Short Description: Tactical Construction provides a per-player toggle that - when enabled - prioritizes the local player's roboport for construction requests (as opposed to allowing construction requests to be satisfied by any statically-placed logistics network that overlaps inside the player's mobile roboport).
Mod State: Beta (maybe? idk, it's not like I do this for a living
)Dependencies: None
Author: me (aaron311/accwebs)
Downloads:
* Mod Portal: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/TacticalConstruction
* Github: https://github.com/accwebs/factorio-tac ... nstruction
Mod portal (and Github) have detailed descriptions of the mod.
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Hey there! Looking for some brave souls to be "guinea pigs" for this (rather hacky) mod of mine. Of course, I'd only recommend trying it if the functionality it provides might be something you want. At this point I've tested it myself in single player and with my friends in various multiplayer gaming sessions, but it's really hard to know how it's doing in a variety of configs and simultaneous use with other mods.
At this point I know the UI sucks. So, while feedback on how you'd want it to work is welcome, that's not really the point right now. What I want to know is what do I break? And what scenarios/usages cause crashes? What's your performance experience with the mod enabled?
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Background: a friend got me addicted to Factorio about 9 months ago. What a wonderful addiction
Of course, my Factorio friends and I love construction robots. Who doesn't? The great news is that the game seems to be pretty good at figuring out the different logistics networks and such and allocating jobs out to available robots.
The bad news is that when building out your base, a constant annoyance to me and my friends is that once a construction job is 'assigned out' to the base network, even if the assigned robot is light-years away, the job won't get re-assigned to your local player. I get that that's probably a case of "it's not a bug, it's a feature", and I think I agree. However, the practical aspect of things is sometimes you just want your player's robots to finish the damn template next to you right away so you can get on with your life.
Rather than complain about it (okay, that's a lie, I complained about it incessantly), I decided to see if I could do something about it. So, after doing some investigation that *cough* might have involved a little bit of disassembling the native executable using the included PDB file for symbols (what can I say, I'm obsessive at times) I finally realized how the game's robot scheduling algorithm worked. Reviewing the various nested loops and calls, suddenly clicked to me that if I was to create a separate force in the game, the construction requests would be scheduled separately.
Hence this horrible idea of a mod was formed. When you toggle the button on, your player and any entities needing construction within your player's roboport, get moved to an alternate force. This has the effect of prioritizing your local roboport at the expense of causing various negative side effects. (So far they all seem to be temporary, although not sure, hence this call for help testing
)Anyhow, if you *do* decide to try this out, would be interested in feedback. Is this useful or just annoying? Etc.
Peace,
Aaron