Train Suborders

[Jelmergu]

I have a factory with a couple of trains that go to a circuit controlled unloading station. This station has to be able to take one item from each wagon to check its contents and determine if it should unload the wagon.

To achieve this, I have set my trains to leave after 5 seconds of inactivity. I resoned that if the train was empty it would not need to stay in the station and wait for the circuit to tell it to leave.

As recap needed is:

• Always wait for 5 seconds of inactivity
• Either leave
  • When Everything < 0 (leave when circuit says so)
  • When Empty cargo inventory

In game that results in the following


The last 'AND 5 seconds of inactivity' is in my opinion a bit overkill.

What I suggest is that you can group conditions together, in this case the empty cargo and circuit can get grouped together
Something like this:


Which also allows for creating conditions that say either 5 seconds of inactivity and either 1 or 2, or 60 seconds passed or something

[thetoolcrafter]

This is a really good idea, I only hope this gets read by the developers

[Deadly-Bagel]

Hmm. How do you group conditions? Can you 'ungroup' them? What about nesting groups? For this to be implemented properly it would double the number of buttons for managing wait conditions and you have to consider that trains aren't particularly newb-friendly to start with.

I would make a counter-suggestion for indenting AND conditions. Purely a cosmetic change, but it would make it clearer that it is a 'block' that all must be true to trigger leaving the station.

On the surface your suggestions sounds good however it's only useful if you have a condition that applies identically to multiple OR blocks, but somewhat falls apart if you have two (or more) common conditions which would require nesting however that gets messy. I think this would be very rarely used due to the obscurity of it and mostly because it doesn't apply to very many situations.

[ssilk]

I would call the concept "brackets".

[Yoyobuae]

I would call the concept "brackets".

Maybe the UI should auto-bracket the conditions based on the existing operator precedence for AND, OR. The conditions are already automatically grouped (I think AND is calculated first, then OR. Or maybe it was the other way around).

Explicitly showing this grouping would help UI clarity, I think.

[golfmiketango]

+1 for the idea of explicitly showing the operator precedence somehow, even if the semantics were to remain the same.