the thousands? So it's 1430 instead of 1.4k

Rounding is fine when it gets into the tens of thousands, but with thousands having the exact amount would still be useful. For example when testing beaconed builds where just an inserter swing missing an item can account for tens of products missing. Or at least give mods access to the exact numbers. As far as I can tell even statistics mods can't show the exact amount.

[catpig]

The phrasing was pretty odd, like they cannot imagine you using your PC after Win10 Support is over, maybe there is a reason why they don't have to imagine that, like Win10 no longer booting to protect the user from their own decisions.

Obviously you're free to keep running Win10 after support ends. You're also free to eat a mouldy steak you found in the park. Neither is a good idea because you'll get infected with something
If all you're missing for Win11 is the TPM thingy, there's ways to turn off that requirement. MS even allows some new systems to be shipped like that.

Edit: Typo

[Greaka]

I use background saving for 4 years now. One of the best things about Factorio is that it runs on a potato, which I have done so on my vps server since forever.

In anticipation of the 2.0 release, I started a SE run with a few friends back when 2.0 was announced and around 150h in, I needed to upgrade the server. 4GB of RAM simply wasn't enough when the server uses 3GB to run and background saving doubles that amount. The server became unusable for sometimes 30s every 5min because the resulting swap usage pegged the cpu. In the end, this meant that background saving took longer than blocking saving and the game was unresponsive for the entire duration.

I don't know if you can take anything away from this, I just wanted to share a user story after you asked for feedback. If it's possible, it might be worth exploring if the forked Factorio instance could unload essentially everything but raw entity data or similar. I don't know much about the internals of the game, even after reading all FFFs.

[catpig]

Great FFF again, I have a few comments:
- Would be nice if it were possible to select a different planet rather than the current one in statistics
- What you wrote about compilers isn't quite correct. The compilers typically used on Linux (gcc, llvm) can also be used on Windows. Though there's other issues that are presumably the reason you don't do that - just wanted to note that it is possible. The big cost in supporting more OSs is testing/QA/support anyway. (No idea about macOS, last time I dealt with that it was trying to support OSX users for an unpaid libre software I maintained - I gave up when I couldn't get an OSX VM to work thanks to Apple's fanatical anti-customer policies, and I wasn't gonna spend thousands on rebadged PC hardware [this was before "apple silicon"] that costs a fraction without the Apple logo just to be able to give free support for unpaid software )
- Excellent that you upstreamed that clipboard feature!
- I had no idea that fork() can be used for stuff like this. Very very neat!

[picklock]

The new statistics shown seem sensible to me. I agree with Serenity and I am also in favor of the suggestion to display the full number for values in the thousands and not to round them. 4 digits for values in the thousands increase the clarity enormously and would be very helpful. Implementing this would be another excellent QOL feature.

The Linux part of the FFF is very interesting. You get so much background information from very few development teams. Thanks for that.

[Terrahertz]

The phrasing was pretty odd, like they cannot imagine you using your PC after Win10 Support is over, maybe there is a reason why they don't have to imagine that, like Win10 no longer booting to protect the user from their own decisions.

Obviously you're free to keep running Win10 after support ends. You're also free to eat a mouldy steak you found in the park. Neither is a good idea because you'll get infected with something
If all you're missing for Win11 is the TPM thingy, there's ways to turn off that requirement. MS even allows some new systems to be shipped like that.

Edit: Typo

I use Win11 at work, I do not like it one bit, so there are more reasons I rather switch to linux or keep running Win10 until it breaks.
Thanks to Hardware-Firewalls and Java-Script-Blockers its more likely that Steam-Client will drop support because of Chromium again before any Virus will destroy the machine.

[layus]

Async what ?!

Oh my god, I have been waiting on these autosave progress bar for nothing all these years ?

This is an amazing feature !

Reminds me of how emacs used to load elisp code at the end of the build, then fork and save a memory dump. That was used to speed up startup time, as the memory dump was packaged with the emacs binary. Those things you can do... Amazing

[Upserter]

May I take the opportunity to say how much I appreciate the excellent Linux support. It's a big part of why I'm so enthusiastic about recommending the game to others.

[EustaceCS]

That blue fuel cell looks suspicious as hell.
Cold fusion based reactors confirmed?
----------------------------------------------------
Each removed redundant dependancy makes my factory work faster...

[Terrahertz]

That blue fuel cell looks suspicious as hell.
Cold fusion based reactors confirmed?
----------------------------------------------------
Each removed redundant dependancy makes my factory work faster...

Good eye!

Maybe it could also be a heavy water cell, that does not need enriched uranium: Heavy Water Reactor

But maybe its also just a placeholder, like the graphics for Carbon are just a recolored brick.

[Agamemnon]

I do have a suggestion for production statistics (sorry if it has already been mentioned)

Please include a way of visualising for each recipe how all the machines producing the same thing spend their time. (Producing, Input starved or Output blocked)
This should make it way easier to check if your production is actually falling behind or you just need to make bigger buffers. I have seen a mod doing just that, so it shouldn't be hard, right?

[aka13]

Hi,
Can the statistic window remember my last setting?
All the time I open the window the last 5 sec is selected and I need to switch to 10 minutes

PS: Thank you sooo much for Linux support!

+1

[jgilmore42]

While you are improving the stats UI, *please* add a very basic QoL feature: Remember/persist last viewed time scale accross close/open stats UI. Opening the stats UI defaults to "5 s", which I honestly believe to be the *least* useful choice. Every single time I open stats, I need to switch again to more commonly viewed scales such as "10 min" or "1 h" for example. The user's chosen item-filters get persisted, why not persist the choice of time-scale too? This would facilitate and reduce tedium while monitoring a specific part of production repeatedly in the stats UI.

Seconded