Personal robots prioritizing nearest first

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older topic with same suggestion

[CzBuCHi]

What ?

Make construction bots place items not randomly all over the blueprint but only when there is already placed item or player nearby....

Why ?

Currently after placing smelter BP and having only few bots, it takes really long time before smelter can produce anyting because bots are spraying items all over the place ...

TL/DR:

Imagine, that attached image represents game world at 4 stages of build ...
- green square: chest with all nesseseary items and roboport
- blue rectangle: ghost of smelting arrays
- orange lines: connection to outer world (power, belts, ...)
- black pixels: placed items

on upper site u can see current progress of bots building ... no smelting until bots decide to place items at beginning of array (may take a while ...)
on lower site u can see my proposal how bots should build ... smelting can start really soon because array is builded from begining to end

PS: Sorry if this was already suggested, but i didnt find it ...

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older thread with same or similar suggestion.

[bobucles]

Shrinking the construction zone size of personal roboports is a huge buff to their functionality for this very reason.

[mrvn]

Shrinking the construction zone size of personal roboports is a huge buff to their functionality for this very reason.

How do you shrink the construction zone size?

[thedarkbunny]

How do you shrink the construction zone size?

Mods, generally.

[mrvn]

How do you shrink the construction zone size?

Mods, generally.

Any pointers to the API to use?

[bobucles]

Code: Select all

data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["personal-roboport-equipment"].construction_radius = 10 --down from 15
data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["personal-roboport-mk2-equipment"].construction_radius = 15 --down from 20	

It's a very simple QOL roboport buff.

[mrvn]

Code: Select all

data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["personal-roboport-equipment"].construction_radius = 10 --down from 15
data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["personal-roboport-mk2-equipment"].construction_radius = 15 --down from 20	

It's a very simple QOL roboport buff.

Args. That's not what I mend. That simply makes smaller roboport range. I want to shrink or grow it as needed. E.g. enter a train, shrink it to 1. Leave a train, grow it by one each tick till max.

[orzelek]

Code: Select all

data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["personal-roboport-equipment"].construction_radius = 10 --down from 15
data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["personal-roboport-mk2-equipment"].construction_radius = 15 --down from 20	

It's a very simple QOL roboport buff.

Args. That's not what I mend. That simply makes smaller roboport range. I want to shrink or grow it as needed. E.g. enter a train, shrink it to 1. Leave a train, grow it by one each tick till max.

With how game currently works you would need to dynamically replace equipment in grid I think since those parameters can't be modified in runtime.

[mrvn]

Code: Select all

data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["personal-roboport-equipment"].construction_radius = 10 --down from 15
data.raw["roboport-equipment"]["personal-roboport-mk2-equipment"].construction_radius = 15 --down from 20	

It's a very simple QOL roboport buff.

Args. That's not what I mend. That simply makes smaller roboport range. I want to shrink or grow it as needed. E.g. enter a train, shrink it to 1. Leave a train, grow it by one each tick till max.

With how game currently works you would need to dynamically replace equipment in grid I think since those parameters can't be modified in runtime.

Which then I think drains the battery. Or can you set the battery level back to what it was when removing the roboport from LUA?

[Darinth]

My apologies on being late to the party and thread necromancy. I know thread necromancy is generally prefered to entirely new topics, but it always feels weird.

What about utilizing the client to provide hints to the server? I don't know how this optimization would work in single player (I don't know if factorio always runs an internal server, and SP simply connects to it like many games that support both SP and MP or if it's go some other methodology). If the client were to analyze it's surroundings via iterating the chunks, find the closest entity to construction and it sent the server an entity a tick while it's got construction robots available as a hint to 'check this entity for construction via my player roboport' the server could check it, and effectively the server has had the effort of constructing the closest entity by player roboports offloaded. Wouldn't solve roboports not constructing nearest entities first, but I wasn't ever really bothered by roboports not constructing their closest entities first. I did tend to get annoyed by watching my personal robots fly off into the wild blue yonder when there were things to (de)construct right next to me.

[mrvn]

My apologies on being late to the party and thread necromancy. I know thread necromancy is generally prefered to entirely new topics, but it always feels weird.

