[0.18.36] Inconsistent splitter behaviours on full flow
Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2020 2:30 am
In a full flow situation -- full inputs, full drain -- splitters can exhibit inconsistent behaviour. I encountered it when attempting to create a belt-driven sushi setup, as here:
The splitters of interest are the ones in the 8:8 balancer, whose intended purpose was to output eight evenly mixed belts. Mathematically, this should work; all eight (seven loaded, one empty) input belts have an equal number of paths to the eight output belts and there are no throughput bottlenecks inside the balancer itself.
However, as shown in the screenshot, the fully loaded splitters are not mixing the provided belts. Instead, some of them are swapping them (e.g. the first splitter for red and green sciences, which produces one belt of red and one belt of green instead of two belts of one-half each) and some are simply passing material straight through, such as the first splitter on military and chemical, or the first splitter on purple and yellow. Similar behaviour is visible elsewhere.
This is not consistent with the purpose of a splitter. Worse, it's inconsistent in different ways, since sometimes the belts are switched and sometimes not. And, further, there's at least one other state I have observed, though do not currently have a screenshot of, which is that one lane will get swapped. This gets the 2-belts-of-half-and-half but isn't really what's desired either.
I don't know what makes any given one of these states occur over the other two; I suspect timing issues of some sort involving which feed hits them when.
The splitters of interest are the ones in the 8:8 balancer, whose intended purpose was to output eight evenly mixed belts. Mathematically, this should work; all eight (seven loaded, one empty) input belts have an equal number of paths to the eight output belts and there are no throughput bottlenecks inside the balancer itself.
However, as shown in the screenshot, the fully loaded splitters are not mixing the provided belts. Instead, some of them are swapping them (e.g. the first splitter for red and green sciences, which produces one belt of red and one belt of green instead of two belts of one-half each) and some are simply passing material straight through, such as the first splitter on military and chemical, or the first splitter on purple and yellow. Similar behaviour is visible elsewhere.
This is not consistent with the purpose of a splitter. Worse, it's inconsistent in different ways, since sometimes the belts are switched and sometimes not. And, further, there's at least one other state I have observed, though do not currently have a screenshot of, which is that one lane will get swapped. This gets the 2-belts-of-half-and-half but isn't really what's desired either.
I don't know what makes any given one of these states occur over the other two; I suspect timing issues of some sort involving which feed hits them when.