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didn't fix the freezing issue for me. clicking the research tab totally freeze the game forcing me to force close it.

edit : works fine with just core, hugslib, and modlistbackup. hard to guess which mod it conflicts with..

oh btw, i'm playing a resolution of 1587 x 913 and the research tab was cut off at the bottom.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, specially the one about resolution. I'll have to figure that one out.

Modlist is also helpful! Just so you know, it's not a matter of conflicts with other mods, it's just that it gets too heavy for accounting for so many projects, which goes against the very essence of this mod. I want it to be able to handle any amount of mods, so back to the drawing board.

Version 1.1.2 is out!

I released 1.1.1 which should fix the freezing and crashing problems from 1.1.0, but soon received reports of bad performance on AMD processors. In those cases, when you first click to open the Research Tab, there might be a slight freeze of a couple seconds, if and only if that's one of the first things you do after loading the game. That means the thread is still running.

Please let me know!

Is this mod something that needs to run often? I kind of figured it would organize the layout once, or when the research menu is opened, not every couple of seconds in the background, so it's odd for this mod to be causing the stutter.

You are right, I does a bunch of heavy calculations when you load the save game and then just regular vanilla stuff.

But after finishing the electric smelting reasearch the research tab is blank while using your mod. Reloading the game didn't fix it. Deactiving your mod does fix the problem but loading it again causes the research tab to go blank again. Any way to fix this ?

Might have been caused by the update. I was naive to change so much for a single update. Add that to the fact that I could not reproduce any of the problems yet, so I'll have to be creative about how to test this. Maybe I'll need testers.

Meanwhile, I did a rollback in Steam and edited this topic to include a link to both versions. 1.1 is going to stay beta and forum only for now.

Very good job, so neat !

Thanks! Version 1.1 is out, it should be even neater!

There are other mods that do something similar.

If I wanted to do that, I would use Harmony to patch the PreOpen method from the class MainTabWindow_Research, adding a Postfix method that took the relevantProjects field, which is a list of all projects, and remove the ones you don't want.

Edit : I will make a final testing if this doesnt give any further results i will probably just give up, and disable AF from my modlist since ur mod is technical a better addition in terms of QOL.

Sorry about that.. =/

I know that the Alien Races Framework and Harmony (the library it uses) are also under very active development, so maybe things get sorted out on their own.

Well now im confused, Humanoid alien framework still dont work for me together with ur mod. I updated it already and tried around but cant get it work together for whatever reason :/.

Do you have any details? Maybe an error message? Is it the exact same behavior as before?

[Good news!]

Good news! erdelf (author of the Alien Race Framework) was very kind to fix the issue on his side. It seems to be a problem with a library he uses, so he changed his code to do things manually until the library sorts things out.

And so in seeing your marvelous seven-step process I begin to wonder if it might be possible to conduct some sort of saving the current state and returning between steps, then continuing where it left off at the next pass.

That's feasible and not a bad idea at all!

How about an option to cache the structure in the save itself?

Humm, I've seen mods struggle with saving stuff (Numbers, I'm looking at you), so that would not be a priority at this time.

I know you said we wouldn't need a vertical scroll bar if we used your mod, but for those of us that prefer the old model of the research menu I must ask: Can this mod remove the error that consistently pops up whenever we load up Rimworld? The one saying there are mods out of bounds.

Sorry, no. Each mod does it's own thing in this case.

In fact i updated Alien Race Framework latly to use the Cuthulu and Bee Race and i used also before Insectoids, Asari etc. When i Disable all of this mods, ur mod is working as intended also works good except the little Crop on bottom of the screen it is all sorted fine.

I guess that means i need now to choose which mod i gonna use kek hard decision since i really like the feeling when u have Multiple Races bringing up more life to rimworld. For a Space setting game it was bothering me there wasnt at all other races only other Factions :/.

I'll talk to erdelf (Alian Race author) to see if there is something that can be done.

3309 ms organizing research tab. on an old 2.5GHz Quadcore

That's not very good. It should get better in the next version.

