I was just reading the latest FFF and it mentioned how the Factorio logo was designed as if it were an entity which could theoretically be built in the world, and it made me think: wouldn't it be really awesome to have all letters/numbers/symbols as placeables in game? I know there is a text-plates mod which does this, but I'm talking about vanilla, and using the font and style of the Factorio logo, perhaps made from copper, with an iron variant too. This would make labelling areas of your base possible, and the letters should perhaps show on the map as simplified glyphs.
I think size variations should also be possible, so that labels for major areas of a base can be larger and smaller direction labels can be smaller. When I say label, I mean a row of placed characters of course, just like in the aforementioned mod.
I would love this, as it'd bring a lot to factory design and would especially be great on servers/multiplayer, where there may be new players joining who don't know their way around. text-plates is one of those must-have mods but if we could have an implementation in the base game, even better! If the idea is to make vanilla as enjoyable as possible, this feels - to me at least - like a very obvious and important step.
I hope plenty of people would like to see this as a feature in the future too. I'll gladly wait until other more important things are finished, for sure, but please at least consider the idea for the future :)
Re: Text plates
Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2020 10:50 am
by Qon
In that thread I posted about the solution. The game already has text "text plates" buildable in game.
There's a mod for that: Signal Signs by Qon
It makes (vanilla) text comments with constant combinator blueprints made from text input, using the alt mode and letter signals. There's some limitations on characters that can be used (A-Z, 0-9, space and dot) and it takes some space. But the signs are pure vanilla, the mod just generates them in an easy way.
In that thread I posted about the solution. The game already has text "text plates" buildable in game.
These letters do not look good: the font is not "industrial", the blue background looks clear but it is not "organic" for Factorio. This is debugging information, not a text entity itself.
In short...
Does it work? Yes.
Does it look good? No.
Can we ask for nicer things? Yes.
Re: Text plates
Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2020 3:57 pm
by Squelch
Attach Notes has both sign-posts and allows us to add labels and descriptions to entities with various font styles too.
I use it extensively in both my factory and test sandbox to designate areas and leave notes for myself on what a particular circuit network is meant to do for example.
I would love to see something like it in vanilla.
Re: Text plates
Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2020 5:11 pm
by MassiveDynamic
Or you can do this....
Screenshot (56).png (923.78 KiB) Viewed 4385 times
coppercoil is right, the idea is for it to look decent, and not require alt-view & combinators or multiple tile spaces to achieve simple text.
This. The current solution relies on people having specific settings turned on. Personally I usually run with combinator logic turned off on alt-view, specifically because it gets very noisy/distracting very quickly when walking through areas which have lots of circuitry. Also, it usually doesn't make any sense to me anyway unless I go into each combinator individually and check what the logic is.
Pretty sure OP is aware of the mods, he's specifically asking for implementation in vanilla. Frankly I agree with him.
Re: Text plates
Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2020 1:47 pm
by Deadlock989
This is a lot more difficult than you might think. I know this because I spent hours on it.
"Text plate" fonts have to be monospaced or they look like shit on a grid. The irony is that monospaced fonts themselves typically look very pedestrian. This is why there are no great works of literature published in Courier New. The Factorio logo font is not monospaced.
Earendel created a custom monospaced font from scratch for his mod. I, on the other hand, wasted a day or two trying out various public domain monospaced fonts to try and set up an automated workflow in Blender.
I tried out about 30 fonts. 28 of them were pants on a stick. Of the remaining two, one of them turned out to have spacing issues that required editing by hand which defeated the whole purpose of the exercise. Neither of them looked like the Factorio font and they did not even look "industrial". One was excessively cheerful and the other one, which I went with in the end, was pretty much "digital".
There is a reason why typography is a high art form.
The Text Plates and Attach Notes mods work perfectly adequately. If you want text plates (or non-monospaced floating notes) in your game, you can have them. There is absolutely no reason to not install a mod except for the loss of cheevments, which is a stupid reason.
I took the time to point out several reasons why this is not a "minor feature". You could at least acknowledge that.
I acknowledge that.
With this statement, I was making a generalization. I understand the complexity of the problem here, you laid it out quite eloquently. Though, OP has a point that Wube has already added the "factorio logo" as an entity in-game, so that is a good frame of reference for text plates in the base game.
Will this ever happen? Probably not. Mainly because once the "this already exists as a mod" apologists roll in, there's no more room for negotiations.
Though, OP has a point that Wube has already added the "factorio logo" as an entity in-game, so that is a good frame of reference for text plates in the base game.
That's one entity, which already existed as an asset and is designed expressly for the purpose of appearing on the menu screen in pre-designed cutscenes, not as an in-game entity with separate shadows, collision boxes, etc. that will ever be used by a player.
A full set of individual text plates would consist of at least forty or fifty more entities which don't currently exist as assets. The existing font "style" would need redesigning from scratch to fill a tile grid or it would look like arse on toast.
Then there are international character sets to consider. Accents, non-Roman alphabets, etc.
I made my own logo entity at the weekend, ahead of the upcoming "menu simulation" feature. It took me two hours to get it to a state where it pleased me. One entity and it still doesn't meet the Factorio art standard. Maybe I'm just slow.
Just install the damn mod.
Re: Text plates
Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2020 4:17 pm
by Squelch
With the complexities and impact on real estate that bringing something like this to game, perhaps another tack could be taken?
I can't speak for others, but my personal wish is to be able to label certain parts of my factory. Physical text plates like the new ones Wube are bringing to the title screens or the examples already demonstrated here would indeed serve this purpose. However, I'd be just as satisfied if we could mark an area with a tint, and have the label displayed when the cursor is in that zone. Just like the blue marquee when building a blueprint, or the orange logistics zone for roboports, but with colours and text defined by the player, and displayed on demand.
