[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

[Vykromod]

Excellent mod! Exactly what Factorio is missing. There is one thing though - would it be too much to ask if there was some method of more direct control over the droids? Like giving direct orders to the squads, like in RTS games? Often I don't want the droids to rampage through the map and rack up the evolution factor, and I'd instead prefer to send them to a certain location to clear up before setting up an outpost, without having to go there and deploy them by hand or hoping for the assembler to accidentally send them that way.

[kyranzor]

Yeah, eventually i'll be adding something like that.

I want to add a RTS style control center where you can select and direct squads using command capsules or something. Will probably hijack some code from the good old satellite observer mod

[kyranzor]

For those like Rens2Sea who have an error due to a counter not having enough slots, and those who have issues with something about guardstations in the on_configuration_changed event code, please download the latest dev branch and confirm for me if it fixes your problem:

https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfact ... opment.zip

You don't need to rename your mod folder, it's still considered 0.2.1 for now, but replace the contents of your robot army mod folder with the updated contents of the Development branch zip (make sure folder structure is correct of course!)

[Rens2Sea]

Jup, that works!

[kyranzor]

Cool, one problem though, to fix it I had to detect the problem and force-destroy and replace the counter which breaks the circuit wire connections it had (if any) so you will need to find them and re wire them.

It's a bug with factorio, I'll report it to the devs soon when I have time. Basically the prototype of the counter should update to have 6 slots but for some reason it doesn't so old counters with 2 slots won't take 6 slots worth of signals and I can't find a way to increase it nicely

[Optera]

After watching Hunting Squads for a few hours i noticed some odd behavior.
Sometimes squads run way outside the designated hunting radius and never retreat even with only 5 bots remaining. I set them to retreat with 10/20.

Controlling them with Satellite Uplink station would be amazing.

I think it'd be nice to link one squad to a Guard Station or Assembler.
Assemblers then could produce only until their hunting squad size is reached like Guard stations do.
It'd also make sense for Hunting Squads to target the nearest enemy to their station so they dont beeline in the middle of biter territory.

[kyranzor]

After watching Hunting Squads for a few hours i noticed some odd behavior.
Sometimes squads run way outside the designated hunting radius and never retreat even with only 5 bots remaining. I set them to retreat with 10/20.

Do you have a droid assembler they can retreat to? If you've only ever placed droids by hand, and there is no droid assembler, they don't know where to retreat to. Could that be the problem?

Otherwise, i'm not sure exactly would could be causing that - at the very least a rally beacon, once placed, will trigger them all to move to that beacon and you can at least pick them up or send them back out with more members.

[Optera]

After watching Hunting Squads for a few hours i noticed some odd behavior.
Sometimes squads run way outside the designated hunting radius and never retreat even with only 5 bots remaining. I set them to retreat with 10/20.

Do you have a droid assembler they can retreat to? If you've only ever placed droids by hand, and there is no droid assembler, they don't know where to retreat to. Could that be the problem?

Otherwise, i'm not sure exactly would could be causing that - at the very least a rally beacon, once placed, will trigger them all to move to that beacon and you can at least pick them up or send them back out with more members.

Do they remember which assembler spawned them or will they retreat across a huge map to the assemblers?

[kyranzor]

Currently squads are independant of who/what spawned them. They just look for the nearest droid assembler to retreat to as that's the most logical place they might receive reinforcements from.

Keeping squads decoupled from spawner logic helps because if I tightly couple the logic in that way, it adds huge amounts of extra code to maintain those links and handle strange or extra cases like who/what does a squad consider as home if the player spawned them rather than an assembler?

[Optera]

I was asking for a link since i needed 3 assembler to even get the hunting quads to start cleaning.
Currently there is no feasible way to make sure each of those locations spawns/maintains exactly one hunting squad.

[kyranzor]

The droid assemblers just deploy what is given to them so if you want to control how many droids are going where you need to control the rate that you insert droids.

The squad sizes are arbitrary and can now be set in the new settings module by the way.. no need to change config.lua for the most common settings.

Why did you need 3 assemblers? For spawning more droids faster?

[Optera]

The squad sizes are arbitrary and can now be set in the new settings module by the way.. no need to change config.lua for the most common settings.

The activity module should also show constants like squad size.

Why did you need 3 assemblers? For spawning more droids faster?

My map got so big, thanks to RSO, I need to place assemblers in at least 3 spots for them to even find a potential target.

The droid assemblers just deploy what is given to them so if you want to control how many droids are going where you need to control the rate that you insert droids.

That's why I need some way of knowing the status of the squad(s) in the area of each assembler. Having only information about current active droids and droid types only helps if i where to use one type per area.

Edit:
You could add Backer names to assemblers and guard posts. Each bot spawned inherits that name and the assemblers can return count of bot's with their backer name when hocked to circuit network.
That way we can also easily group assemblers like train stops.
Renaming can be easily done as this mod shows: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/GotLag/Renamer

[DOSorDIE]

Robo_Error.png (98.42 KiB) Viewed 8213 times

I have no Droidstation in use ...

EDIT:
I see some other had the same problem and you give a download link for the fixed version.
Worked her too!

EDIT2:
The "Droid activity module" make a sounds every seconds and that sucks.
... without its only when something happend and that is OK.

[Supercheese]

Yeah, eventually i'll be adding something like that.
I want to add a RTS style control center where you can select and direct squads using command capsules or something. Will probably hijack some code from the good old satellite observer mod

I'd be more than willing to help out or add any bits to Satellite Uplink Station for commanding your robot army around.

[kyranzor]

Robo_Error.png

I have no Droidstation in use ...

EDIT:
I see some other had the same problem and you give a download link for the fixed version.
Worked her too!

EDIT2:
The "Droid activity module" make a sounds every seconds and that sucks.
... without its only when something happend and that is OK.

DOSorDIE, what do you mean the droid activity module makes sounds?? Is there a warning message printed every second? I don't understand. Are you sure it wasn't the "droid settings module"? and you set the wrong signal values?

[Qon]

If you use dev branch (0.2.1) does it have same error?

edit:
there are a few possible missing return-handling errors that could pop up but that particular one that is now generated should be fixed by the dev branch code. i'll be releasing 0.2.1 in about 6 hours officially for everyone so any last changes or bugs you guys can find for me with 0.13.14 would be super handy... i'm at work for another 2.5-3 hours so I can't do much till then.

Works in 0.2.1! Thanks :>

[kyranzor]

Qon - great!


DOSorDIE - I figured out why, it has some old debugging code in there for checking the slot - count. I'll fix that and release 0.2.2

[kyranzor]

Official v0.2.2 with the two known bugs fixed has been released. See mod portal https://mods.factorio.com/mods/kyranzor/robotarmy for download

Changes from 0.2.1 to 0.2.2 release:
- fixed counters from old save games not liking going from 2 signal slots to 6 slots
- fixed on_configuration_changed error when no guardstations were present.

[Nyghtbrynger]

Hello,
* Had to register to post a bug *
I'm playing with dozens of mods enabled, but I think that "Landfill" cause issues with yours. When remodeling the map with the water-bomb, we sometimes let small path between two holes of water. Your IA is having trouble when it attempt to cross a river with a single tile sized path for instance and I get this bug:

[kyranzor]

Hello,
* Had to register to post a bug *
I'm playing with dozens of mods enabled, but I think that "Landfill" cause issues with yours. When remodeling the map with the water-bomb, we sometimes let small path between two holes of water. Your IA is having trouble when it attempt to cross a river with a single tile sized path for instance and I get this bug:

This is solved by updating factorio to latest build (0.13.15)