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[HOSH]

I had a look at doing some pipe spacings too.
Alternatively, you could just say "Screw it", and align the pipe to the nearest belt step equal or above it's current distance, so if we go with Belts set 4, which is 4+5, you'd use steps 3, 4, 5 and 7 and get 14, 19, 24 and 34.
Tier 1 pipes are the same as red belts, tier 2 the same as blue belts, tier 3 the same as purple belts, then tungsten misses a step and is longer than green... because 29 is less than 30.

Well I have two opposite thoughts. Personally I like this setup where they are very similar, even through it is a little longer it looks to me more rounded. If similar to #4 maybe add in a pipe tier that line up with Purple, the first thing that come to mind was titanium or nitinol.

Only thing I do not like on #4 is it is too long for the black which stretches the rest out. So I would venture to guess #3 for the belts. (ok we lose a little length, but not bad) Something then with the pipe matching to these tiers, but start with the Red belt length and go up from there, so then it would be back to your 4 tiers. This would be something between the 2nd and 3rd, if that is possible.

[bobingabout]

My vote would be set #3 too. A black UG should be short and crossing 4 belts is too much I feel. That's what yellow UGs should be for. Black UG should be so you can cross belts at all. Not to make a main bus.

#3 actually only jumps 2 belts, and #4 jumps 3.

I had a look at doing some pipe spacings too.
Alternatively, you could just say "Screw it", and align the pipe to the nearest belt step equal or above it's current distance, so if we go with Belts set 4, which is 4+5, you'd use steps 3, 4, 5 and 7 and get 14, 19, 24 and 34.
Tier 1 pipes are the same as red belts, tier 2 the same as blue belts, tier 3 the same as purple belts, then tungsten misses a step and is longer than green... because 29 is less than 30.

Well I have two opposite thoughts. Personally I like this setup where they are very similar, even through it is a little longer it looks to me more rounded. If similar to #4 maybe add in a pipe tier that line up with Purple, the first thing that come to mind was titanium or nitinol.

Only thing I do not like on #4 is it is too long for the black which stretches the rest out. So I would venture to guess #3 for the belts. (ok we lose a little length, but not bad) Something then with the pipe matching to these tiers, but start with the Red belt length and go up from there, so then it would be back to your 4 tiers. This would be something between the 2nd and 3rd, if that is possible.

Titanium already exists as a Tier 3 pipe. honestly the tiers are all wrong, because it should be the same as tungsten, or at least longer than it is.

And, although I do actually like the look of belt model #3, the main reason making the top tiers shorter concerns me is that if people are already using these in an existing save, those belts/pipes will become disconnected.
Now, I'm not a big belt user, so I know I personally won't have this problem with the belts, but I will have this problem with my tungsten pipes.

I was thinking about giving the player a few options to adjust the values away from my new defaults too, so if you like the idea of black belts jumping 10 belts, and gaining another 10 every tier, you can set those options, or just have black belts jump 1 belt, with each belt giving +2 per tier, that's some hardcore UGBs.

To note, the magic formula for making them line up is that each step should add 1 more per level than the starting distance... though as you can see with pipes, you can start on the 3rd step for a big range at the start, and it works out.

[jodokus31]

regarding belt lengths:
I personally like the vanilla spacings (I guess its #3). If I make a bus kind of thing, i usually use 6 lanes, where I need at least a red ugb to cross.
black ugb could jump also 4 lanes like yellow. They are so limited by throughput, that you need to replace it soon in most cases.
And starting a 2 lane per segment bus is not so fun (I did it with xander and its just huge and ugly)

[RocketManChronicles]

I'm torn on this. I have since upgraded from the Main Bus factory to a more Train Bus factory. Belts are more a thing of mass movement of items for short distances that Bots are inefficient for. So, belts are not of major concern for me at this point in factory building. But Pipes, I would love the Titanium to match the Tungsten and Ceramic. As for overall length, I am ready for whatever you give us.

Also, with my upgrades away from Main bus factories, I do not have blueprints to carry over, so ... yeah, I guess I don't really have a say here. LOL

[HOSH]

That could work if you have the default at the #3 for the tier 0-5 belts like the few people who are commenting, and let others adjust the settings in the mod settings if they want longer between levels.

