Comparison of old and new fabricator UI

[llunak]

Just to be clear, I'm talking about this:

I think the pictures already quite show it, but let's point it out anyway.

The problems of the old UI were:

1. it wouldn't move onto another queued item if the current one didn't have ingredients.
2. One couldn't queue more than 6 items.

(Something important I'm missing?).

Now, these have been fixed (sort of), at the cost of new problems:

1. The UI is noticeably less clear: The details of the operation are in a tooltip, which has a number of problems (tooltip positioning broken in the first place, not able to click links, black&white, need to hover).
2. Not able to specify order/priority of items.

The problems of the new UI can be fixed by:

1. Show the details again above the selection of items to build. I.e. do it like the old UI did.
2. Show a queue of items to build below. I.e. like the old UI did.

In other words, the new UI fixed problems of the old UI by changes that introduced problems that can be fixed by reverting these changes.

Could the problems of the old UI be fixed differently? I think yes:

1. Just make the processing search queued items from the front until one is found that can be processed. If there are tungsten and gold queued and there's no wolframite available, just refine gold. The new UI needs the code to work this way anyway, so presumably this work has already been done.
2. Allow more than 6 items in the queue and add a scrollbar if needed. Moreover, possibly adding also "+10" button next to the "+1" and "continuous".

 

So, there it is. I suggest the new UI is reverted, because there were no real problems with the old UI itself. Problems were only with the code behind the UI, and those can be fixed just by improving the code, without making the UI worse. The way I see it, the new UI will either be worse than the old one (so why bother) or it will end up much like the old UI (so why do it the hard way). Yes, I know it kinda sucks to throw away work, but why spend even more time trying to fix problems the hard way. The idea and code for the new UI are better, but not the new UI itself. So please keep the new code behind it but also keep the better UI.

 

[Sasza22]

The new UI needs to show details when hovering over an item.

[Rogue Witch]

Just make the recipes draggable vertically so that we can prioritize what happens first (from top to bottom). Then the system moves down queue if resources are unavailable.