A new belt and tracking system.

[GDHURRICANE]

Tl;dr a covered belt faster than express belt that changes how belts store values to increase cpu/ups.

sorry for the wall of words.

I’ve been a lurker but decided to combine ideas I’ve seen and came up with into one definitive post. So now that the bots vs belts controversy has died down, I can share my idea without getting yelled at. I believe that bots don't need nerfed, but belts buffed. I propose to adding a 4th tier belt, one that will lower cps/ups usage by its mechanics and be needing less of them. My idea for a name would be the Highway belt. This would be faster than the express belt (say maybe 48 items /s or 64 items /s) and would work differently than a regular belt. This has been suggested before, but they could have some kind of cover, so you cannot put things onto or off of the belts. There would be a corresponding splitter and underground variant also. I am not a professional coder, but possibly you could calculate the speed and distance of belt to the next exit and the items wouldn't be tracked, they would be moved 1 belt before the end, until they were supposed to come out. This would decrease cpu/ups as it does not have to track the object every tick. However, it would make it hard to deconstruct the belts, as they wouldn't actually be on the belt. You could however when deconstructing the belt, move the 8 items that would be on the belt that's being deconstructed. It wouldn’t have to be checked every tick, only slightly under the mining time. Or give each of the groups of 8 its own assigned number, and when mined, calls onto the group of 8 that would be at the belt when mined. (or groups) The recipe would be decided on what the material the dome is. I recommend concrete, so it has another use.
Highway Belt-10 concrete,1 express belt,4 iron gears,1 advanced circuit,1 battery
Highway Splitter-1 express Splitter,4 iron rods,4 iron gears,2 advanced circuits,1 battery
Highway Underground Belt-1 express underground belt,15 concrete,15 iron gears,1 advanced circuit,1 battery

These ingredients are based on what it looks like (like iron rods for splitters) concrete for the cover, and advanced circuits and batteries because it needs “Electric” to make it go so fast.

I believe we need a new tier of belts as while bots and trains become better with research, especially with bots, we need to do something to help belts. Increasing their speed is not an option, so I believe either this or compression would be the right choice.

These are supposed to be late game belts used to mass transit many objects while reducing cpu/ups. To the nerdy side of the community, would the tracking idea work? I suspect not, or could it be changed to work with a non-see through system? Thank you for reading this mess.

[y.petremann]

I think the idea of covered highway belt is a good idea for many reason :

• Rendering is optimised since there is no more animation needed and items to render, permitting more FPS
• Those highway belts would forbid insertion or pickup from inserters, still loaders, splitters and side belts would still be allowed, this optimizing a lot the calculation when optimizing the transport lines (allowing longer transport lines)
• Having a fourth tier of belts which is covered would permit to have thicker bus which would be more fps friendly.

[Vegemeister]

It was my understanding that with the new belt optimizations, long runs of belt that nothing interacts with are already O(1), if you aren't looking at them. I think the splitter contraptions you'd need to collapse multiple belts into the covered highway belt and then expand them back at the other end would cost more CPU time than if you just ran however many parallel belts from point A to point B.

[blueblue]

There is a mod for this by the way, it's called vacuum belts.

[McDuff]

Vacuum belts is good but it still renders the objects.

Could "covered" belts use the underground belt system for their length to save ups?