What about utilizing the client to provide hints to the server? I don't know how this optimization would work in single player (I don't know if factorio always runs an internal server, and SP simply connects to it like many games that support both SP and MP or if it's go some other methodology). If the client were to analyze it's surroundings via iterating the chunks, find the closest entity to construction and it sent the server an entity a tick while it's got construction robots available as a hint to 'check this entity for construction via my player roboport' the server could check it, and effectively the server has had the effort of constructing the closest entity by player roboports offloaded. Wouldn't solve roboports not constructing nearest entities first, but I wasn't ever really bothered by roboports not constructing their closest entities first. I did tend to get annoyed by watching my personal robots fly off into the wild blue yonder when there were things to (de)construct right next to me.

Every client (and sever) computes everything bit identical. So if your client checks your roboport then every other player in multiplayer and the headless server has to check your roboport too. And that means you have to check everyone else roboport as well. So everyone checks everything.

Even if you change that so only you check your own roboport then everyone else would still have to wait for you to do so ot you get dropped from the game when you are to slow to keep up.

[Darinth]

That's right. I forgot that factorio utilizes a system that basically syncs the ticks between all of the players and servers, which makes perfect sense given the amount of data that would probably otherwise have to pass through the network connection. Bleh. I want there to be a solution to this problem, it bothers me every time I see bots from my personal roboport acting dumb. *_*

[Philip017]

i know there are lot of brilliant programmers for you lot out there and with factorio becoming even more multi threaded, i dont see why personal robots cant have their own thread or for that matter every logistics zone have it's own thread. it may require someone with the access and ability to rewrite some or all of the robot logic but i know it can be done. i have not read this entire thread, and i have probably commented on this before, but it would be so nice to have a working function that would do this work.

example, my personal robots do only my work, if i didn't place the blueprint, they will not help someone else build. this would not be a problem for single player games. it may require that each player have their own force, but can also be a member of another force so we can all collaborate on work. since the blueprint is mine, my robots can know where im at, if im standing still then it should be easy enough to figure out what is close and what is far, if i am standing still do close work first, if i move, then wait till i stand still again for a couple seconds, then assign work again. i do not at all mind waiting a couple seconds for the robots to figure out what to build close to me first, and this work could be sent to another thread till it's done, then let the main que know it's finished figuring out what to do. this logic would only apply to personal robots, base robots would still function the same way they do now. if my personal roboport is with in range of the ghost, has been assigned as being close to me, i have the item, and available robots (not waiting to charge), my robots will do the work, if the base robots are already assigned to that ghost they are canceled and my robot builds it instead. the base robot returns the unused item to the nearest yellow chest. i don't understand why any robot that needs to be charged is considered available to do a job, this is really apparent when you mine them when you have no more charge in your roboports.

i really love the new car/train logic so my robots dont run away while i zoom down out of range. thanks to whomever got that working so well.

thanks again, hope i haven't been too harsh, i know ya'll work hard on this

[_italics_]

Try out the Closest First mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ClosestFirst
You can see a little demo here: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... nouncement

One of these days I'll get around to making it a bit tighter, but it does the job without noticeable performance impact for me. Time profiler shows about 1/3-1/6th of Bottleneck's time.

It splits up the work over two ticks, and in multiplayer each player gets their own work-ticks. Haven't tried it myself, but I have gotten reports that it works without issues.

[hypertrax99]

What ?

i want a priority list for my personal robot hangar, to choose what they build first!
maybe also an option for build nearest/farest first

Why ?

because i read the pinned thread?
no, because i hate it when build for example a defense wall and the damn robots first build all the laser turrets and at the and the poles for the energy, really useless for me
when you build more then your robots can handle in one flight is it bad :/

maybe something like this:

zz.jpg (240.34 KiB) Viewed 6164 times

[Darinth]

Due to technical constraints on how the current system works, Wube has said no to robots being given priority in which things they build when. I'm hoping that some day they might be willing to change that. I actually really want robots to build things that are closest to you.

[Sad_Brother]

But for now one robot can wait for space cleared from trees by other robots before building.

Why one robot cannot wait for space powered before placing power consumer?
Why one robot cannot wait for power pole can be connected to other poles before placing new?
Why construction requests cannot be sorted by some priority?

[Darinth]

From reading through a massive thread on the subject is that it's all additional overhead and on previous attempts to some form of priority they saw substantial performance degredation. I personally think it's doable, but I don't know the codebase well enough to actually be able to make that call. So as much as it annoys me, I'm going to have to place faith in the Wube staff that if this isn't done it's not for a lack of interest, but due to technical constraints of some kind.