[MOD 0.16] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.12.0

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prg
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[MOD 0.16] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.12.0

Post by prg »

Image

Automate yet another aspect of constructing your factory!

Finding a way for a new transport belt through the maze of your factory has never been easier. Simply place a pair of transport belt start and end markers on the ground. This automatic belt planner will create transport belt ghosts between them for your construction robots to fill in. The path finding process runs in the background while you're free to take care of other more interesting things.

Now also supports placing pipes.
basic usage
Settings GUI explanation
Debug mode
Current version on the mod portal.

Known issues
  • Not well tested, especially in multiplayer.
  • Could be faster.
  • Possibly invalid/non-optimal paths could be found if you remodel your factory too heavily while the path finder is running. Modified tiles won't be re-evaluated.
  • Newly placed underground sections might interfere with already existing underground sections. This didn't use to happen too often with belts, but pipes tend to be placed in "always underground" mode with the maximum underground length of pipes being twice that of belts, so this might become more noticeable. Coming up with a proper check for that seems really annoying, so I'll first see how much of a problem this turns out to be.
  • Maximum length for underground belts hardcoded to five tiles for now.
Changelog
Last edited by prg on Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:56 pm, edited 8 times in total.
Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner—Automate yet another aspect of constructing your factory!

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Re: [MOD 0.12.30] Automatic Belt Planner v0.6.0

Post by prg »

New version. So, uhm, bump.
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Re: [MOD 0.12.30] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.7.0

Post by Ralord89 »

Pipes too? thank fuck for this, awesome work. Been testing with both belts and pipes with all functions, and I can say the only issue I've come across is underground belts/pipes crossing over, but you seem to know that already.

What I can suggest is mod support for Dytech and Bob's Mods pips and belts, and something to detect a Underground tunnel/pipe's maximum length as some mods increase the maximum distance they can go.

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Re: [MOD 0.12.30] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.7.0

Post by DUMBHA »

Ah yeah pipe support. Thanks for the awesome mod :D

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Re: [MOD 0.12.30] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.7.0

Post by British_Petroleum »

wow nice work. I think this could be one of those mods that eventually becomes part of the core game, like roadworks & personal roboport.

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Re: [MOD 0.12.30] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.7.0

Post by prg »

Ralord89 wrote:Pipes too? thank fuck for this, awesome work. Been testing with both belts and pipes with all functions, and I can say the only issue I've come across is underground belts/pipes crossing over, but you seem to know that already.

What I can suggest is mod support for Dytech and Bob's Mods pips and belts, and something to detect a Underground tunnel/pipe's maximum length as some mods increase the maximum distance they can go.
That's already planned, support for accessing modded underground belt lengths will come in 0.13. The problem with interfering underground sections will probably be a lot worse with modded belts, so I might need to do something about it after all. I just can't think of a sane way of doing this without totally destroying performance when underground sections can be like 30 or 50 tiles long. Sigh.
British_Petroleum wrote:wow nice work. I think this could be one of those mods that eventually becomes part of the core game, like roadworks & personal roboport.
Yeah, that would be nice. Path finding would probably be orders of magnitude faster when implemented in C++.
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Re: [MOD 0.13] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.9.0

Post by prg »

Just added an option to reverse the belt direction which can be selected after a path has been found before clicking the "create ghosts" button to make the belt run from end towards start. Useful if you're already standing near the intended end position of the belt and don't want to walk across your whole factory twice.

Will look into adding modded belt support soonish... I hope.
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Re: [MOD 0.14] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.10.0

Post by prg »

Minor update to support Factorio 0.14.
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Re: [MOD 0.14] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.10.0

Post by Jürgen Erhard »

How's the 0.15 update coming along? ;-)

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.10.0

Post by prg »

I'm a bit short on time at the moment. Looks like a few minor things need to get done besides changing "factorio_version" to "0.15". Should manage to get a release out tomorrow I think.
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Re: [MOD 0.14] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.10.0

Post by Jürgen Erhard »

Thanks in advance! :D

Also please note the strict icon_size change in 0.15.7.

