I think its best to rework the boiler to act as assemblers with a recipe category 'heat-exchange'/'energy-exchange'bobingabout wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:35 amMy sugested fix for this is to add a category to fluids, similar to how you have fuel_category in items.
Currently, on a boiler and steam engine input you have a filter = "water" and filter = "steam". What if that filter was... category_filter = "water" and category_filter = "steam"? add category = "steam" to both steam165 and steam500 and then the fluidbox would only need to check for category == "steam" rather than going through a whole array on a filter (the reason given for why it was implemented only as a single value is that it would take too much processing time if every fluidbox had to check a filter array. with this sugestion it's increased from 1 (specific fluid) to 2 (Specific fluid and specific category)
For modding, This would extend to the boiler to change the specific fluid input from "water" to category "water", and I can add this category to pure-water and lithia-water in my mod to allow any type to be an input to the boiler.
And for my oil boiler and fluid generator, a category filter of "fuel-oil" would allow me to filter it to oils only, and stop steam from entering.
This would lead for current builds just to select the right recipes, without any change of blueprints or factorys and you don't have a different mechanic for this matter as the existing with assemblers
Added benefit is that you then could even heat some items in this manner not only just fluids ( who knows sometimes you will need a super heated loco )
with 0.17 and the 'void' for energy_usage you could even make this recipe/boiler working without electicty if wanted