Picture in Picture mode.

[katastic]

TL;DR

- OpenTTD style picture-in-picture

picture-in-picture.png (6.84 MiB) Viewed 94 times

What?

- Add OpenTTD style persistent picture-in-picture pop-out windows for graphs and views.

Why?

In OpenTDD and many similar games (e.g. Rollercoaster Tycoon), which Factorio UI feels definitely inspired by, you can load multiple views. Factorio can while mouse hovering over a pin. But the problem is, you can't KEEP those views.

Hover over a pinned thing (below minimap) and you see a player, or space ship. But move your mouse? It's gone. Load up the electricity tab or production tab, cool! But then it's there forever, or gone. You can KINDA move the entire window off screen but then we're doing this wierd juggling where we hope the graph we want is actually on the top/left/right (and bottom won't work because the title bar is on the top.) You have to do that to watch your accumulator power while flying your space ship. Open the electrical panel and drag it down near the bottom of the screen. Which is... out-of-character manual compared to the rest of Factorio.

I suggest we allow picture-in-picture dialogs just like OpenTTD has. It's just a dialog box with a canvas view, and a title bar with an [X], and optionally, a pin/minimize-to-bar button. [explained later]

Whether we allow modders to do this themselves for all the nitty gritty or not, allowing the API to support being able to pick a graph and press the "pop out into window" button would be amazing. Having your spidertrons running around and having a small view dedicated to their warpath, would be great.

OpenTTD and similar games also support "minimizing" a window to just the title-bar which is nice. Factorio is essentially already doing this with the pinned views bar below the minimap though, except instead of free-form pinned bars you get a list of them like a stacking window manager.

You could even do something cool like put all picture-in-pictures/pinned into a single window, with tabs. So you can press control-left/control-right (whatever) to go across pages, or minimize your watched graphs window.

tabs.png (47.95 KiB) Viewed 94 times

You could also do something with an auto-stacking GUI sorter so you can have a bunch of random "views" into graphs/etc the way something like MSI Afterburner (and other system monitoring tools) let you queue up an arbitrary number of graphs. Of course that involves far more work than simply allowing pinned windows to stay persistent.

graphs.png (28.79 KiB) Viewed 94 times

But for a game where people LOVE optimizing graphs representing throughput, it makes a lot of sense to support adding more built-in support for graphs and views instead of constantly changing your remote views and spamming alt-left/alt-right for forward/back (and that doesn't even do graphs, just remove view locations).

Cheers,
--Katastic

[Koub]

For completeness, there have been a couple suggestions requesting for a PiP functionality :
viewtopic.php?t=8271
viewtopic.php?t=124924
I won't merge the threads though, because I feel the suggestions are different enough for that not to make sense.