[MOD 0.12.x] Nixie Tubes - numeric display elements

[Alexs]

can you make Nixie tubes elements with dimensions of just one box,
which is only half of long and perhaps with light blue neon display?

So a display panel could be implemented for all major commodities on a central place.
That would cost only half of place and would more readable and clear.
Along with your Combinator mod a real highlight!

[GopherAtl]

For the moment, Nixie Tubes does what I set out to make it do, so other than bug fixes, no immediate plans to add major features, I'm afraid. Too many other ideas for mods I want to work on first!

Down the road, who knows? I've got some ideas, including some things along the lines you're asking for, but it could be a while, and I'm not promising anything!

[Peter34]

I like this mod a lot. Initially I had some trouble using it, because I connected to the left-most Tube, and it showed nothing, but then I went and RTFM and now it works fine.

I am a bit concerned about the power usage. I mean 8 kW isn't super expensive, but it's not cheap either. A row of 5 Tubes, to display the contents of a bunch of Tanks with 5 digits, is 40 kW, that's almost 10% of one Steam Engine. Well... Maybe it is right.

Update speed seems very high. Is it good that they update so often? It seems like once per second. I'm concerned about game performance issues. I haven't had any, but I'm testing them in SP, and MP is much more sensitive to performance. Updating every 2.5 or 3 or even 4 seconds might be better.

How do they work with excess digit input? Specifically, I'm thinking ahead to alpha 13 where we'll be able to Wire up our Accumulators. I'd like a Tube display connected to my AccuBank so I can see the charge percentage from 100 percent to 0, but I'm miserly. I'd like to use only 2 Tubes, if possible, instead of spending a third for the 3rd digit, but how would that work? What are some of the easiest ways to get 2 Tubes to display "99" if they're fed 100 as well as if they're fed 99?

[GopherAtl]

I am a bit concerned about the power usage. I mean 8 kW isn't super expensive, but it's not cheap either. A row of 5 Tubes, to display the contents of a bunch of Tanks with 5 digits, is 40 kW, that's almost 10% of one Steam Engine. Well... Maybe it is right.

8kW seemed about right to me, but I just poked at it and found it''s not actually consuming that; only right-most in a wired group that's displaying a number are currently consuming more than the idle power draw, which is closer to 250. I'll have to look into this a bit more, see about fixing it.

Update speed seems very high. Is it good that they update so often? It seems like once per second. I'm concerned about game performance issues. I haven't had any, but I'm testing them in SP, and MP is much more sensitive to performance. Updating every 2.5 or 3 or even 4 seconds might be better.

I meant to add a config setting for that and then forgot about it; it's currently going 5 times a second, which doesn't seem unreasonable to me for the average player, but whenever I do another release I'll add the config setting so you can adjust it without getting into the actual source.

How do they work with excess digit input? Specifically, I'm thinking ahead to alpha 13 where we'll be able to Wire up our Accumulators. I'd like a Tube display connected to my AccuBank so I can see the charge percentage from 100 percent to 0, but I'm miserly. I'd like to use only 2 Tubes, if possible, instead of spending a third for the 3rd digit, but how would that work? What are some of the easiest ways to get 2 Tubes to display "99" if they're fed 100 as well as if they're fed 99?

Currently, if you fed 100 into a 2-digit nixie, it would display "00." Any extra digits it doesn't have room for are just thrown away. To get your percentage at all, you're ultimately going to be dividing the actual output by (maxOutput/100), which will scale it to the range 0-100; just changing that to (maxOutput/99) would scale it to 0-99, which would make each % point displayed off by .01%, cumulative. If that's not good enough for some reason, you'd just need to add more circuit logic to clamp the value down and replace it when it goes over 99.

[DukeAl]

Hi,
tried your mod in a mp game with a friend and got a desync. It happened when we selected the item in the gui.
When I reconnected again the tubes were still placed but the selection in the gui was empty.
We used version 0.1.6 in factorio 0.12.5 with quiet a lot of other mods. I can post the list if it would help.

[Peter34]

Ouch, that's not good. I'm gathering and testing a bunch of mods, testing in SP, because I hope to start a grand coop MP game with some friends, once 13.1 comes out. And I'm really keen on using Nixie Tubes. In fact, having a numerical readout (and once that's about a million times easier to use than a forest of Combinators talking to a large matrix of Lamps in 7-segment configuration) is so super nice that I'd be intensely reluctant to play at all without it.

So I hope it gets fixed.

Just random guessing here, but could it be that setting the Nixie Tubes to update only once every 3 seconds, instead of every 1/5 second, might make them functional in MP? I really don't think that very fast updating is necessary...

[GopherAtl]

Hmm. I've used them in mp myself without problems, but not since v0.12.4, will have to see if I can reproduce this issue.

The update speed is configurable; if the updates are related, at best, I would think this would reduce the likelihood of it causing a desync, not actually eliminate it?

After thinking about it a bit, my best guess is that if the change in the gui is made at the wrong time, multiple instances in mp can update before the change propagates, causing the tubes to update to display different values. I'll be doing an update of this mod to use the new 0.12.5 logistics api rather than the hacky approach it does now to read the logistics network, will try and resolve this issue at the same time.

[DukeAl]

I hope you can beat the crap out of this pesky bug.

And by the way, your awsome little mods are among the most useful out there. Thank you

[GopherAtl]

ok, update almost ready I think, not certain if this change will actually fix the desync issues but hoping it will? I'm still a bit fuzzy on the underlying mechanics of what mods actually do that causes desyncs in the first place... I understand the theory, but in practice, the precise circumstances seem to elude me. Watch this space, won't double-post for the update, which should be imminent.

