Friday Facts #402 - Lightspeed circuits

[jgilmore42]

Is there a mod that implements the radar feature in the current version of the game?

Yes. I don't know for sure which one, but the current modpack for "space exploration" has a uplink/downlink pair of machines with an infinite number of named channels. Not sure if they're available as a stand-alone mod, but it wouldn't surprise me.

They're used to coordinate among the different "planets" for what's required in various places.

Haven't played in awhile, let me update and look through my mods list... Found it: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-signal-transmission

[jgilmore42]

I would straight up not bother with the radar transmission at all - why bother wasting the resources to craft them and the power to run them, when powerline circuits are free on both accounts? Besides, it doesn't remove the need for a multiplexer anyway since there's only one channel.

Fair. And running the lines yourself at least gives the possibility of having more that two channels (this FFF has built-in to each radar two channels, red and green.)

I might point out though that you HAVE to have a radar at each outpost anyway, might as well hook your circuits to it and either not bother running red/green wires everywhere (even though that's free too, it does have to be patched occasionally, so there's a verysmall management overhead.) or have an extra pair of channels.

[protocol_1903]

Good to see _CodeGreen beat the devs to the cutting circuits problem. Also nice to see they fixed it :)

[Seelo]

Seeing the flashing progress bars on the ultra speed crafting immediately made me think about idle/clicker games like Adventure Capitalist, where when you start producing too much the "progress bar" becomes a continuous animation and instead of current progress you see amount produced per second.

I think it would look very cool if instead of flashing bar with meaningless (at this point) percentage you saw a nice flowing bar with a static text in the vein of "450% per second" (or per tick?)

[Drury]

Seeing the flashing progress bars on the ultra speed crafting immediately made me think about idle/clicker games like Adventure Capitalist, where when you start producing too much the "progress bar" becomes a continuous animation and instead of current progress you see amount produced per second.

I think it would look very cool if instead of flashing bar with meaningless (at this point) percentage you saw a nice flowing bar with a static text in the vein of "450% per second" (or per tick?)

Wouldn't mind having this displayed somewhere in the machine UI at all times, semi-obsoleting the rate calculator mod.

[morse]

Do I still qualify as a nerd if I never watched "spaceballs"?

[GreatWyrmGold]

I wonder whether there's some way to broadcast wireless circuit signals from one surface to another.

Found the teaser! Notice this excavator-claw-looking arm... thing on the player, hidden behind the UI window?

Whoa, I didn't even notice! Usually I at least see what they're hiding/teasing even if I'm not 100% sure.

I checked the original foundry video and yeah, its not in there. I think you are right that it is on the player but I can't imagine what use the player would have for an excavator dig-arm. Anybody else got any ideas?

Fasterer "mining" speed when rearranging the factory? Reshaping terrain? Automated fish-catching?

I can't think of anything a player-mounted excavator dig-arm could be used for that a personal roboport wouldn't be better at.

[Lubricus]

Real world radars is for detecting stuff like enemies, not for transmitting data.
So I think it would be better to make an new entity for transmitting data and leave the circuit connection for an future implementation of getting data of enemies/biters in the radar range. Then the radar would work more like a real world radar and not confusingly be an WIFI.

[XANi]

Real world radars is for detecting stuff like enemies, not for transmitting data.
So I think it would be better to make an new entity for transmitting data and leave the circuit connection for an future implementation of getting data of enemies/biters in the radar range. Then the radar would work more like a real world radar and not confusingly be an WIFI.

I expect many "YOU CAN DO THAT WITH RADAR?!" comments in the future lmao.

Kinda like when people discover you can just wire the accumulator to get the charge level (btw why we can't do same for power poles and current energy production/consumption?).

I'd rather have it being a radio tower building (also goes around the problem of having a bunch of radars eating UPS by scanning stuff uselessly), maybe with switch between surface/global mode (with corresponding increase in power usage).

[TioQueToca74]

Well, no need for separate entity, I think you can add simple checkboxes to the radar such as:
[ ] Send & Receive circuit signals
[ ] (future or mod feature) log stats about biters (this can look like the roboport one where you can choose signal symbol, I would add "number of mele biters, number of distance biters, number of nest, nearest biter distance", the last one can be used for alerts or some advance use, the other useful one is the number of nests, you can do something automatically when you detect they reach your radar coverture zone)

[AileTheAlien]

remembers the outside circuit wire connections, and tries to reconnect them if possible. To minimize problems, these connections are only remembered when using the cut tool, and are not (and cannot) ever be transferred into the blueprint library or blueprint export string.

