on_player_selected_area

[evandro_6565]

-- I want to get the selection area.. I did some tests to know which event does this but it didn't work.

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script.on_event(defines.events.on_player_selected_area, function(event) print("on_player_selected_area") end) 

function print(text, color)
	color = color or {r = 1, g = 1, b = 1}
	if game then
		for _, p in pairs(game.players) do
			game.players[_].print(text, color)
		end
	end
end

[Stringweasel]

Why didn't it work? What output did you get? What input did you give? What do you want to achieve?

Oh you're the one with the Damage Effect mod. It looks really cool! There's some discussions that popped up on your mod page, don't know if you noticed

[evandro_6565]

I found the event: on_player_setup_blueprint

[evandro_6565]

Why didn't it work? What output did you get? What input did you give? What do you want to achieve?

Oh you're the one with the Damage Effect mod. It looks really cool! There's some discussions that popped up on your mod page, don't know if you noticed

yes i noticed that. my "Damage Effect" mod is having entity-ghost issues

[evandro_6565]

Why didn't it work? What output did you get? What input did you give? What do you want to achieve?

Oh you're the one with the Damage Effect mod. It looks really cool! There's some discussions that popped up on your mod page, don't know if you noticed

I'm having problems with "surface.find_entity_filtered" I thought it would return all entities from a specific area... for example, I have two entities assembling-machine-1 and stone-wall and it only returns stone-wall and an assembling- machine-1 instead of two

if it's two equal entities with the same name, it only returns one.. in the loop

[Stringweasel]

I'm having problems with "surface.find_entity_filtered" I thought it would return all entities from a specific area... for example, I have two entities assembling-machine-1 and stone-wall and it only returns stone-wall and an assembling- machine-1 instead of two

if it's two equal entities with the same name, it only returns one.. in the loop

Can you show your code? Did you possibly specify `limit = 1` by accident?

[Silari]

And how are you checking what it returns? Note that if you're using print to print the results, print will not output the same string twice. So even if you find two assembling machines if you loop over the results and print the type, it'll only print "assembling-machine-1" ONCE.

[evandro_6565]

And how are you checking what it returns? Note that if you're using print to print the results, print will not output the same string twice. So even if you find two assembling machines if you loop over the results and print the type, it'll only print "assembling-machine-1" ONCE.

there is a condition before the print function that checks if the entity is a ghost and another parameter is the ghost_name to check which ghost contains the entity

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for _, entity in pairs(entities) do
			if entity.name:find "entity-ghost" and entity.ghost_name:find "-damaged" then
				print("replace_entity_ghost: "..entity.name)
			end
		end

when there is this condition: entity.ghost name:find "-damaged"
nothing... when you only have: entity.name:find "entity-ghost" in this condition print works..

The result I got is that I can't find the ghost of the entity I'm looking for

[FuryoftheStars]

Try putting a % symbol in front of those dashes within the find strings.

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if entity.name:find("entity%-ghost") and entity.ghost_name:find("%-damaged") then

I ran into this same issue with the Tree Sapling (Redux) mod.

[Pi-C]

Try putting a % symbol in front of those dashes within the find strings.

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if entity.name:find("entity%-ghost") and entity.ghost_name:find("%-damaged") then

I ran into this same issue with the Tree Sapling (Redux) mod.

From the Lua manual:

string.find (s, pattern [, init [, plain]])
Looks for the first match of pattern in the string s. If it finds a match, then find returns the indices of s where this occurrence starts and ends; otherwise, it returns nil. A third, optional numerical argument init specifies where to start the search; its default value is 1 and can be negative. A value of true as a fourth, optional argument plain turns off the pattern matching facilities, so the function does a plain "find substring" operation, with no characters in pattern being considered magic. Note that if plain is given, then init must be given as well.

If the pattern has captures, then in a successful match the captured values are also returned, after the two indices.

In this case, you could simply write

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if entity.name:find("entity-ghost", 1, true) and entity.ghost_name:find("-damaged", 1, true) then

When your string may be either a regular expression or plain text, you should use

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if (entity.name:find(pattern, 1, true) or entity.name:find(pattern)) and 
   (entity.ghost_name:find(other_pattern, 1, true) or entity.ghost_name:find(other_pattern)) then

[evandro_6565]

Code: Select all

if (entity.name:find(pattern, 1, true) or entity.name:find(pattern)) and 
   (entity.ghost_name:find(other_pattern, 1, true) or entity.ghost_name:find(other_pattern)) then

ok, my script worked... but i will test this one.

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if entity.name == "entity-ghost" and entity.ghost_name:find "-damaged" then

but the problem I don't know if it was in the condition. I changed this "find_entities_filtered"
instead of "area" I used "radius" with a manual number of 200 to test.
with "area" nothing was returned.

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surface.find_entities_filtered{position = position, radius = 200}

[Stringweasel]

but the problem I don't know if it was in the condition. I changed this "find_entities_filtered"
instead of "area" I used "radius" with a manual number of 200 to test.
with "area" nothing was returned.

Can you show the code that's not working?

If it works with `radius` and not `radius` then it sounds like you might be using the `area` keyword incorrectly maybe. Did you ensure the first position of the bounding box is the top left position? This means it's the smaller x and y values. An example for the docs. Or possibly you added `position` too, which will taken precidence over `area`.

