[MOD 0.16] Miniloader

[Therax]

very cool. I was concerned it might be nanobots.. but haven't dug into the whole bobs-robots thing yet :-p

All your reported issues around blueprints should be resolved in 1.5.2. Let me know if you find more!

I can somehow understand automation 2, but all the other tech and even science2 packs? All the parts you need for the yellow-miniloader are available for science1 and can be built already way earlier.

Miniloaders are far too powerful for red science, since they are considerably more effective than a fast or filter inserter. At the time you get them, they are already more powerful than stack inserters, so they require green science, like stack inserters, but are available considerably earlier since you don't need oil or red circuits. As for the technology requirements, the idea at one time was to require Engine Units as ingredients, but I relented.

There will be another pass over costs and technology requirements soon, given the requests for miniloaders to be components in higher tier miniloaders.

[Nexela]

Nanobots raises the on_built_entity event instead of the on_robot_built_entity. Since this is the event for a player building something, and it's normally impossible for a player to build an entity that is already connected to a circuit network or with circuit conditions set

This was a toss up at the the time. I believe it was on_robot_built for a while but the number of mods making wrong assumptions was far greater at that point so I switched them back.

[Therax]

Nanobots raises the on_built_entity event instead of the on_robot_built_entity. Since this is the event for a player building something, and it's normally impossible for a player to build an entity that is already connected to a circuit network or with circuit conditions set

This was a toss up at the the time. I believe it was on_robot_built for a while but the number of mods making wrong assumptions was far greater at that point so I switched them back.

I can see the arguments both ways, on_built_entity has player_index, which does make sense for Nanobots. Thank you for the revived flag though, it at least made compensating for the surprise very easy.

[Dimava]

Error when trying to bluepring road (tiles without buildings)

Error while running event
miniloader::on_player_setup_blueprint (ID 68)
__miniloader__/lualib/blueprint.lua:104: bad
argument #1 to 'ipairs' (table expected, got nil)

Probably needs nil check

[Therax]

Error when trying to bluepring road (tiles without buildings)

Thank you! Fixed in v1.5.3.

[staviq]

There is a bug, sometimes miniloaders only output on one side on the belt, until i rotate them back and forth:

I've been unable to reproduce this. The mod portal is being slow and unreliable at the moment, so I wasn't able to look at your saved game in detail. I'll try again later, but if you can provide any additional detail, that would be helpful: were the affected miniloaders placed by hand or by robot? Were they migrated from a prior version?

Placed probably by bots (Nanobots) and yes, they might be migrated from previous version.
This hasn't happened again though, only that time in that save, so maybe you have fixed it by accident

Found another problem in the latest version, Upgrade builder damages the entities, they disappear and only a part of the graphics remains that is not selectable:

I have also tested with no mods, except miniloader and "upgrade builder and planner" and it still does that.

[pleauser]

This hasn't happened again though, only that time in that save, so maybe you have fixed it by accident

Found another problem in the latest version, Upgrade builder damages the entities, they disappear and only a part of the graphics remains that is not selectable:

I have also tested with no mods, except miniloader and "upgrade builder and planner" and it still does that.

I was getting one sided output and other interesting related bugs several versions ago. i think/hope it was that which you were seeing

if Therax can get upgrade planner to work on these that would be great - but as compound objects they might be beyond its scope

[BHakluyt]

Hi Therax

I wanted to check out your mod sometime, so I have downloaded it, but have not researched it in my game *yet.* Just now I was zooming out and using shift-click to get a BP of a roboport and then the game crashed:

Miniloader Game Crash.jpg (486.51 KiB) Viewed 8939 times

What else you need?

factorio-current.log

(10.87 KiB) Downloaded 166 times

factorio-previous.log

(11.02 KiB) Downloaded 142 times

mod-list.json

(2.29 KiB) Downloaded 167 times

mod-settings.json

(6.82 KiB) Downloaded 170 times

edit - it seems to happen every time one use shift-click with a blueprint in order to get a BP of a single item. Just tested this with concrete and a random inserter.

[Therax]

Placed probably by bots (Nanobots) and yes, they might be migrated from previous version.
This hasn't happened again though, only that time in that save, so maybe you have fixed it by accident

Ah, this would have been the same Nanobots-related bug I tracked down in pleauser's save. The miniloader's inserters weren't getting correctly circuit connected to each other, leading to the behavior where the inserter for one of the lanes was enabled but the other disabled.

Found another problem in the latest version, Upgrade builder damages the entities, they disappear and only a part of the graphics remains that is not selectable:

It looks like Upgrade Planner removes the inserters, but not the belt segment, and then fails to place the new entity because the belt segment is in the way. I may be able to work around it.

edit - it seems to happen every time one use shift-click with a blueprint in order to get a BP of a single item. Just tested this with concrete and a random inserter.

Reported as core Factorio bug. It appears to affect anytime you create a blueprint while holding shift:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=56692

There appears to be no easy workaround. I can prevent the crash, but the resulting blueprint would have an incorrect entity count, since it captures all of the multiple entities in a miniloader.

