[2.0.8] Pressing control when holding tileable material makes the brush disapear

[RenKuro]

When pressing Control button and having Stone brick in inventory the green brush that acts as a preview of which area will be covered disappears.

I havent found keybind that would produce this behavior. Issue is when having a keyboard without num keys setting increase and decrease of tile size on ctrl+scroll wheel feels natural. Issue with brush disappearing persist when resetting keybinds to default

Expected behavior would be for preview brush to not disappear when having control button pressed down.

This bind worked great before 2.0

[Genhis]

Thanks for the report, this works as intended. Control + Click transfers items from the cursor to an entity inventory. In 1.1, it is showing the tile placement preview by mistake and you aren't able to place the tiles while holding Control.

[RenKuro]

That is indeed a sad news

[wartthog]

Thanks for the report, this works as intended. CTRL + Click transfers items from the cursor to an entity inventory. In 1.1, it is showing the tile placement preview by mistake and you aren't able to place the tiles while holding Control.

My head agrees with you but my heart agrees with RenKuro. Let me think out loud for a bit here but I promise I'm going somewhere.

Exploring the Problem Space:
In his defense, using mouse wheel to change the tile brush quickly while building is one of my favourite interface power tools in the game! It's so handy for those of us who want to be more surgical with our concrete, i.e. who don't pave the world! XD To put it in perspective, it's as important to me as using shift + mouse wheel to change blueprints in a book!

Actually, that's a fantastic analogy. Imagine the experience if the blueprint preview, title and icons disappeared whenever shift was held! It'd still be usable, but pretty disruptive. Similarly, having the tile brush disappear when control is down feels like a YouTube video buffering for a split second, like tripping over a raised sidewalk block.

I do understand that hiding the brush while control is down is a valuable UX hint, indicating that left-clicking isn't going to place those tiles. However, it's not implemented consistently at the moment.

1. The brush still shows when holding control if your cursor is a tile ghost, even though control + click with a tile does nothing.
2. The brush still shows when holding alt, even if alt + click would open the factoriopedia.

The UX hint is valuable, but I'm not sure the cost of chasing all the edge cases is worth it. And if y'all decide not to chase the edge cases, that's fine of course, but it does kind of weaken the argument for the case in question.

Potential improvements:

1. Good news! Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see a problem with using shift + mouse wheel for the tile brush size instead. It then matches the key for switching blueprints in a book, both of which are altering the placement mode of the item in your hand, so there's some nice symmetry there.
   • @RenKuro: I recommend trying this out. I know I will!
   • @Genhis: What do you think about making shift + mouse wheel the default alternate for tile brush size to make this cool feature easier to discover for other new players? I know changing settings for something this low priority, this late in the product cycle is kinda crazy but thought I'd throw it out there at least.
2. Fix the inconsistencies. I.e. make the (i) and (ii) cases also hide the brush, for consistency -- though this may trigger similar "bug" reports!
3. Instead of hiding the brush, what if you draw it red? I realize that already represents trying to place a tile over another tile that can't be replaced, but the general idea of "I can't place the tile" is the same at least. And users like RenKuro and I wouldn't lose our visual feedback while changing the brush size.

Thanks for reading! I hope these ideas have been interesting and maybe even useful, but do with them as you please!