well, ok then! out of sheer curiosity, (this is an honest question, as I am not, nor do I plan to be, plugged into the competitive community): do these sort of mods become akin to juicing in the Tour de France; everybody does it, so you're automatically behind if you don't? so "it's my funeral" if I just install vanilla PA and try to play a game?
i know, it's a slippery slope, and there's a BIG grey area in there, but I can easily put hotbuild in one category, and auto factory in another. the fact that you can't says it all. i've voiced my opinion, and i got back pretty much exactly what I expected. I was hoping for a surprise, but there are none to be had here, evidently. it's not my intention to derail this thread into this old-as-time argument. i won't let that happen. respectfully, I won't throw any more gasoline onto the fire. happy modding!
I don't think any of the top players use this mod. I use it because it allows me to focus my much more limited APM in other areas, but it's not as effective as actually managing the queue myself. I'm surprised this discussion hasn't happened earlier as well, but in my view as the client allows it it's pointless to rail against it. I don't really have a problem with it.
100% reproducible as in happens every time? I'd like to know exactly what's happening please, I'm not seeing this. Also is this with noblackscreens on or off? I'll stare at the code for a while and see if there's a silly error.
I thought I had tested with only Auto Factory enabled, but you're right, somehow No Black Screens is still enabled and it's definitely only an issue that occurs when No Black Screens is enabled in conjunction with Auto Factory being enabled and set to automatically on. I've attached screenshots of my settings.
no time to do actual tests, but a random guess: tAutoFactory.js is loaded before the tAutoFactory.css. Maybe doing that isn't good somehow. Make it load the css first.
I haven't got time to properly look at this until the weekend, so for now here's the slightly modified files as per Cola_Colin's suggestion. Let me know if that changes anything.
Your mods directory should be here: Replace the tAutoFactory directory with the one in the zip file, or just the modinfo.json file. It probably doesn;t work, I could still crash it by repeatedly switching between settings and live game. Sorry for not fixing it last weekend, I had a stab at it then got frustrated. There must be something fundamental I'm messing up. Will try again this weekend.
I'm a little late to this, but I wanted to respond to it anyway. I don't use this mod because I don't like the idea of giving up control over my factories. I think that maybe at the lower levels of play, people could use this mod to get a small advantage. I already had a system worked out before this mod came out that I think gives me the speed of Auto Factory while only giving up a small amount of control. I use this mouse and bind the buttons on the tilt wheel to Select Idle Fabbers and Select Idle Factories. That lets me just flick the wheel to the right to pull up a build menu for all of the recently built factories so that I can queue them up without zooming in on them. I do lose the ability to see the area around a factory before I set the queue, but if I press the button often enough I can usually remember which factories were recently placed. I can also double-tap the wheel to the other side and zoom to an idle fabber. My method is somewhere in the middle of auto factory and manually queuing factories in terms of speed and control, but it works for me. Faster players probably prefer to select the factory themselves, while slower players will be able to benefit from Auto Factory. The end result is that slower players can be just as fast as the fastest players, but their weakness shows through in the control they give up over their factories. I think that's a pretty fair trade because it allows slower players to compete without taking away every benefit of being faster. Out of curiosity; would you say that my mouse button bind is an unfair advantage as well? All I have done is bind two keyboard shortcuts already in the game to my mouse, and now I can be almost as fast as this mod.
Yeah it works really well. I actually never click on a factory unless I need to change the build queue.
We just need some display of how many idle engineers and idle factories a player has. Worked pretty well in SupCom. Basically it needs to be some area in some corner of the screen that should be empty if playing perfect.
thanks for the reply! i respect your opinion. No: I don't consider any special mouse or keybinding to be at all unfair! You're allowed any interface option you want - go to town! You're still initializing the action, however streamlined you've made it for yourself. I think maybe my spidey-sense starts tingling "unfair" when something would happen in your game, but not mine, if we both went afk to make a sandwich.
i'm guessing he used the mouse software to map the wheel tilts to a key, and then set that key in PA's options... (?). it'd be swell if hotbuild starts to recognize other keypresses soon, like the F-keys and mouse wheel antics.
I think that should be a separate mod. It strays pretty far from this one, and on its own it has the potential to expand in interesting ways. I picture the UI like the unit selection in the bottom left. But clicking on a unit type selects all of that type, shift clicking selects one of that type. I'm not going to make a mod like that anytime soon as there's just too little PA time