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{{-2, -3}, {5, 8}}

or even better

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{left_top = {x = -2, y = -3}, right_bottom = {x = 5, y = 8}}

[evandro_6565]

Code: Select all

{{-2, -3}, {5, 8}}

or even better

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{left_top = {x = -2, y = -3}, right_bottom = {x = 5, y = 8}}

I was analyzing this code to find the area... I noticed that {{-x, -y} {x, y}} mine was positive {{x, y} {x, y}}

[evandro_6565]

I found a big problem how to loop through the global variable without slowing it down... I think I'm using more of a loop inside the TICK

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script.on_event(defines.events.on_tick, function() 
	run_tick() 

	turret.on_tick()
	entity.on_tick()
	car.on_tick()
	stone.on_tick()
end)

have a problem using "FOR" loop inside the event_tick... if I use just one it can relieve the game's FPS that is dropping a lot.... I didn't know that... any ideas

every on_tick() function has a loop I think this must be crashing and lowering fps

[evandro_6565]

the ghost entity was like the damaged entity I didn't want it because the player doesn't build this entity so it replaces the ghost of the entity of my mod with the original but in the undo tool CTRL Z doesn't work because this entity was placed by the script and not by the player staying for him to do manually

[Stringweasel]

I found a big problem how to loop through the global variable without slowing it down... I think I'm using more of a loop inside the TICK

Oof, UPS optimization is a tough one. A few ideas, although there are many people who know much more than me:

• What many people do is stagger the checks, for example instead of updating every tick only do it every 10th tick. Or every second. For example, Space Exploration's cargo rockets only update their signals every second.
• You can even improve that idea even more by only updating n entities in your table, instead of all of them every single time. See this handy functio for_n_of from flib you could mimic for example. This is done very nicely in Nixie Tubes for example. If you have one nixie, then the numbers update super fast, but the more you place down, the longer they take to update - but never at the cost of the game slowing down.
• The best on_tick is no on_tick. If you can get around not using on_tick, and rather listening for other events, then it's almost always better.

Some more specific notes about your code:

• Correct use of tables. For example, instead of using the `#` operator to get the length of a table that changes length often, keep track of it yourself. Everytime you call `#` the the game must iterate over every item in the list to count the elements. For example, I see in your code you have a function where `radius[random(#radius)` is called 6 times, and every time it will count all the elements. Count it yourself beforehand, and rather use that stored value.
• You could break your `global.entities` into different lists, e.g. `global.entities.cars = {}` so you can send car entities to only cars. That way you don't have to send every entity every tick to every damage check, just for the `stone` code to do a string::find to check if it's a car or not.
• I see you pass the entity-tag between functions, and then use `e = global.entities[tag]` everytime. This is very expensive, rather send the entity object itself. You're only sending a reference so there's no issues. That a lot of unneccesary table lookups.

Then finally, you could use Factorio's Debugger which has a built-in profiler. You could see exactly which function are taking the most time. Very handy to improve performance. I've used it quite a bit to improve the performance of some of my mods.

You definitely know how to code though, I'm sure you'll get the performance better

[evandro_6565]

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event.on_tick(function()
  global.from_k = table.for_n_of(extremely_large_table, global.from_k, 10, function(v) game.print(v) end)
end)

this code for_n_of improved the performance... but I didn't understand what exactly this function returns besides the inner function I inserted. {from_k}


Factorio's Debugger, I don't know how to use it.. it seems that you have to configure the launch

[Stringweasel]

this code for_n_of improved the performance

Great! I haven't had a close look at that function, but pretty sure `from_k` keeps track of which entries you updated last.

As for the Debugger, yes. You need two files in a folder called ".vscode". For example, this is how it looks in my mod folder.

As a side note: If I was you I would seriously considering improving performance even more, because your mod seems that it will attempt to keep track of every single entity in the world! That's massive! You will easily have to store, and loop over 10 thousands of entities every time. That will bloat the save files, and (with your new `for_n_of` code) every entity might only get updated like once every 10 minutes.

I would make main changes that would greatly increase performance:

1. As I mentioned earlier, store your different entities in seperate lists, like `global.entities.cars`, etc.
2. More importantly, only start keeping track of entities once they're damaged by listening to `on_entity_damaged`, and then forget about the entity again if it reaches full health.

Optimizing mods like this in Lua is all about reducing the amount of table lookups. And point 2 above will decrease the amount of entities you need to update by something like 90%!

If you want I could help you out. You could host your code on GitHub (like many mods do), and I can make Pull-Requests (like this) to your code and you can add it. I think this is a really cool project, and would love to see it reach it's full potential.

[evandro_6565]

I got it, good idea to ignore entities in the table to optimize the mod this lessens the effort in the loop.

I'm still learning to use github...

in the debugger where exactly the location of the launch file would be. in the mod folder.. :

it generated this I have to change something..

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{
    // Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes.
    // Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
    // For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "type": "factoriomod",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Factorio Mod Debug"
        },
        {
            "type": "factoriomod",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Factorio Mod Debug (Settings & Data)",
            "hookSettings": true,
            "hookData": true
        },
        {
            "type": "factoriomod",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Factorio Mod Debug (Profile)",
            "hookMode": "profile"
        }
    ]
}

[evandro_6565]

I have a question, do you know of a tool to visualize this code: shift = util.by_pixel(x, y) I have to keep opening and closing the game to test the positioning