TL;DR please first (or at the same time) give alternatives and then fix/change something,
instead of first fixing the overheating problem without inventing a keyboard with control keys.
Drison wrote:Koub wrote:Honestly, to all those who want the unintuitive black magic powered splitters :
https://xkcd.com/1172/
Hah this is spot on!
NO, it is a different problem ...
it would be "spot on", if we would have belt sorter items, belt sideloader items, etc in factorio, thus being able to achieve something without hacks or complicated large setups.
the situation in factorio would be something like no keyboard having a control key at all in that example (and not only one user's key being broken), thus everybody using the overheating workaround, and after fixing the overheating having no method to use or simulate that ctrl-functionality.
another example: underground belts are used to split the lanes of a belt (well known, and even documented). disallowing that trick in the future would be perfectly fine
only if we have some other method, eg a belt separator item (which splits lanes to separate belts) or a lane stopper item (which blocks one or the other lane of a belt), or something similar. theoretically it might be possible to use arrays of filter inserters, but only in some cases (when the lanes have different items), and at a high cost of space, items, effort, urging people to use bots to build such things with blueprints, and annoy people.
for merging/sideloading, there is a wonderful mod by Klonan:
Belt Buffer which allows up to 5 belts to directly insert into a buffer chest (straight belt and two "side belts" on the incoming side, two more incoming "side belts" with lower priority on the outgoing side, and one output belt. it also allows to use inserters to transfer items (input and output) between belts and chests/assemblers very fast. really nice!
but that is only a mod. we need similar tools for vanilla! maybe like that suggestion of a 1x1 item (buffer chest) which has 2 inputs and 2 outputs (with optional configuration for input/output, filters, lanes, etc), but until we get such things, we need to be able to continue using all the traditional and wellknown tricks of splitters, undergrounds, sideloading, etc.
a simple idea how to solve sideloading problems (got it 5 seconds ago, not very well thought through yet): change belt speed to 15/30/60 items per second. that would be nice round numbers instead of n*13.333333, and allow to have a faster (double the speed) belt where sideloading occurs. it could/should be documented that no belt has full compression by sideloading, except by using faster belts on the sideloading location (and thus the highest speed belts have no easy method for full compression), and people could decide whether to stay with easily compressed yellow and red belts (which are even a bit faster than before) or use the very fast new blue belts which can't be fully compressed easily.
thus please first (or at the same time) give any good alternatives and then fix/change something,
instead of first fixing the overheating problem without inventing a keyboard with control keys.
ps: if terrain generation has to be fixed in a way that breaks saves (really break saves, or only have ugly edges at newly generated chunks?), please do so before 0.16 becomes stable. if you announce that change a week in advance on an experimental build, people can decide to stay with a specific build until their map is done, and nobody should complain, in contrast to having buggy map generation in a stable 0.16, and then breaking it anyway when going to 0.17
.