Improvement of minimap factory link display

[Ranran(retired)]

Pull request #431 brings a small improvement to minimap.
If you open the factory dialog while minimap is open, the linked factories will be connected. This is a very useful feature. The patch improves this one more step.
Tooltips for linked factory names are color-coded according to whether they are suppliers or consumers.
This color is the same as the color of the supplier or consumer symbol in the factory dialog, which is color-coded orange and blue.

[Matthew]

Thank you for contributing this, Ranran. Your UI improvements have improved the game greatly. But isn't this feature already present? When the factory dialog is open, I see the suppliers linked by red lines and the consumers linked by white lines:

[Ranran(retired)]

Yes, I know. I thought it would be clearer to color the tooltip rather than follow the lines, so I did. Also the colors of the lines are not correlated so it is not intuitive as to which is the consumer.

[Mariculous]

When the factory dialog is open, I see the suppliers linked by red lines and the consumers linked by white lines

What the heck! I did not know this :O
I only knew about the mouseover effect when the industry layer is enabled on the minimap.

May I ask what exactly is the advantage in coloring the tooltips (in addition to or instead of?) coloring the lines?
In any case, if both are color coded, the color code should be consistent.

What happened to the ctrl key in that context?
Previously, if holding the ctrl key, suppliers were highlighted, otherwise consumers.

[Matthew]

Yes, I know. I thought it would be clearer to color the tooltip rather than follow the lines, so I did. Also the colors of the lines are not correlated so it is not intuitive as to which is the consumer.

OK, I see. I find it helpful to follow the lines, because otherwise you have to search the whole map. But I know it can be a little difficult to understand sometimes, e.g. markets can have many lines.

What the heck! I did not know this :O
I only knew about the mouseover effect when the industry layer is enabled on the minimap.

I think it's a recent feature, maybe one of the features that Ranran has kindly brought across from Standard?

[prissi]

Indeed, as on big screen and with touch screen hitting factories is next to impossible.

[wlindley]

Most excellent!  (I also had long forgotten why sometimes the lines appeared, the answer being whether the factory dialog was open).

Any chance of sorting the industry list, and removing the duplicates?  Here for example, "Clay Pit" is repeated three times.  And quick, what colour is the Coal Merchant? 



If the list items could be filtered by the selected goods type, that would be an extra bonus.  As-is, the industry list is jumbled and useless, no?

[Ranran(retired)]

I don't think the tooltip was originally designed to display suppliers and consumers at the same time.
The original function was that if you moused over the factory while the industry button was pressed, a white line would be linked, and pressing shift would switch to a red line. A recent change added an example where both are displayed at the same time. This created a confusion. So, I think the addition of color-coding for tooltips is appropriate.
Extended uses symbols to distinguish between input and output, which can be associated with them to help the player understand them.

I didn't change the line color, but the map uses a lot of colors, and the lines are thin, so visibility is not good. Red in particular gets lost in the map. Ideally, the lines should have arrows for direction, but that is difficult. Therefore, using colors is an easy way.
Should the color of this line also be changed?


From what I can see at first glance, the list appears to be alphabetical, with suppliers, manufacturers, end consumers, and power plant in that order.

[jamespetts]

Excellent, thank you. Now incorporated. This does make things clearer.

[Ranran(retired)]

Any chance of sorting the industry list, and removing the duplicates?  Here for example, "Clay Pit" is repeated three times.

I did a quick check on this again. As I said before, this is grouped as Producers, Manufacturers, and Consumers, in alphabetical order.
It is hard to tell because there are no separators, but there is concern that adding separators will expand the list.
There is also the idea of adding text color. For example, blue for producers and orange for consumers). And in this case, the color coding is biased to one side. Lately the heavy use of text color changes is starting to become less desirable to me. It does not work very well with the theme.

Next, duplicate text is intentionally created by the pakset author (translator) to create duplicates.
It could have a different text in a different language. For example, in other languages, it can be translated as old small coal mine, old coal mine.
If they are integrated, the moment you change the language, it create a contradiction.
Furthermore, the map color of industries with the same name is not necessarily the same. It's just that its pakset is intentionally made the same. For example, we can change the brightness slightly to distinguish between them.