Technical and UX issues

Production Line Suggestions
1

Well then, here’s another of these topics. You asked for it, cliffski :wink: One paragraph per issue, because doing bullet lists in BBCode is awful.

Alt-tabbing causes a black screen. Already reported several times. Workaround is to play in windowed mode.

Scrolling. Edge scrolling only scrolls if your cursor is close to, but not exactly on the edge. Arrow keys are not a good substitute for me because they are on the wrong side of the keyboard (lefties might be very happy with it though). I would really like to have some drag-to-scroll button. The first thing I tried was dragging the right mouse button, so I guess that’s customary in the games I play…?

Zooming. Mouse weel zoom works OK, but it would be better if it zoomed around the location of the mouse cursor, instead of the centre of the screen. That is, after zoom, you’d still have the same tile under your cursor as before, if that makes sense.

The game stopped responding when I got back to it after typing it. Music still played, but no input was being handled anymore. I’m not sure the game was still running or not, because I didn’t have moving bits on the map yet. This is going to make it a bit annoying to type more feedback while I’m playing, or look at your FAQ and Getting Started Guide.

The game window (when in windowed mode) spawns at the top left of the screen. That’s a pity, because it’s covered by my taskbar. Best to center it though, even for people with a non-funny configuration.

The floor pattern is very noisy and distracting, and when zoomed in, makes it hard to see where tile boundaries are (because each tile is made of 4x4 subtiles which again are made of 2x2 subtiles). I would suggest something more boring like concrete, maybe spiced up with some decals (drains, stains).

Once you’ve started dragging a conveyor, there’s no way to cancel the drag. I would suggest that both right-click and Esc should do the trick.

Resource conveyor graphics sometimes overlap each other in the wrong way. The blue poles being drawn in front of the red rail, when they should be behind.

That’s it for now, more to follow later…

2

some of these are already on my fixed list (pending an update).
FWIW you can use WSAD to move the map too. I just finished coding drag-movement too.

3

Great to hear that, looking forward to the update :slight_smile:

As to WASD, well, I’m a great model for weird setups, because I also use a dvorak keyboard layout. Although I prefer .OEU (better known as ESDF) anyway. There are more keys around it you can bind, and it’s where the keyboard wants your hand to be anyway.

I guess the bottom line is that keybindings need to be configurable. Not just for deliberate weirdos like me, but also for countries defaulting to AZERTY, QWERTZ and other non-QWERTY layouts. But I’m sure you already knew that.

4

Yup good point…keybindings need to go on my list!

5

Yay update, thank you!

Good: alt-tab from fullscreen no longer causes black screen.

Bad: fullscreen option is gone entirely?! imgur.com/a/BiLez

6

After actually playing for a while: more UX feedbacks! [1.01]

The Stockpile is only clickable on its topmost tile; the other three don’t seem to count.

It would be nice, particularly due to its weird shape, if the Resource Conveyor had a translucent green “footprint” square below it, like all the other items you can place.

I want to see which resources a particular slot needs per car. The game only shows me which ones it has in stock. Also answers questions like: do I need one wing mirror item per car, or two?

The UI for configuring stockpiles is really clunky. Why not just have all items in the list from the start, with their sliders set to 0? (I know the UI is “placeholder”, but I don’t know if that just means eyecandy, or also the flow of dialogs and such.) If that’s not possible for some reason, at least sort the items in the stockpile alphabetically, instead of in order of addition.

Space bar should pause and resume (resume back to the speed it was at before pausing). Keys 1-3 should set that speed.

The mouse cursor changes to a hand when hovering over an unbought factory area, even if that area is covered by a dialog or popup window. Similar while placing slots and hovering over the slot chooser popup; the green ghost just follows your cursor anyway instead of disappearing. Fortunately the click goes to the dialog, as intended.

Popup windows for slots should close when you click their slot again.

The pie chart at the bottom of the slot popup, showing where time is spent, is really nice; but I’d like to be able to see over what time interval that is measured. I get the sense that the time is very much on the short side, and will fluctuate too much to be useful. Alternatively, measure it over the slot’s lifetime, but provide a button to manually reset it. That way I can see whether my optimisations have had the intended effect.

Popup windows should be draggable, so I can keep e.g. the window for a slot and for its neighbouring stockpile on screen at the same time and position them so they don’t get in each other’s way.

Can I see somewhere what all the different parts of a car model currently cost, in total? Right now I have no clue whether a car costs more to make than I sell it for.

The slot placement window should have an X button, like the other windows.

The game should start paused, because there is no point running time before you have your assembly line set up.

Abbreviating large sums in the finance window is a good idea, but it should be done either for all amounts in the list, or none. At first glance , 86,645 looks much bigger than 220k :slight_smile: