Proposal to fix: the pulse function on inserters (+belts?) is inconsistent under low power.

[Theikkru]

Being simple also. Especially a computer game for nerds.

Some of the best and nerdiest games I've played are very simple in design. Zachtronics games spring to mind. One thing I noticed about those games that really made them feel elegant was that their mechanics and rules were very consistent. (Consistency good. Inconsistency bad. Yes.)

[Deadlock989]

Is this dead horse still being flogged?

[ptx0]

[...]
the proposal decides there's an issue just because inserters don't behave like combinators, combinators miss the pulse outputs during low power condition. this is because of poor base design - no real question about it.

inserters have odd behaviour - they will drop an item into a cargo wagon while powered off. they are weird. that's all.

My proposal is about a way to make inserters (and other logic devices) be less weird and inconsistent, so why such strong fight against it? Even if I swallow your position that suffering from it can only be a result of bad base design, (and for the record I don't,) I've shown time and time again that having this weird and inconsistent behavior adds nothing to the game, and time and time again I show different ways it can cause all sorts of aggravating problems, and I've even come up with a solution to it, yet somehow "just fix ur power" justifies keeping an inconsistency around? I already addressed this argument way back in the Objection 1 section of the main post, yet you're here repeating the same argument without answering any of my refutations. If you can show me problems with my actual suggested solution, or reasons BESIDES those I've already addressed that changes should or should not be made, then I'm all ears, but repeating a bad argument does not make it any better.

they could just remove the brownout mechanism since it is compute intensive and revert to a Satisfactory-esque fuse situation where breaching the max capacity results in everything going completely off! that'd save UPS. i don't see how your suggestion saves UPS at all, you're asking for inserter circuit logic to follow brownouts just like combinators do, which is more compute to do, and not less.

[5thHorseman]

no, that's not what anyone is telling you - they're saying instead that the problem is the lack of power. and then you tell us that no one is listening to you. we're listening. we just disagree.

Yeah, but they're wrong. The lack of power isn't the problem.

And here's the fundamental difference between those who support this and those who don't.

You think that because we disagree with you that we don't understand the problem, in the same way that someone who tells a joke that doesn't get a laugh thinks it's because the audience doesn't get the joke. They get the joke. They just don't think it's funny.

I get your reasoning. I just don't think it's necessary when "add power" fixes it.

I even understand your frustration. I was told that limiting train stations to X trains was a bad idea and wouldn't be implemented. Now (in 1.1) it's being implemented. The big difference between us is that once the developers told me it would not be implemented, I understood that even though I didn't agree with them, it was their game and they got the final say. So I shut up, and let them program the game the way they wanted.

[Theikkru]

they could just remove the brownout mechanism since it is compute intensive and revert to a Satisfactory-esque fuse situation where breaching the max capacity results in everything going completely off! that'd save UPS.

That could, and if there were some sort of breaker mechanic on power producing entities in this game, that might be another solution to this.

i don't see how your suggestion saves UPS at all, you're asking for inserter circuit logic to follow brownouts just like combinators do, which is more compute to do, and not less.

Because all such calculations would be performed at the same time by the electrical network, just as they are for solar panels now. Solar panels have an O(1) computation cost factor because the network does the same complexity of calculation for any number of solar panels. Currently, combinators must be calculated individually because they have individual energy buffers. By consolidating the calculations onto the electric network and synchronizing all logic devices, separate calculations are no longer required for individual logic devices, making them computationally cost the same as solar panels (for the power calculation).

[Theikkru]

[...]
You think that because we disagree with you that we don't understand the problem, in the same way that someone who tells a joke that doesn't get a laugh thinks it's because the audience doesn't get the joke. They get the joke. They just don't think it's funny.

I get your reasoning. I just don't think it's necessary when "add power" fixes it.
[...]

I think you don't understand the problem, because you aren't addressing it. The problem, as written directly in the title, is that an inconsistency exists. See Objection 1. Unless you can guarantee that no player will ever encounter the inconsistency because no one will ever suffer from low power, "add power" does not "fix" anything, and does not make the inconsistency no longer exist; it just hides the effects of the inconsistency from you by removing one of the conditions for it to manifest. That is neither a justification for an inconsistency to exist, nor a reason to inflict it upon those who, however rarely, do encounter it.

[...]I was told that limiting train stations to X trains was a bad idea and wouldn't be implemented.[...]

And here is the fundamental difference between this topic and your case. No one has even given a reason why the proposal is a bad idea. I've provided reasons it would be a good idea, and people have repeatedly responded that the underlying problem can be avoided by doing such and such, but that doesn't make the proposal itself (that the problem should be removed, among other things) any less of a good idea.

[5thHorseman]

I think you don't understand the problem, because you aren't addressing it. The problem, as written directly in the title, is that an inconsistency exists.

