No.olafthecat wrote:A tinsy bit of Necro going on here.
I think that could turn out to be very fun and interesting. Please post something hereLilly wrote:I've looked into what it takes to turn this into a mod. I found that it can be done, but only as a proof of concept, or in a very limited fashion. The biggest problem is drawing the belt lines and animating the buckets.
One approach is to bake the belt lines and buckets into a single animation, however, the ropeway would then be limited to fixed directions, and if you want hanging ropes, then also limited to fixed distances. Each station will simply keep a list of what is in transit towards that station and when it will arrive. This requires the least amount of lua code and thus will also work for big factories, however you can't see the contents of each bucket while they're in transit. There are still a few issues to resolve, such as what to do when output is blocked, or when the line is deconstructed.
For more freedom in pole placement, the ropes can be drawn as beam entities (the copper/red/green-wire drawing cannot be used here), and the buckets as car-entities. The problem here however, is that every bucket's movement has to be controlled with lua. Worst case, this means updating every bucket every tick and thus there's a limit to say 10.000 buckets per factory before you get serious frame rate issues. This can be alleviated somewhat by setting their direction and velocity and only updating them when they make a turn, which will be a bit more complicated to implement in lua. This approach allows for some interesting functionality though, such as detaching the buckets from the ropeway and offloading them onto belts, or vice-versa, using belts to load them into the station, where they will be attached to the ropeway.
I've made picture of what buckets on belts looks like:
I should really get into lua sometime...