There's already other options in blueprints to include trains or not, include any entities or only specific ones, even include train fuel - but somehow circuit wires are too much? The things that are really annoying to do over and over, when you already figured out a solution?

[Qon]

Is there a mod that implements the radar feature in the current version of the game?

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fff-402-radars
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/shortwave_fix (best one imo, what I wish the FFF implemented instead)
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-signal-transmission

[Qon]

Would it be bold ask for an "integrated circuit" a box 2x4 tiles which opens a virtual surface (a sort of space platform of a fixed size, one chunk , 32x32 tiles ). Box has 4 inputs and 4 outputs wires connectors. Only combinator's items are allowed to place inside the "integrated circuit box".

Factorio's combinator style logic can take up a lot of space, be horrible to move around, and impossible to understand later or properly document.

I made an assembly language for combinators to sidestep most of the issues that fiddling with combinators and wires manually creates: https://qon.github.io/combinassembly/
Some instructions: https://github.com/Qon/combinassembly
2D-layout is a planned feature.

Size issue kind of fixed: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SchallCircuitScaling

[SkerrittT]

Excellent, thank you.
I (no doubt like everyone else here) am keenly looking forward to the new version.

[FasterJump]

One chanel is 2 cables (red and green) and each cable can transmit around 200 signals (1 signal per item icon)... I think that 1 chanel (400 signals) are enough. Why would you need more than that? Most players will need 0 anyway since the train system handles cargo logic by itself (that's even more true with all the new train stop improvements).

Some advanced players are requesting multiple chanels, I don't see an use for that, but I wouldn't be against an advanced option to enable more than 1 channel. Or these players can just use multiplexing, they say it's not that hard to do.

[Qon]

One chanel is 2 cables (red and green) and each cable can transmit around 200 signals (1 signal per item icon)... I think that 1 chanel (400 signals) are enough. Why would you need more than that? Most players will need 0 anyway since the train system handles cargo logic by itself (that's even more true with all the new train stop improvements).

"640kb ought to be enough for everybody"

The main point of channels isn't just to be able to send more data. The primary reason is so that you can avoid interference when all channels use similar signals. Manually re-encoding signals is a huge amount of work that is exceptionally boring and error prone and will fail for any real system. Many channels will naturally potentially use up to ALL signals as well even if they don't usually end up doing that in practice or not all the time.

1 channel, a 3x3 entity that requires 300kW just makes the system to clunky and costly to actually make me consider using the feature instead of wires. I will still add wires to my rail network blueprint so that I have it when I need it, because what was presented is too clunky and what if I later realize I need 2 channels? Going back and adding them later is way to annoying. So the feature falls short of fixing the issue it was meant to fix unless you can be absolutely sure you won't need more than 1 channel.

Another reason for adding more channels is that adding more channels to a rail system means adding that many more poles just for signal wires, it's not scalable. Adding a trillion channels doesn't cost anything if it is implemented like in the shortwave mod, which is a lot of lost potential that was skipped for no good reason.

[Drury]

Most players will need 0 anyway since the train system handles cargo logic by itself (that's even more true with all the new train stop improvements).

Most players will never need to touch circuits ever since most meta layouts are self-balancing, so why are they even a feature in the first place?

Or these players can just use multiplexing, they say it's not that hard to do.

Multiplexing brings a lot of issues, chiefly to do with timing. You can only send the status of one train stop per tick, so with 60 stops that's already 1 second of lag. Add one more stop and suddenly the timing of all stops is different. It's not unworkable, but not having to bother with it would be preferable.

[FasterJump]

Multiple chanels would be a solution for a problem that nobody encountered (show me a vanilla base where there are multiple red/green cables running accross the map). I'm being the devil advocate here, I don't mind multiple chanels really, and I'm not an advanced circuit user, so take my arguments with a grain of salt.

Regarding the foundry speed, it's very fast, but you can see that the molten bucket transfer animation is still around 1 per second. In most games, the foundry will reach less than this speed, because you can get more output with productivity modules in the foundry (because productivity scales multiplicatively with speed).

[protocol_1903]

There's already other options in blueprints to include trains or not, include any entities or only specific ones, even include train fuel - but somehow circuit wires are too much? The things that are really annoying to do over and over, when you already figured out a solution?

I think you misunderstand what they mean. There is no point in saving external connections unless you are using the copy paste tool.

[pleegwat]

I don't think radar signals are for people who are already using factory-wide signal networks. They are probably primarily intended at players who use circuit-wired rail blueprints "because", never use it, until at some point late in they find a usecase and then find out there are too many gaps in their network where they had to do a few meters of rail manually and their circuit network doesn't connect.