Okay. I'll address it directly. An inconsistency exists. Inserters work differently under low power than combinators.

I am totally fine with that and don't think it's a problem.

Turrets don't use power. Unless you are talking about laser turrets. That's an inconsistency. It's also not a problem.
All explosives will damage your buildings. Except Cliff Explosives. That's an inconsistency. It's also not a problem.
I could write more, but frankly I'm tired of this inane subject. It's a video game.
Inserters work the way they work and combinators work the way they work. They work slightly different from each other in extreme conditions that are also conditions your factory should never be in because if your factory is in that condition you're in serious trouble. Sure, it's inconsistent. It's also not a problem.

And here is the fundamental difference between this topic and your case. No one has even given a reason why the suggestion is a bad idea.

The suggestion doesn't need to be a BAD idea to not get implemented. It's enough that it's not a GOOD idea. I think this idea is neutral. If they'd coded it this way I wouldn't be sad, or happy about it. That they're not does not make me happy, or sad. My only problem with it currently is that it is being championed as an amazing fix to a horrible flaw in the game when the developers of the game have responded with "meh, no," because that's basically a very fair assessment of it.

[Theikkru]

[...]
Turrets don't use power. Unless you are talking about laser turrets. That's an inconsistency. It's also not a problem.
All explosives will damage your buildings. Except Cliff Explosives. That's an inconsistency. It's also not a problem.
[...]

Laser turrets requiring power is an inconsistency justified by the fact that lasers require power as ammunition.
"Explosives" isn't a class, and cliff explosives aren't weapons, so it's not surprising that they wouldn't damage buildings like weapons do. (Explosives, the intermediate product, can't damage anything either.)
More to the point, I did describe circumstances under which the inserter inconsistency would cause problems, and regardless of whether or not it's considered good gameplay or not to be in those circumstances, it's well within the realm of normal gameplay, so that's still no justification for the behavior to be inconsistent, broken, or erratic.

The suggestion doesn't need to be a BAD idea to not get implemented. It's enough that it's not a GOOD idea. I think this idea is neutral. If they'd coded it this way I wouldn't be sad, or happy about it. That they're not does not make me happy, or sad. My only problem with it currently is that it is being championed as an amazing fix to a horrible flaw in the game when the developers of the game have responded with "meh, no," because that's basically a very fair assessment of it.

It's not being championed as an amazing fix, it's being championed as a plain old good idea that for some reason is getting tons of unreasoning and very repetitive backlash. Even disregarding the inconsistency removal aspect of the proposal, the UPS improvement aspect remains, so it would still be a good idea. The only dev response so far was from boskid, and the content of that was not 'meh', it was a comment about implementation problems that doesn't even apply to the proposal.

[foamy]

Is this dead horse still being flogged?

Modding Discussions is thataway. Since you've not played a vanilla game of Factorio in two years, I think your comments would be more useful there.

no, that's not what anyone is telling you - they're saying instead that the problem is the lack of power. and then you tell us that no one is listening to you. we're listening. we just disagree.

Yeah, but they're wrong. The lack of power isn't the problem.

And here's the fundamental difference between those who support this and those who don't.

You think that because we disagree with you that we don't understand the problem, in the same way that someone who tells a joke that doesn't get a laugh thinks it's because the audience doesn't get the joke. They get the joke. They just don't think it's funny.

I get your reasoning. I just don't think it's necessary when "add power" fixes it.

I even understand your frustration. I was told that limiting train stations to X trains was a bad idea and wouldn't be implemented. Now (in 1.1) it's being implemented. The big difference between us is that once the developers told me it would not be implemented, I understood that even though I didn't agree with them, it was their game and they got the final say. So I shut up, and let them program the game the way they wanted.

See, I'd buy this more if the people objecting to this ever seemed to respond to the actual ideas and thing at issue, instead of going 'eh just add power instead of complaining'. I can totally see saying this isn't a priority -- because I don't think it is -- but the comments dismissing it as a suggestion haven't actually addressed the suggestion itself. Even the dev that responded to the first thread seemed to think the issue was something entirely different.

I dunno why it's so hard to grasp. It feels like people are just objecting to the change because it's a change. Nobody seems to be coming up with, say, implementation issues, or unexpected corner cases, or some reason the current behaviour is actually better; just 'build your factory differently, not a problem' blanket dismissals.

Gets annoying.

[Koub]

I dunno why it's so hard to grasp. It feels like people are just objecting to the change because it's a change. Nobody seems to be coming up with, say, implementation issues, or unexpected corner cases, or some reason the current behaviour is actually better; just 'build your factory differently, not a problem' blanket dismissals.

Gets annoying.

