Factorio Forums

TL;DR

The arrows on rail segment visualisation should be bigger/clearer than they are right now.

What?

If you zoom all the way in you can see those are arrows. But who builds rails zoomed all the way in? Even just a bit further away they turn into barely discernable dots. They should either be way bigger, or scale with camera zoom level to be clearly visible at all times.

Why?

This forum's Gameplay Help section seems to be a bit more advanced (naturally, people will only make an account if they are into the game already), but over on Reddit I see a lot more first time newbie kind of questions. A lot of them are about trains and a lot of those are caused by not understanding the signal directionality. Yes, there is a dedicated in game tutorial that explains it in detail, but it's evidently not enough. And honestly this information should just be visible. It sort of already is visible, just not clearly for some reason, and it's often missed by the very people that would benefit the most from seeing it. These arrows should be the first thing they see after placing their first signal.

The rail segment visualisations appear to come from data/base/graphics/entity/rails/rail/rail-segment-visualisations-endings.png (and likely rail-segment-visualisations-middle.png as well). The sprite sheet uses 64x64. But each element only uses a portion of the space.

I tried changing a single arrow (up), and this is what it looks like in game: I don't know how much bigger it could go just by changing the graphics because this is using most of the 64x64 space in the spritesheet now. And indeed, the cyan arrow appears to be covering the pink ending. But you can see the up arrow much better than the down arrow just above it.

This file appears to be referenced from data/base/prototypes/entity/rail-pictures.lua, for segment_visualisation_endings, so it should be possible for a mod to provide a new file and override pictures.segment_visualisation_endings for the various rail prototypes.