Personally I still would like to see the default distance line up to whichever belts scheme some, as we have tier 0-3 pipes (correct?) and I think you were referring to it could start at tier 2 red belt and go through tier 5 green belt. Although that would decrease the gain by going to the next tier, unless they could also have increased flow rate by going to the next tier of pipe?

Notes skip for TL:
Although for bobs+ games I have also changed over to a mini-startup base and then migrate to train based hub, so our runs of belt are shorter, we just have a lot of them.

I guess I got it mixed up, as I was basing the pipes off the 0.14 distances and most of them were similar based on size. Have not got to tier 3 pipes yet on my new game on 0.16, was waiting on some of the updates you were working on before doing too much. As I like the changes that have been happening.

[bman212121]

I completely agree it would be awesome if we could just set the distances ourselves from the GUI. If someone comes up with another pattern they like better they can just toss it in there.

The best schemes I could come up with ended up with the last tier becoming quite a bit longer. #3 is okay but if you were trying to replace sections of belts stuff with always be in the way.

Although it's a bit goofy, doing a single skip for Black works out fairly well.

So without drawing the picture, it would end up like this:

Black = 1 skip
Yellow = 4 skips
Red = 10 skips
Purple = 22 skips
Green = 34 skips

If you did that pattern, any belts that you had laid down between black squares would never be in the way of any other undergrounds you would put on the map. Then when you removed blacks, you'd have 4 tiles wide between any belts that were on the ground using that pattern now. If you removed the Yellows you'd always have 10 squares without interruption. The Purple / Green would let you skip up to 22 tiles in the first column, and 2 x 10 tiles in the second column. The 3rd column would repeat the pattern. This would definitely make the green longer than ever before, but it would make layouts a lot cleaner.

Here is a picture of that:

Belt Jump 1.png (7.17 KiB) Viewed 6616 times

The other option is to keep black at 2 skips. This makes it so that every other set of black would be blocked by a yellow belt, but every 3 sets would still have 4 belts of room, just like the first setup. Remove the black and it would perform the same way as before. I really like yellow sticking to 4 squares instead of 6 because I think that 6 would let you skip so much you wouldn't have to plan anything out early.

EDIT: The one nice thing about 2 square blacks is that you'd have access to early belt weaving with black and yellow. I think that's probably worth the tradeoff of them not lining up every other set of tiles.

Here is the alternate suggestion:

Belt Jump 2.png (6.02 KiB) Viewed 6616 times

Green would definitely would be super huge, but it would actually be handy because if you were trying to run belts along side say MK3 big power poles, they would still need to come up out of the ground between the poles. The scale on a lot of the other items can span really long distances, so it would make sense that the belts could as well.

EDIT: And I realized that I forgot Blue in my layout. So used to having 5 belts that 6 is kind of crazy.

Here would be my best guess to cram another belt into this layout:

You would end up with 16 skips for a blue if it were inserted accordingly. The only real thing I don't like about that is blue becomes the odd duckling that actually hurts the pattern a bit. I think the top pattern if you shifted the green to the right 2 squares, and the purple to the left 2 squares, you could weave green, purple, and red together simultaneously without them ever hitting each other. You could downscale the blue to the red size to make sure it works with blues and then they should all still thread. Or like as the game progresses if you had red laid down, upgrade that to blue, then weave a purple in your blue belt, then weave a green inside of both of those. (And I think if you stuck with blue at 10 square skips offset halfway between reds, you actually should be able to weave red, blue, purple, and green!)

Black = 1 skip
Yellow = 4 skips
Red = 10 skips
Blue = 16 skips
Purple = 22 skips
Green = 34 skips

Belt Jump 3.png (7.87 KiB) Viewed 6610 times

Belt Jump 4.png (6.71 KiB) Viewed 6610 times

So my vote would go towards the last picture I posted, Belt Jump 4.

[mrvn]

All good suggetions.

But could we please have black belts that skip 2 other belts first and not change any others? All the other changes would be destructive and I think need more thought on how to handle upgrades.

[bman212121]

One more pattern suggestion. I'm purposely using things that are divisible by a ton of numbers, as it makes things symmetrical. The smallest I can see fitting would be using a 48 block pattern.
There are segments that are 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 12, since those all divide nicely into 48.