[Oaquasis]

Hey Therax,

Thanks for the fix with the underground belts and I love the filter loaders! Great work!
Just as BHakluyt we are having a lot of problems with blueprints crashing the game.

I was roaming around in the code of the mod and might have found a solution/workaround.
It's workable solution for us at least.

I changed the following code (control.lua:208)

Code: Select all

blueprint.filter_miniloaders(bp)  

to

Code: Select all

if blueprint.valid and blueprint.valid_for_read then
  blueprint.filter_miniloaders(bp)
end

And now everytime a blueprint is made that should have crashed the server we end up with an empty blueprint instead.
When blueprinting the same zone again it works.

Maybe this could help you find permanent solution.
(disclaimer; i have some coding knowledge, but know nothing of LUA or Factorio mod modding, so either .valid or .valid_for_read could be fine. I just wanted to be safe.)

[Sunnova]

I had a couple crashes with 1.5.3 also, in blueprint.lua, functions

inserters_in_position
remove_entities

I put nil checks for bp_entities after the line with the "for" statement, this stopped the crashes for me.

Could not even load my save without doing that. Working fine now.

[Therax]

edit - it seems to happen every time one use shift-click with a blueprint in order to get a BP of a single item. Just tested this with concrete and a random inserter.

Just as BHakluyt we are having a lot of problems with blueprints crashing the game.

I had a couple crashes with 1.5.3 also, in blueprint.lua, functions

inserters_in_position
remove_entities

These should all be fixed in v1.5.4, available now. Thanks for your patience!

[buggy123]

I know this supports Bob's faster belts, but does it also support the faster belts from https://mods.factorio.com/mod/UltimateBelts?

[Therax]

Found another problem in the latest version, Upgrade builder damages the entities, they disappear and only a part of the graphics remains that is not selectable:

I have also tested with no mods, except miniloader and "upgrade builder and planner" and it still does that.

This was tricky, but mod portal now has v1.5.5 uploaded, with upgrade-planner support.

In my testing, I thought I found a bug that actually turns out to be an upgrade-planner bug affecting vanilla inserters as well: upgrading an inserter with robots breaks any circuit connections.

[Therax]

I know this supports Bob's faster belts, but does it also support the faster belts from https://mods.factorio.com/mod/UltimateBelts?

Beta support added in v1.5.6.

Note that UltimateBelts are so fast that they seriously stretch the Factorio engine, at least in terms of how inserters and belts interact. Support in Miniloader is thus very incomplete.

[SqFKYo]

I found a weird interaction with Omnimatter mods. Namely if you have omnicrystal and omniscience (need also omnilib and omnimatter to run them) along with miniloader, the omniscience goes bonkers and adds omnipacks to bunch of early techs such as logistics 2. I've discussed this with omnisuite make and since he doesn't know what miniloader does internally, he suspected it might rearrange techs somehow, which then confuses omniscience.

Any chance of trying to work out this issue?

[Tyarns]

Thank you very much for adding Ultimate Belts support! If there is anything I can do to make support easier for you please let me know!

The quickest way to reach me is the factorio discord channel, but I regularly check my messages and the Ultimate Belts discussions page on the mod portal too

[Therax]

I found a weird interaction with Omnimatter mods. Namely if you have omnicrystal and omniscience (need also omnilib and omnimatter to run them) along with miniloader, the omniscience goes bonkers and adds omnipacks to bunch of early techs such as logistics 2. I've discussed this with omnisuite make and since he doesn't know what miniloader does internally, he suspected it might rearrange techs somehow, which then confuses omniscience.

Any chance of trying to work out this issue?

Miniloader doesn't do anything out of the ordinary with technologies. It doesn't touch logistics 2 or any existing techs, or change any dependencies or otherwise rearrange the tech tree.

Miniloader is open source, so the Omnimatter dev is free to have a look and verify what's happening with technologies, but this sounds like a bug on the Omnimatter side at first glance.

[SqFKYo]

I found a weird interaction with Omnimatter mods. Namely if you have omnicrystal and omniscience (need also omnilib and omnimatter to run them) along with miniloader, the omniscience goes bonkers and adds omnipacks to bunch of early techs such as logistics 2. I've discussed this with omnisuite make and since he doesn't know what miniloader does internally, he suspected it might rearrange techs somehow, which then confuses omniscience.

Any chance of trying to work out this issue?

Miniloader doesn't do anything out of the ordinary with technologies. It doesn't touch logistics 2 or any existing techs, or change any dependencies or otherwise rearrange the tech tree.

Miniloader is open source, so the Omnimatter dev is free to have a look and verify what's happening with technologies, but this sounds like a bug on the Omnimatter side at first glance.

I went through the mods, and for some reason changing 1 to 2 in tech_reqs on line 215 in data.lua fixes the issue:
local main_prereq = data.raw["technology"][tech_prereqs[2]]

Didn't really understand why, but it works, so feel free to make that change if it suits you.

[Therax]

2) I know you've already tweaked the material costs, but could you consider using earlier tiers of loaders as components to higher tiers? I have a ton of yellow loaders lying around that I'd like to get rid of via upgrading. It seems more economical and is how the vanilla belt-related items work.

By the way, this change made it into 1.5.6. Happy recycling!