Let me tell you a tale. At my day job, things globally work, despite some process issues that are clunky and incoherent due to a bad early design decision (that seemed smart at that time). I have risen a suggestion and tried to convince every one that things could be so much more straightforward if we changed a small part of the way we do things. All the people have agreed that what I said makes sense. But 1 year and a half after that, nothing has changed.
Do you want to know why ? Nobody cares. Things work well enough that even if I'm right on the paper, nobody will invest the smallest effort to correct a process that is "good enough".

So it's the same thing here. You might be right, but in the end, nobody cares. We have a idiomatic expression for that in French : making a mountain out of a molehill. That's the way I see this discussion.
Would you and OP feel better if you were said : "Yeah, you're right, but nobody cares, so just mod in the behaviour you desperately want (or just use a mod that addresses the symptom), and get over it" ?

[ptx0]

More to the point, I did describe circumstances under which the inserter inconsistency would cause problems, and regardless of whether or not it's considered good gameplay or not to be in those circumstances, it's well within the realm of normal gameplay, so that's still no justification for the behavior to be inconsistent, broken, or erratic.

not justified according to... who? someone who isn't a developer of this game?

I gotta be honest, this is a weird hill to choose to die on. there's far better issues of inconsistency in the game, which people are ACTUALLY LIKELY TO RUN INTO - such as, inserters dropping items into train while powered off.. but if THAT issue is not worth fixing, this one definitely isn't.

if you need to reduce UPS usage of circuits' power usage, you can just install a mod to make them use no electricity. but overall, circuits are going to consume UPS when the signals change, anyway.

in Space Exploration, i have to use cross-surface circuits to maintain resource levels in my space outpost, and when my power dips, it oversupplies the space station because there's no incoming signals. my reaction wasn't "oh my god this game is broken, this is a noob trap!" it was "oh I should put this on its own dedicated power infrastructure" which is even easier in 1.1 with the power wires being preserved in BPs.

[Theikkru]

Let me tell you a tale. At my day job, things globally work, despite some process issues that are clunky and incoherent due to a bad early design decision (that seemed smart at that time). I have risen a suggestion and tried to convince every one that things could be so much more straightforward if we changed a small part of the way we do things. All the people have agreed that what I said makes sense. But 1 year and a half after that, nothing has changed.
Do you want to know why ? Nobody cares. Things work well enough that even if I'm right on the paper, nobody will invest the smallest effort to correct a process that is "good enough".

So it's the same thing here. You might be right, but in the end, nobody cares. We have a idiomatic expression for that in French : making a mountain out of a molehill. That's the way I see this discussion.
Would you and OP feel better if you were said : "Yeah, you're right, but nobody cares, so just mod in the behaviour you desperately want (or just use a mod that addresses the symptom), and get over it" ?

I see 3 counterpoints to this.

The first, on a forum meta level, is that the behavior in this and previous threads does not match what happens in a case of "good idea but not worth". If everyone is feeling apathetic about an idea, the thread gets a couple of half-hearted replies, maybe an agreement, maybe someone mentions a workaround, and pretty quickly the thread loses steam and sinks into the bowels of the suggestions forum without further replies, because no one feels strongly enough about it to do or say anything (just like the inaction you described). Instead, this and the previous thread got tons of replies actively trying to shoot down this suggestion, (and even the threads themselves have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous modding,) but they were all the same bad arguments that, when pressed, quickly fell apart. That suggests some motive/interest in the subject exists, but since no one has provided a coherent opposition, I have no idea what it is.

Second, a "not worth the effort to implement" response doesn't really fit the circumstances. I've got the impression that in Factorio, an unusually refined game, things like lack of bugs, consistent behavior of game mechanics, and especially optimization of game performance (UPS) are quite highly valued. The proposal here could contribute to at least two of those goals, while using a lot of existing internal game mechanics, (lowering the bar for implementation,) so it appears to align very well with actual demonstrated development motivations (as opposed to merely ostensible ones part of a corporate slogan or motivational program). So far, no one in a position of knowledge has refuted any of that, or brought up any contravening factors.

Third, a response to the question at the end. Based on my limited knowledge of modding and other replies I've seen, this proposal is very likely unmoddable, because it involves optimization of internal game mechanisms that the modding APIs won't have enough access to. If someone with more modding knowledge can refute this by showing how such an implementation might work, please do. (That would also strengthen the second point though.)

[ptx0]

[...] but they were all the same bad arguments that, when pressed, quickly fell apart. [...]

holy cow, it's so crazy that you can't see what's happening here is happening on both sides. you keep ignoring really good advice and suggestions and ways that you can just ignore this or never run into it, but you keep insisting that people WILL run into this "trap". you called it a trap, asked for the pulse feature to be removed from the game, and you wonder why people are passionate about telling you to leave it alone....? your entire premise is flawed
- thus, the details don't matter.

[Deadlock989]

So it's the same thing here. You might be right, but in the end, nobody cares. We have a idiomatic expression for that in French : making a mountain out of a molehill. That's the way I see this discussion.