Also, dunno what I was thinking in the last post, this doesn't use logistics networks and I don't intend to make it use them at this time. You can always use a logistic combinator to bridge the two if that's the intended behavior.

Also also, I lied about the config thing, apparently I never got around to that in past versions, but the update has the feature finally. Still defaulting to 5 updates/second, with updates delayed while the gui is opened by any players, which will hopefully, maybe, fix the desyncing issue? possibly?

:edit: ok, 0.1.7 is up, no idea if it will fix this desync issue, which I have not been able to reproduce at all.

@dukeai, is this a consistent, reproducable error for you? Like, it's desyncing every time you change the item in the gui, and you're not getting any desyncs otherwise?

[DaCyclops]

Actually, that Desync might have been the result of a bug in 0.12.5 fixed with 0.12.6 - any time you changed ANY circuit condition in multiplayer it would desync.

[DukeAl]

We tried it 2 times in a row in the same session and got the same problem. Other than that I didn't have a desync in mp. Just regular lua errors with some mods which we then deaktivated.
And we were useing your combinator mods too so the gui was used very often without problems.

I will try it again with your new version as soon as my friend has time again.
I could also send you the save, but its about 11mb and as I said before it uses a lot of mods.

[GopherAtl]

@DaCyclops ah, ok, that is good to know; I may revert one of the changes I made in 0.1.7 in the next release if this turns out to be the case.

@DukeAI, are you still using 0.12.5? If so, you should update to 0.12.6; if not, let me know and I will investigate further. If I understand correctly the 0.12.5 issue was with conditions on circuit networks; the logistics combinator only use conditions on logistics networks, so might not have shared the same problem.

[DOSorDIE]

2015-10-2 ???
I have no idea in which country you are live but here in Europe we have Month 09

[DukeAl]

Hi,
I tried the nixie tubes yesterday evening again in mp (0.1.7 & 0.12.6) and now it seems to work fine.
There was a strange bug with the sensors now though. I will post a bug report as soon as I find the time.
And thank you for your quick patch.

[Peter34]

Am I right in that you've changed the mod, so that in 1.7 it updates 2 times per second rather than 5 times per second? Because that's what it looks like in the config file.

[Narc]

I don't suppose there's any way to display the item icon in the left most tube?

displaying the items would be ... I dunno.[...]What you can do is just plonk one of the item in a chest next to the number, it'll display the icon for you in alt mode

How about an invisible entity with a single-item inventory and a fluidbox (why a fluidbox?)? It probably won't be able to show the abstract signals, but that would be all the better. For my preference, I'd have it at the bottom-right of the rightmost nixie.

I may poke at this and toss a PR your way.

[Peter34]

Am I right in that you've changed the mod, so that in 1.7 it updates 2 times per second rather than 5 times per second? Because that's what it looks like in the config file.

Actually, it looks as if it updates once per 2 seconds, thus once per 120 ticks, not twice per one second (once per 30 ticks).

But is that right? Or have I misunderstood it...

[Narc]

Am I right in that you've changed the mod, so that in 1.7 it updates 2 times per second rather than 5 times per second? Because that's what it looks like in the config file.

Actually, it looks as if it updates once per 2 seconds, thus once per 120 ticks, not twice per one second (once per 30 ticks).

But is that right? Or have I misunderstood it...

Yeah, a quick peek at the code shows it's once every (60 * refresh_rate) ticks. From the comment in config.lua, it looks like it was intended to be (60 / refresh_rate). I'll make a pull request.

[vzybilly]

What is the possibility of adding letters into this? I could help out with making functions for strings into numbers and numbers into strings. for basic functionality it could only support ascii #32 to #95 (space==off), resorted slightly, maybe. it could also include some of the Extended ASCII Codes, maybe some replacing the less used things like "[]_$\" which would help things to fit tighter into a compressed number...

some maths

#32 to #95 would be 6 bits of data. we could trash the arithmetic and boolean operators to make room for the extended ascii letter codes or add them in causing #32 to #154 with about 5 more letters till it's at a full 7 bits of data.
the circuit network seems to run off of ints which are 32 bit(signed).
the non-extended-ascii can hold about 5 letters per value. the extended-ascii can hold about 4.
a single constant combinator (maybe we could make one that uses a string and builds the output?) can provide 15 values for string lengths of 75 for non-extended and 60 for extended.
If we make a "string-combinator" we could have it automatically output virtual signals 0~9, A~E. (backer-name could also be a good storage area for the string. entity prototype needs: "has_backer_name = true" EDIT: this seems to be bugged)
If we also had a "string-combinator" we could also just skip past that and have the ability to enslave the left and pass the string through.

my whole thought about an update would be this:

• Blue edged: current nixie tubes
• Purple/Red edged: compressed string values(numbers as strings), 2 different ones to allow them to run right next to each other(IE: PPPPPRRRRRPPPPP) without enslaving the other type.
• Gold: permanently displays a value, base crafting makes an Off/Space, then two craftings for each letter/number, one to the letter/number and the other back to off. (off excludes the circuit, crafting to letter/number is Off+circuit, crafting from results in Off+circuit)

I could write all of the updates for you with all this, along with an ingame GUI to convert strings into numbers for players, I could also edit the borders of all of them. All that would be needed is a new nixie-digits.png with the new letters and such.



thoughts?

[hitzu]

GopherAtl, I'm in a process of making new skin for tubes for myself, but I would like to share with others. Are you intrested?

Work in progress

nixie-numerals.gif (775.74 KiB) Viewed 9326 times

Some progress. Making glass is hard >__<

nixie-numerals1.gif (527.46 KiB) Viewed 9305 times