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Re: [MOD 0.14] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.10.0

Post by prg »

There. A bit rushed, but should be usable again. Current release doesn't know about the increased underground belt length of the recent update yet (that really had to be released today, just when I thought I was done with porting the mod?), making this configurable will take a little more work.
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Re: [MOD 0.14] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.10.0

Post by AndrewIRL »

Sounds like an excellent mod, wish I had been using it on 0.14 - looking forward to this:
prg wrote:Current release doesn't know about the increased underground belt length of the recent update yet

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Re: [MOD 0.15] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.11.0

Post by wvlad »

Why can't I place a ghost of the planner entity? You know, you can place ghosts from map to anywhere.

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Re: [MOD 0.15] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.11.0

Post by prg »

wvlad wrote:Why can't I place a ghost of the planner entity? You know, you can place ghosts from map to anywhere.
That was the straight forward way to implement things (per-player path finder settings, matching up start and end marker) but I might have a look at how to make that work in the future.

...after I implement the other things I have on the TODO list that I haven't been getting around to since forever.
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Re: [MOD 0.15] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.11.0

Post by pulsar9 »

If you are still making changes, I would like to see an option to put the planner back into the player's hand when the 'create ghosts' button is pressed. Would make building multiple rows of belts so much better.

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Re: [MOD 0.15] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.11.0

Post by prg »

pulsar9 wrote:If you are still making changes, I would like to see an option to put the planner back into the player's hand when the 'create ghosts' button is pressed. Would make building multiple rows of belts so much better.
So an addition to the continuous build mode that lets you select a new start position everytime instead of reusing the old one?

Continuous build mode: off, separate paths, single path.

Makes sense, I'll look into it the next time I mess with the mod.
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Re: [MOD 0.15] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.11.0

Post by konfu »

First of all, nice work! I had a very similar mod idea and found this when looking for existing solutions.
Some remarks:
* Ideally, this would behave just like the rail planner, e.g. yellow arrows apearing as you hover your cursor on a belt, then shift click to enter ghost building mode with the path automatically updating as you move your cursor... Oh what a wonderful dream...
* The option to prefer the longest underground belts doesn't seem to account for the increased underground distance of red and blue belts.
* It would be nice, if one could alter the settings after the start end endpoint are set. That way you wouldn't have to set the same points multiple times when tweaking the settings.
* Can you add the ability to plan multiple belt lines? I find it tedious to build dozens of belt lines into and out of balancers even when using Picker Extended's Belt Brush utility. It would be perfect if this mod could solve this.

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Re: [MOD 0.15] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.11.0

Post by prg »

konfu wrote:First of all, nice work! I had a very similar mod idea and found this when looking for existing solutions.
Thanks! Hope it's useful for you.
konfu wrote:Some remarks:
* Ideally, this would behave just like the rail planner, e.g. yellow arrows apearing as you hover your cursor on a belt, then shift click to enter ghost building mode with the path automatically updating as you move your cursor... Oh what a wonderful dream...
Yeah, that would be great. But the cursor position isn't part of the shared game state so it can't be accessed by mods. Also this Lua implementation would likely be a bit too slow for non-trivial paths.
konfu wrote:* The option to prefer the longest underground belts doesn't seem to account for the increased underground distance of red and blue belts.
Known. I've been wanting to add support for different kinds of belts including modded ones since forever but creating a proper GUI and such for this requires effort and I've been pretty busy for the last year or so with getting my life sorted.
konfu wrote:* It would be nice, if one could alter the settings after the start end endpoint are set. That way you wouldn't have to set the same points multiple times when tweaking the settings.
If the path that has been found isn't to your liking, click Undo > Settings > change stuff around > Re-use end at $position.
konfu wrote:* Can you add the ability to plan multiple belt lines? I find it tedious to build dozens of belt lines into and out of balancers even when using Picker Extended's Belt Brush utility. It would be perfect if this mod could solve this.
Hm, might look into adding the ability to place multiple start and end markers at the same time. Not sure how well that would work though.

Things should start to settle down a bit for me in the near future, so I hope I'll be able to get back to working on this soonish.
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Re: [MOD 0.15] Automatic Belt (and pipe) Planner v0.11.0

Post by maschine »

Please update the Mod for 0.16, i cant't live without it :D

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