I don't think it's entirely that. I think Pauli's "not even wrong" applies. The assertions that everyone just doesn't understand the special concerns is a dead giveaway.

You're right to the extent that I didn't care at all until one person started saying the game was badly designed and a feature that literally hundreds of thousands of people are using should be removed because it offends their personal sensibilities when they have a terribly, terribly built power supply and their intricate house of cards falls down. Then I cared, for a millisecond.

[ptx0]

You're right to the extent that I didn't care at all until one person started saying the game was badly designed and a feature that literally hundreds of thousands of people are using should be removed because it offends their personal sensibilities when they have a terribly, terribly built power supply and their intricate house of cards falls down. Then I cared, for a millisecond.

deadlock and I hardly ever agree on anything. that should tell OP something.

[Theikkru]

holy cow, it's so crazy that you can't see what's happening here is happening on both sides. you keep ignoring really good advice and suggestions and ways that you can just ignore this or never run into it,

No, I acknowledged repeatedly that those methods exist and are in fact valid ways to avoid running into the inconsistency. That isn't an argument against removing the inconsistency entirely unless they somehow eliminate the possibility that the inconsistency manifests (even for players unaware of it), and that's not the case,

but you keep insisting that people WILL run into this "trap".

no, I'm simply saying they still CAN run into it because the possibility still exists,

you called it a trap, asked for the pulse feature to be removed from the game,

and no I did not. Even in the title, "Please remove if unfixable" is only a conditional statement, and no more than a cursory look at the main post would reveal that that statement is rhetorical because the only image there shows that the problem is by no stretch of the imagination "unfixable". I then went on to explicitly state as much later:

Rest assured, you are correct. My "easy fix" suggestion is primarily a rhetorical demonstration of the absurdity of the inconsistency and how trivial it would be to fix things. In the event it's actually implemented, you'd have to use the 2-combinator setup I showed to recreate the pulse function, but that would be it.
[...]

[...]
There is no dumbing down or removal of anything, and I've been trying to build a case for that this whole time; the fix is right here:
[...]
Even the "easy fix" can't be called a "removal" if it's still in the game, and it's certainly not a "dumbing down" if players actually have to figure out the general implementation of pulses instead of just clicking a toggle button. Regardless, as I've been saying the whole time, the "easy fix" was mostly a rhetorical device to point out the absurdity of the situation (that the general implementation doesn't suffer from broken behavior while the supposed "convenience feature" does).
[...]

From the very start, I declared that the actual suggestion was the proposal behind the spoiler.

and you wonder why people are passionate about telling you to leave it alone....? [...]

Yes I am. Are you telling me that all this is caused by people failing to actually read and understand the contents of this thread? I'm removing it from the title to be safe.

deadlock and I hardly ever agree on anything. that should tell OP something.

Not really. I've already known for a long time that groups can come to a consensus, even if that consensus is completely illogical. It's commonly known as groupthink.

Besides, none of this really refutes my point, since the last thread ended in complete disarray anyways, despite the lack of any mention of pulse function removal.

[Jap2.0]

...they were all the same bad arguments that, when pressed, quickly fell apart.

I'm sorry but attempting to objectively judge the quality of the arguments of the person you're arguing discussing with is generally a futile exercise.

Edit/follow-up: Bonus points for removing the inflammatory part that wasn't really the suggestion from the title. Now if only the actual suggestion wasn't hidden...

[ptx0]

holy cow, it's so crazy that you can't see what's happening here is happening on both sides. you keep ignoring really good advice and suggestions and ways that you can just ignore this or never run into it,

No

you're not ignoring the solutions? so what are you asking for it to be changed for? sounds like your problem is resolved.

[Jap2.0]

holy cow, it's so crazy that you can't see what's happening here is happening on both sides. you keep ignoring really good advice and suggestions and ways that you can just ignore this or never run into it,

No

you're not ignoring the solutions? so what are you asking for it to be changed for? sounds like your problem is resolved.

Okay you could at least try reading the next sentence.

[Theikkru]

I'm sorry but attempting to objectively judge the quality of the arguments of the person you're arguing discussing with is generally a futile exercise.

There are logic-based methods for evaluating an argument and how it interacts with an opposing argument that operate independently of and objectively on said argument. There are limitations to these methods, as they assume things like common premises and therefore cannot resolve incongruent ones, but they can be used to determine whether an argument logically refutes another, whether it is itself logically consistent, and whether it is correctly supported by its own premises. These are examples of indicators of an argument that logically addresses/refutes another:

[...]say, implementation issues, or unexpected corner cases, or some reason the current behaviour is actually better;[...]

Edit/follow-up: Bonus points for removing the inflammatory part that wasn't really the suggestion from the title. Now if only the actual suggestion wasn't hidden...

This and another clarity addition done.