You end up with:

Black: 2 skip
Yellow: 4 skip
Red: 6 skip
Blue: 10 skip
Purple: 14 skip
Green: 22 skip

Belt Jump 5.png (4.93 KiB) Viewed 6605 times

Off the top of my head I don't recall if that overlays base game or not. I think maybe the blue is slightly longer. It's not a bad pattern, and might fit okay into one of your ideas. I personally kind of like the 72 pattern better just because the last couple of sizes ramp up and give you a ton of length to work with. This one isn't bad though.



EDIT: 60 pattern?

Black: 2
Yellow: 4
Red: 8
Blue: 13
Purple: 18
Green: 28

Belt Jump 6.png (6.01 KiB) Viewed 6605 times

That one also does give a 12 x 5 pattern, which allows for 10 skips between UGs, but I figured that was too close to Red to be useful for blue. 13 is a bit odd though.

[bobingabout]

2 main points here.

1. The value used by a belt isn't the gap between them, it's the distance they look for a connected entity, so to get a 2 gap, it needs to look 3 tiles ahead, so the value is actually 3, not 2. I do get what you're saying though.
2. I was planning to use a simple 2 variable formula to calculate the distances, not actually give the player a setting for each belt and pipe. These 2 values would be the starting distance, say, 3 for black belts (which has a gap of 2), and then 4 for the "distance per tier" increase. so yellow belts would then have a value of 7 (gap of 6), and red belts 11 (gap of 10) etc. It's when the starting value is 1 less than (a multiple of) the per tier value that you get the nice lined up rows.
Pipes having a starting distance of 11, but a per tier of 4 gives a nice lined up table too.

The current implementation of the formula has a starting tier offset, not a first value, so you do actually set it to -1. however, that means the setting for that value needs to be able to drop below zero, and I can't set a hard limit, making it possible for you to set a value to result in a distance of 0 or below for underground distance, which will lock your game into an unloadable state. This wouldn't be so bad if you could just edit the settings.json file... but it's a .dat file now. so a slight rethink on how to do it, and the safest method is to use a starting value instead of an offset, and multiply the per level increase by level-1 instead of just level.


but after reading some of these comments, I think the way forward is not to force the belt distance change, nor tie it into the belt overhaul. Instead I should probably add another setting, "Belt and Pipe underground distance overhaul" with another 3 or 4 settings for the variables I mentioned above. Also go with pipe tiers as follows should have the best results. T0 = Iron, Copper, Stone. T1 = Steel, Bronze. T2 = Brass, Plastic. T3 = Titanium, Ceramic. T4 = Tungsten. Even though in theory Tungsten should be the same tier as Titanium and Ceramic, it is a tier above now, and shifting to this new formula keeps the tungsten superiority, while also making the other pipe tiers make sense.

In fact, those are the default numbers I'd probably want to go with. black belt distance 3 (remember, that's a gap of 2), iron pipe with a distance of 11 (gap of 10, that's +1 what it is now) and then +4 per tier, so belts go 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23 and pipes go 11, 15, 19, 23, and 27 for tungsten.
Since you probably think in gap distances too, I can actually have the values add the +1 internally so you set Gap distance rather than scan distance, so you'd put settings to 2 and 10 for black belt and iron pipe distances, instead of 3 and 11.

And yes, I know that puts Brass and Tungsten pipes, purple and green belts with a shorter distance than they have now.

[HOSH]

I wish there was a section in the mod settings GUI/menu for modders to list a recommended values for min/max if wanted and default. This way if we want to play around we can without resetting all values.

Looks great for the rest of it. Nice balanced and even...

[bman212121]

This wouldn't be so bad if you could just edit the settings.json file... but it's a .dat file now. so a slight rethink on how to do it

I'm sure I'm out of the loop on this one. I haven't moved a server to .16 yet, so I'm curious if you could explain that a bit further. Which settings file was changed to a .dat file, and why?

[bman212121]

I wish there was a section in the mod settings GUI/menu for modders to list a recommended values for min/max if wanted and default. This way if we want to play around we can without resetting all values.

Looks great for the rest of it. Nice balanced and even...

Agreed. I think min / max and default would be nice, but I wish it would allow even more flexibility.

