Radar Circuit Data

[adam_bise]

For automated land expansion, namely with recursive blueprints.

The current method for automated land expansion, the detection of mineral patches, cliffs, and water is via testing each coordinate with a blueprint, on a chunk that is already revealed through radar and may or may not even have any minerals at all.

A nice solution to this would be the ability to read radar data on the circuit network.

Signaling:

There is no need for radar id's or a mess of radar relative coordinates, just simple serialized terrain signals containing the coordinate value from map center, updated every tick for the duration of the sweep.

In each sweep the data is sent from the first radar, then the second. The order doesn't matter. For each radar, for each tick the first coordinate is sent then the second. Again, order doesn't matter. The signal itself is terrain type with the value of the coordinate. Interesting terrain types would be things like water, land, cliff, tree, mineral type, crude patch.

The number of radars on the map, multiplied by the constant number of coordinates per radar area gives you the number of ticks per sweep.

The data could be read with combinators, recording coordinates of wanted minerals, and automated expansion via radars becomes possible.

Also, the "major changes to the blueprint library" in FF278 hopefully includes automated blueprint deployment. If so, hopefully by coordinate. If not, recursive blueprints could be changed or forked to allow absolute coordinates.