Production Module not fully working

[skillabstinenz]

I put 100 iron plates into a 4 pm3 assembly machine, this normally produces 280 sticks. But this time it only produced 278, not filling the extra bar completely.

http://picpaste.com/280-1dcmTrHT.png

Somehow after some time/uses it desyncs to less. Happened with other products as well.

Edit: Also not being powered fully seems to cause it sooner. One 100 plates stacks with not enough power means only 278,x produced.

[Loewchen]

Just a rounding error. NaB.

[Xeanoa]

A brownout still shouldn't cause rounding errors that magnify like that...

[Rseding91]

A brownout still shouldn't cause rounding errors that magnify like that...

Brownout means it doesn't have 100% power which means it doesn't produce 100% of it's potential so it doesn't progress 100% that tick. That's expected.

So you get something like 90 ticks at 100% power and 10 ticks at 70% power which translates to 90 ticks at 100% increment and 10 ticks at 70% increment.

[Xeanoa]

A brownout still shouldn't cause rounding errors that magnify like that...

Brownout means it doesn't have 100% power which means it doesn't produce 100% of it's potential so it doesn't progress 100% that tick. That's expected.

So you get something like 90 ticks at 100% power and 10 ticks at 70% power which translates to 90 ticks at 100% increment and 10 ticks at 70% increment.

I would expect a brownout to only affect the speed of the machine, but not productivity in any way.
So, actually, a brownout not only causes the machine's crafting speed to be slower, but also lowers the module effect by the same amount?

[Rseding91]

A brownout still shouldn't cause rounding errors that magnify like that...

Brownout means it doesn't have 100% power which means it doesn't produce 100% of it's potential so it doesn't progress 100% that tick. That's expected.

So you get something like 90 ticks at 100% power and 10 ticks at 70% power which translates to 90 ticks at 100% increment and 10 ticks at 70% increment.

I would expect a brownout to only affect the speed of the machine, but not productivity in any way.
So, actually, a brownout not only causes the machine's crafting speed to be slower, but also lowers the module effect by the same amount?

Yes. 100% of 70% is less than 100% of 100%. The productivity is a % of the speed applied each tick. When less is applied then less goes towards the productivity.

[daniel34]

Yes. 100% of 70% is less than 100% of 100%. The productivity is a % of the speed applied each tick. When less is applied then less goes towards the productivity.

No, productivity doesn't decrease when the machine doesn't have enough energy.

An assembling machine 3 with 4x T3 productivity modules (requiring 881 kW) will produce 70 iron gear wheels when fed 100 iron plates (+40%, as expected). It will do so no matter if it runs on only a single solar panel (60kW, 7% of the required energy) or has full power. The only difference is a rounding error: both will produce 70 iron gear wheels, but the energy-starved assembler has a productivity bar of nothing (all black) and the fully powered assembler has a little pink pixel or two there.

I'm not saying that this is a bug, it might not be viewed as one because rounding errors / slight differences in results are to be expected and fixing them might take a lot of time (and inadvertently create new bugs) which might be better invested in other tasks, for a bug that most players won't even notice unless the are looking closely at the results and do the math. I'm just saying that your conclusion (productivity lowers when there isn't enough power) is wrong. It's not a % of speed, it's a fixed % defined by the module independent of speed or energy available.

EDIT: I did the same tests with iron sticks (as used in the OP) and got 280 for both cases, the fully powered had 1 or 2 pixels of productivity, the energy-starved was completely black on productivity, same as with the iron gear wheels test. I think it's probable that in some cases where the energy is going up and down all the time a result can occur where 278 iron sticks (and an almost filled productivity bar) are created instead of 280 iron sticks, but you'd have to present a reproducible savegame where that happens to be able to isolate the problem. It looks as if using productivity modules favours rounding up instead of down in my cases.