One of the things that Factorio doesn't have that some other engines like the Quake / Cod engine, is the mod maker could specify a default value for their setting. The way it would work is the mod itself sets a default value in it's code, and it will look for a specific variable to see if it's in memory or not. If "bobs-weapon-pistol-damage" variable has not been assigned a value, the mod will just use whatever was coded into it. But if it finds that value in memory it will read whatever it says and use that instead. So almost every hard coded value can be tweaked by just adding a value into the configuration file. (By default most settings are commented out so they are not exposed. You can enable specific settings that you want to tweak)

Actually the more I think about it, it seems like that could be possible, but it would require tweaking on the game side. Make it so that any mod can provide a huge list of every variable it would allow to be tweaked, but don't actually load them. Let someone scroll through a list of possible settings, and when they enable a setting, it shows up in the modding GUI so it can be tweaked. That would keep the GUI somewhat clean, only enable mod settings that are being overridden from the defaults, but still make it so that the mod developer doesn't need to pick and choose what they expose and thus give the server operator access to just about every possible setting they would want to tweak. In that list if it's disabled it could list whatever the default value is supposed to be, so that can be shown. If you click "reset to default" and save that setting, the next time the game loads it should just disable the setting so it doesn't waste space.

[steinio]

This wouldn't be so bad if you could just edit the settings.json file... but it's a .dat file now. so a slight rethink on how to do it

I'm sure I'm out of the loop on this one. I haven't moved a server to .16 yet, so I'm curious if you could explain that a bit further. Which settings file was changed to a .dat file, and why?

mod-settings.json is migrated to mod-settings.dat as binary because float numbers like 0.33333333 couldn't be saved correctly in plain text. Don't blame me

[gaelyte]

I really do like the robotic attack drone(even if I don't understand why they despawn).
Could it be possible to make a defensive drone that is linked to the logistic network, has a huge battery capacity that is used to attack any creature that enters the logistic network and is spotted by a radar?
Some could also be equipped with standard ammo or flametower ammo to be more fun.

[Asanda_Nima]

Hio Bob,

I think since the last update the size and length of pipes/underground pipes is not displayed anymore.
Are all pipes equal now and just differ in the color?

[bobingabout]

Hio Bob,

I think since the last update the size and length of pipes/underground pipes is not displayed anymore.
Are all pipes equal now and just differ in the color?

They're all equal in size, but do vary in length. unfortunately, because the length can be set in the mod settings, and that setting can't easily be displayed, I decided it was best to remove the text.

[RocketManChronicles]

Hey Bob,

Can you take a look at the tech Logistic System 2, and maybe consider having it only require Science Pack 1, Science Pack 2, Science Pack 3, and Logistic Science Pack? Basically, removing the High Tech Science Pack from the recipe. My argument for this is that once I have the High Tech Science Pack going, I can just unlock both Logistic System 2 and Logistic System 3 in quick succession, thus really not using the Mk2 chests at all.

[bobingabout]

Hey Bob,

Can you take a look at the tech Logistic System 2, and maybe consider having it only require Science Pack 1, Science Pack 2, Science Pack 3, and Logistic Science Pack? Basically, removing the High Tech Science Pack from the recipe. My argument for this is that once I have the High Tech Science Pack going, I can just unlock both Logistic System 2 and Logistic System 3 in quick succession, thus really not using the Mk2 chests at all.

Logistics system 2 shouldn't require a high tech science pack by design, if it does it's an error. I'll take a look.

[hewhoispale]

Hio Bob,

I think since the last update the size and length of pipes/underground pipes is not displayed anymore.
Are all pipes equal now and just differ in the color?

They're all equal in size, but do vary in length. unfortunately, because the length can be set in the mod settings, and that setting can't easily be displayed, I decided it was best to remove the text.

Would it reasonable to display the 'tier' on the pipes' description? I can never keep track in game which materials make up which tier, especially when I'm part-way through the research tree and only have some of them available.

[bobingabout]

Yes, it would be possible to do that. someone actually mentioned it to me the other day, but I didn't make a note of it.

Number, no, because you can change it, and reading that into the locale isn't easy, if even possible in the description, but I can slap a simple "Tier 4" as a description of a pipe.