Well for some odd reason, when i activate ur mod. My Research Tab stops working xD

Humm, that is odd. Could it be that you have another mod messing with the Research Tab? Someone in Steam mentioned "Alien Race" as a source of problems.

Great idea. Could save a lot of time when trying some mod packs.
Despite not perfect for me, you can look what the mod does here: http://imgur.com/a/V3GSE. There is no bugs, but it's far more complicated to read than the original in my opinion. Good for research that are already mess up i think.

You are not wrong. Some modders took the time to manually assign their Research Project coordinates when creating their mod. Kudos for them!

Thing is, other modders didn't. Even worse, even mods that had that in mind might collapse with other mods trying to use the same space. This Research Tab mod aims to treat every single possible mod setup and create something that pleases the eye. Being that generalist, most probably it won't ever do better than a human carefully organizing a specific setup.

Future features might make it more interesting for cases like yours!

Around 120 mods* here and only 1389ms. I mean seriously, considering the whole minute it takes to even start the game and almost another one and a half to get the save loaded, ~1.4s is like nothing to me.

None the less there still seem to be a few problems with cut off texts (see screenshot).

I can totally fix that cropping!

About the complexity, you are right. Graph drawing has NP-hard written all over it, which is CS lingo for "if you don't do things smart, it will take forever; even if you do, it will not be optimal". To make this mod I spent 80% of the time reading papers and only 20% coding, but that's also because I didn't have much knowledge about this specific topic.

The problem with that many mods is the limited area for drawing. I do have some changes in mind that might improve both looks and performance. That mod list will prove itself useful when testing! 

edit: improvements that improve...

[Step 1 - Populate requiredByThis and enforce basic topological order]

The way I see it, it takes 7 steps:

• Step 1 - Populate requiredByThis and enforce basic topological order

This allows for bidirectional navigation and also helps dealing with dummy vertices, since it will screw edge drawing if I mess around with prerequisites too much. I hitched a ride in this pass to enforce basic ordering, since the game already almost provides it.

• Step 2 - Transitive reduction

I currently skip this part, but I think it's important in case some modder screw up and add redundant prerequisites.

• Step 3 - Find a topological order compliant with Coffman–Graham algorithm

I decided to go with Coffman-Graham Algorithm because it's the only one that naturally incorporates the layer width constraint (in our context, window height). Longest Path Layering and Network Simplex were my other options that I quickly discarded.

• Step 4 - Distribute tasks among hierarchical layers

Step 3 makes this one a very trivial O(|V|+|E|). Here I take the time to apply some specifics, like bringing those lonely projects (Devilstrand, Stone Cutting, etc) to the far left.

• Step 5 - Add dummy nodes to layers, to make edges more visible

This is essential for the next steps and it got me stuck for some time since I was doing it wrong. Coffman-Graham does not take dummy vertices into account, so my solution was to work with two width constraints, one that considers only orignal vertices and another considering dummies too. There is room for improvement here if I make those dynamic instead of fixed.

• Step 6 - Minimize edge crossings with vertex ordering within layers

This was the really hard part and I kinda rushed through it to be able to release yesterday, since I was very anxious to do it. It's also the heaviest part in terms of computation and that's the main reason I believe there is so much room for performance improvement.

• Step 7 - Set X and Y coordinates for each project based off layering

Also rushed this part and implemented it the dumbest possible way. Also, the paper I was reading to learn good heuristics for this mentioned that:
"These heuristics make good layouts quickly, but they are complicated to program and the results are sometimes noticeably imperfect. Further fine tuning is difficult because the heuristics begin to interfere with each other."
So I decided to improve that some other day.

About the offer, I'm very welcoming to your collaboration! Talk to you on discord.

I just loaded the midgame with 150+ mods running.

It worked. And it's beautiful.

I'm really glad to hear that!

Would you mind opening the console and telling me the what is the reported running time? It should look something like this:

<time>ms organizing Research Tab.

I believe there is a lot of potential for improvement on the performance front.

There you go, I added a Dropbox link.