Personal Roboport Bots Acting Wonky with Repairs

[Grant]

Version 0.17.79
Personal roboport bots don't come out right away to do repairs.
When they do, not enough come out to do all the repairs.
They fix a few things here and there and the process takes many times longer than it should.

Have two fusion reactors, four mega batteries (showing in the green), and four 25 bot ports.
Have researched robot speed up to space science and robot cargo +.
Have exactly the 100 construction bots in inventory to match capacity.
Have hundreds of repair packs in inventory.
Have the personal port toggled on.
Do not have any construction projects going.
Engineer not within any network roboport coverage.

Been playing since 0.12 or so and didn't have this problem until 2020 (not sure if correlated to an version rev).

Example: Out at the perimeter wall. Damage everywhere. A good ten seconds go by. Between 2 and 10 bots finally fly out to some of the farther items needing repair. They come back. A few more fly out and back. After a this repeats between 2 and 4 times then enough come out and do the repairs. Frustrating. Thanks for any help or advice.

[DaveMcW]

Do not have any construction projects going.

You probably do. Look at the alerts icon next to your toolbar.

[Grant]

I knew someone was going to say this. Sorry, I appreciate the reply but when I said no construction projects going I meant it. I don't use them to build very often and when I do is always me standing there until they are done. No icons, no stuff I forgot about, no nada, just lazy bots.

[Loewchen]

Well, post the save.

[Grant]

save attached. thanks

[DaveMcW]

You have 64 turret ghosts and 1462 damaged buildings.

[Grant]

Are not the damaged buildings exactly what the repair bots should be zipping off en mass to repair as soon as I walk in range? The fact they don't is exactly my issue.

Also, so if there is a ghost anywhere on the map the repair bots just don't work? How is that not a bug. You could almost describe it as acting wonky. thanks for the smug useless help.

[SyncViews]

I think they check only a certain number of possible ghosts and damaged buildings per tick/frame. If most of those are out of range or lack materials then the bots appear to do nothing while they go through the list.

[Grant]

My apologies to DaveMcW. I was not aware that repairs needed outside of coverage area of personal roboport slowed down the response time of bots because of some routine the software runs that requires a scan of all damaged/ghost items (Thank you SynchViews) and that the bots just sit there until that is done. So still smug but not useless help.

Anyways, fixed everything and now the bots are working. Still, in my mind this needs to be addressed before Factorio 1.0 launch.

Might be a known thing but is still totally a bug.

[Serenity]

No, it's not a bug. Something you don't like or don't understand is not a bug. The response time of the bot network is intentionally decreased for performance reasons.

[Grant]

No, it's not a bug. Something you don't like or don't understand is not a bug. The response time of the bot network is intentionally decreased for performance reasons.

I got it. You are not a bug. Just a dick.

[torne]

The reason behind this is because the robots do not look for jobs to do - the jobs look for robots to do them. So, the game is constantly looping through all of the available jobs to check:

1) which roboport networks are in range of the job
2) do any of the in-range networks have the required materials
3) do any of the in-range networks with the required materials have idle robots

To stop the entire game from slowing down any time there's a lot of jobs to do, the game only checks a certain maximum number of jobs per tick, and continues where it left off in the next tick. If there's a lot of jobs but very few of them can currently be done, this can delay the jobs that *can* be done for a long time.

A lot of the time this isn't noticeable and works fine, especially for stationary roboports: it's often the case that most of your jobs are inside a roboport network and that the network has enough materials (e.g. a main roboport network covering the whole main base), so the main limiting factor for how fast jobs can be dispatched is just how many robots are available. If there's lots of robots available then it will dispatch lots of jobs each time and the list will quickly get shorter; if there are few/no robots available then it's not going to succeed in dispatching many jobs no matter how many it checks.

Doing it the other way around would probably be more expensive most of the time, because it would require that the roboports frequently check to see if any jobs exist in range. Searching for entities within an area is one of the more expensive operations in the game engine - mods that do this a lot tend to cause performance issues.

So yeah, the engine is optimised for the case where most jobs are possible to complete quickly, which likely isn't the case if you're relying solely on your personal roboport.

[Serenity]

Just a dick.

Just stating the truth. Crying "this is a bug" just because you don't understand how something works and why is beyond silly. "Bug" has a very clear definition. It's unintentional behavior. This is the opposite. It produces results that aren't always optimal, but it's very much intended

[Grant]

Just a dick.

Just stating the truth. Crying "this is a bug" just because you don't understand how something works and why is silly.

You can state the truth without being a jerk. You can not understand something and still know it isn't working efficiently. So maybe "bug" is not the accurate term to use because if the bots are behaving as they are coded to, then yes, of course that isn't a bug. But when Factorio is a 1.0 game released to a mass market, repair bots that don't come out and repair stuff because "reasons" is going to seem like something isn't working correctly to most people. Maybe not a bug but not ideal and (this is a game, right?) definitely not fun.