[0.12]Ideas, suggestions & discussion

[Ratzap]

Put landfill in the wagon and turn on bridge water

Ah then it is that simple. Is that in the FAQ somewhere? Or maybe a tooltip to indicate that uses landfill?

[Mokmo]

I think there's a mod out there that does that, but do you intend on putting a grid on the locomotive?

[Jorbun]

I'm trying to use bulldozer mode to tear up an old rail line, but it keeps deactivating because it "can't place rail". Is there a way to use the FARL for this? If not, maybe a distinct "Demolition" mode could be added?

Also, I think it would be great if the FARL could detect ghost tracks, and be programmed to follow them when possible. And would it be possible to add something which makes a ghost track between two disconnected stops? A "Planning" mode?

[Nexela]

I think bulldozer mode requires a FARL at each end of the train.

[Jorbun]

I think bulldozer mode requires a FARL at each end of the train.

Yes it does, and I did that. And there was a cargo car with rails in it. What I think is happening is bulldozer mode does the following;

Remove entities other than rails in front of the FARL.
Place rails in front of the FARL.
Remove rails behind the FARL.

But this means I can't use it to remove old rails, because when it tries to place a rail where there is already a rail, it deactivates instead of just driving on the existing rail.

[steinio]

Hello,

the F.A.R.L. loco is boring slow compared to the vanilla locos.
Is it possible to change yours to vanilla speed and only slow them down if F.A.R.L. is enabled?

This has the advantage that we can use your loco in usual train business if not used in between.

Greetings steinio.

[Choumiko]

I'm trying to use bulldozer mode to tear up an old rail line, but it keeps deactivating because it "can't place rail". Is there a way to use the FARL for this? If not, maybe a distinct "Demolition" mode could be added?

Remove entities other than rails in front of the FARL.
Place rails in front of the FARL.
Remove rails behind the FARL.

What Factorio/FARL version ? Bulldozer works for me. At the moment bulldozer only removes rails, walls, electric poles, lamps and rail signals. So if you have anything else in your way that may cause the error.

Also, I think it would be great if the FARL could detect ghost tracks, and be programmed to follow them when possible. And would it be possible to add something which makes a ghost track between two disconnected stops? A "Planning" mode?

Detecting ghost tracks is more or less on my todo.
If i add some sort of planning mode it would probably be something like a god mode which only allows using the vanilla rail planner in ghost mode.

I think there's a mod out there that does that, but do you intend on putting a grid on the locomotive?

the F.A.R.L. loco is boring slow compared to the vanilla locos.
Is it possible to change yours to vanilla speed and only slow them down if F.A.R.L. is enabled?

Starting next week i'm gonna make FARL work with robots instead of directly creating the entities. This will require some changes (most likely a FARL-wagon instead of a locomotive, grids on locomotives/wagons). My current unreleased version already adds FARL functionality to all locomotives by adding a grid and a new roboport, so FARLs going 500km/h when not active will be possible.

[Choumiko]

So it did a little bit of work, and robots with FARL seem to be a bad idea:

FARL + Robots

I do find the sound highly annoying and you'll need a ton of robots to go at a decent speed with anything more than 2 lanes (that is unless i add special FARL robots, which I don't really wanna do).
Plus i'd have to redistribute the cargo so that the wagon with the roboport always has enough items in it.

But FARL following ghost tracks is already (more or less) working:

FARL Autopilot (WIP)

All that's left to do is kick the player out of the FARL and replace him with a scripted player that keeps FARL moving forwards, turns following the ghosts is already in

[micomico]

Do you use FARL and a mod that adds vehicle equipments? Don't like the way you can't use the vehicle grid on all locomotives because FARL changes it to its own?

Well, me neither. So I made a little mod that changes that and allows you to use the grid on locomotives:

Fix FARL Equipment 0.0.1

With this you can put all the armor equipment on locomotives, just like you can on other vehicles. It also allows you to put a FARL module on FARL , but it doesn't seem to have negative consequences.

This is all the code involved (in data-updates.lua):

Code: Select all

data.raw["equipment-grid"]["farl-equipment-grid"].width = 10
data.raw["equipment-grid"]["farl-equipment-grid"].height = 10
data.raw["equipment-grid"]["farl-equipment-grid"].equipment_categories = {"armor"}
data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["farl-roboport"].categories = {"armor"}

[Choumiko]

Is there a mod that adds grids to locomotives you are using and FARL overwrites it? If so please name the mod, so i can try and fix it.
I specifically made it so that the small 2x2 "farl equipment only" grid is only added if there's no grid assigned already. If FARL detects a grid, it just adds the farl-equipment category to that grid.

[micomico]

Sure. It's a very simple mod:

VehiclesEquipement by Y.Petremann.

I'll try other ones to see if it's mod specific.

Thanks!

[Optera]

For me Vehicles Equipment does take priority over FARL's grid.
The only bug of using Vehicles Equipment together with FARL I noticed is that FARL locomotives don't have the flags set to preserve grids. Picking them up will make all equipment vanish.

[Choumiko]

I'll take a closer look at vehicle equipment and the needed flags.

Micomico can you post your mod list and/or your Factorio-current.log Might be something with load order of mods.

[micomico]

Just tested with a minimal set of mods and the diesel locomotive has a 2x2 grid, while FARL ends up with a 10x10 grid.

Mod list (minimal):

• creative-mode_0.2.3.zip
• FARL_0.7.3.zip
• VehiclesEquipement_0.0.2.zip

Made my own little mod that only changes vanilla vehicles, to replace 'Vehicles Equipement'. FARL has no grid and the diesel locomotive has a 10x10.

Both logs are attached.

[Choumiko]

Should be fixed now. FARL and normal loco now have a 10x10 grid with VehiclesEquipement and FARL doesn't loose the equipment when being mined

[DarkHelmet]

I'm sure this has been asked about before, but I would love to have an option to place signals as though they were pole entities, exactly as in the blueprint, rather than some distance apart. This is the main reason why I've been reluctant to use FARL, and I feel kind of silly to ask for it.

This is mostly because I've generally used a junction blueprint library and make connections using the poles/signals as anchors. This gets messy when the signals are in non-deterministic locations relative to poles.

I realize this is "interesting" on corners but my use case makes it a non issue as I'd be placing a blueprint there anyway. However, in driving mode, place the pole entity cluster at the last valid position in range of the previous pole. Personally, I even use blueprints for corners so that I can switch to T-junctions later if needed, without disrupting traffic.

[torne]

Using blueprints with walls and concrete seems to leave big gaps in both the walls and concrete on curved rail sections for me, even using the demo save and its blueprints. Is this just a limitation of the current implementation? I liked the idea of building walled off track but having to fill in a gap at every turn is a bit unfortunate.

Really impressed with how it works otherwise, though, especially the ghost rail following!

[Choumiko]

Using blueprints with walls and concrete seems to leave big gaps in both the walls and concrete on curved rail sections for me, even using the demo save and its blueprints. Is this just a limitation of the current implementation? I liked the idea of building walled off track but having to fill in a gap at every turn is a bit unfortunate.

Really impressed with how it works otherwise, though, especially the ghost rail following!

Yes, that's due to the current implementation. I might eventually add blueprints for curves, once i can get my lazy behind going

[torne]

No problem, I can imagine why this would be tricky (it's not obvious how to get things to "line up").

[PeteTheLich]

Hello I had the idea instead of manually laying gravel from the More Floors mod it'd be nice if the FARL would lay the gravel as it went provided it had the stone like it does for concrete as an optional dependency.