Add 2 outputs to Decider Combinator

[vark111]

TL;DR

I would like to have Decider Combinators produce 2 outputs: one for True and one for False.

What?

The mechanics are simple: Have one output enabled if the condition is true, the other output enabled if the condition is false.

A picture's worth a thousand bits:

decider2.png (73.71 KiB) Viewed 169 times

Why?

All too frequently we need to have an output condition determined by both states of a decider. Currently the only way to do this is to drop a second combinator with a boolean inverted condition. A much simpler approach is to use a single decider with a True condition output and a False condition output.

Not only will this reduce the number of deciders in a lot of factories, this could also potentially improve the experience for non-developer players who can easily grasp the concept of an if/else statement, but who might struggle with the concept of boolean inversion.

[Tinyboss]

Could you use a constant combinator to put the false value on the output, and include the negative of it in your decider's output, to cancel it out? Still an extra combinator, but less configuration at least.

Regardless, I like your idea and I've wished for it myself, when setting recipes on my asteroid crushers.

[zig1000]

+1
A static combinator isn't sufficient because you might want both outputs to be based on the input.
For example, a very simple case is 'pass on either the red signal or the green signal based on [condition]' - this currently requires at least 2 combinators afaik.

[macdjord]

+1

As a programmer, it is very weird to have an 'if' condition that doesn't allow you to define the 'else' branch.

[Aricitic]

vark111, I want to personally thank you for not making me create a new topic just to revive an old topic from 2020 to reply to a few people...

In "Else output for decider combinator" (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=64173&start=20) people were explaining how "just add another combinator (idiot)"... No, they didn't add "idiot" but you could sense it in their replies.

Here's why I began to get infuriated by the replies that were basically "old way is good, new way is bad. challange is good, easy is bad."

TLDR: The people opposed to adding this are in one of three camps: imposing their demand for what they believe is "'challenge' through complexity" on others; falsely believing that it would harm TPS; or both. Does anyone here believe that anyone, anyone has the right to impose their beliefs of what "challenge" should be on others? Allowing someone to decide to utilize a feature/function or not does not "impose" challenge, it leaves what the "challenge" is to the individual. And anyone who believes that adding the purely optional "else" output to combinators doesn't understand programming. Wube consists of people who are provenly excellent programmers. They can handle the barely added complexity.

Note on challenge

I'll "amend" one point in the above here: the only one who has the right to "impose" 'challenge' on a user is/are the ones making the game. And even that statement is technically false: a user always has the ability to "cheat" or "mod" the game to change it. The only obvious exception is online experiences (MMOs, multiplayer, etc).

Brace for a LOT of text

People, FFS, we're talking about an Engineer who is so genius that they are able to take a few meager resources after crash-landing an interstellar ship that's slightly larger than a modern shipping truck, and go from "Steam Age" to "Nuclear Age" to "Space Age" within a matter of months or years without any working electronic information sources.
No... No! It's beyond even that. We're talking about an Engineer who is so absolutely, absurdly genius that they are able to make a fully automated manufacturing plant - only slightly larger than a small, two-person, car - out of nine Iron Plates, five Iron Gears and three Electronic Circuits - and those "Electronic Circuits" are made out of one Iron Plate and three Copper Cable. Not only is that literally not how circuits work (Cathodray tubes were more complicated than that) but this is dramatically in excess of modern technology computer capabilities...

So, you're telling me that someone so genius isn't able to figure out how to make a small box that can return two separate conditional signals? A box, mind you, that is about as big as they are? When modern technology is able to produce something the size of "look at the tip of your pinky finger" that can return thousands, if not billions of signals more than that many times in a second?

---

Ok... Ok... I know what some of you are thinking. "Since when is Factorio a 'realism' game?"
Um, I'm not talking realism here. I could list so many things that shatter that expectation... 2D is at the top of my list (no one in their right mind would lay out transport belts along a single layer...).
No. It's about this nonsensical argument about "challenge."

Earendel, who made the Space Exploration mod, among many others, and even helped with the Space Age expansion (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373 says it all...) has many great ideas. Yet they have one mindset that a LOT of people don't like: their idea of "challenge." Robot Attrition is almost a universally hated mod that has Reddit threads telling people how to lobotomize it and even a mod to effectively disable it. The very notion of "spaghetti" in Factorio is about the challenge of using belts and inserters (and trains) to transport things 'most efficiently'. The people who praise the "spaghetti" mindset claim that any "solution involving logistic bots trivializes the challenge."
...
Ok...

Now, let's take a step back and analyze this for a moment. Factorio is a game. The original/main developers of the game added logistic bots to the game. They gave the player a choice to utilize this feature... or not... without consequence. So, who is literally anyone else to take away the choice of how we, as players, take on a challenge? Who are "they" (not Earendel, specifically, but those demanding their idea of "challenge" be 'imposed' on the rest of us) to disable or force consequences on our ability to decide if we want to play one way versus another?
And... Think about this another way. At any point in human history did we, as a species, go "Eh, oh well, I can only do things this way and no other so I'll accept this challenge and live with it?"

Um, no. Throughout history, we've "spat in the face of" 'challenge' with "innovation" and "creativity" to make things easier for ourselves and others. That's where science and technology come from. That's where we come from.


So... I ask you, all of you, those for "greater challenge" and those for "more accessibility" and those for "more features" (and those I can't think of "words" for, sorry), do you really believe that the Engineer would completely and utterly disregard possible solutions just to make things difficult? Or do you think that the Engineer would consider every possible solution and choose which one to utilize? Do you think they would simply limit their genius by default, or decide when to make a game out of the complicated vs when to utilize the resources around them to come up with the "best" and "simplest" solution?

I know what "my" Engineer would do. Both.


Honestly, even if anyone wants to argue that a combinator is more of a mechanical device than a "computer" device (something I would find hard to provide real evidence for) there still exist purely mechanical (versus computer) devices that can conditionally output two (or more) different "signals." Three+, if you count "off" as a signal. Radio transmitters, video projectors (even as old as those first adding sound), just to name a few (and not make this page twice as long as everyone else's posts...)
-- Note: "mechanical" in the sense that it doesn't require a computational processor, not in the sense that it doesn't utilize "electricity," as the combinators DO require electricity... --

Final thoughts:

People, people. If you want to make extremely complex, sprawling landscapes of wires and connectors... that's your choice. We won't deny you that. You always have the option to simply not use a feature, but if a feature doesn't exist it denies the rest of us the ability to utilize it. Why? For what purpose?

Besides, before 2.0 to count the quantity of an item on a strip of transport belts, you had to link each and every belt with wire... Now, with 2.0, you have a two-click option to "Read entire belt."

Finally, someone attempted to argue that adding an "else" output option would be more TPS-intensive than two combinators. This is absurd. Adding a toggle to an operation only adds complexity to that operation IF that toggle is ON. If nothing is selected in the "Else" output it would function identically to the current model.
Additionally, within the Assembly language, there exists a single operational operator: jump. How this is spelled depends on the Assembly language used (depends on the CPU, etc), but it exists. Therefore, with a single operation, you can add an "else" statement in Assembly. ... Adding another Combinator? That duplicates the entire code of the first Combinator.
QED: a function in the most basic (human-readable) language known to computer processors, or duplicating the entire cost of an entity plus connections to and from it; which do you think is more expensive for the CPU to do?
--> There exists no circumstance where adding an "else" output would be "more costly" than adding additional Combinators... with the sole exception of "Bad Programmers" and I would like to think that by this point Wube have proven themselves to be anything but...

Ok... ONE LAST thought: in the referenced thread some people demanded an example, "in-game," where having one combinator provide an "else" output would be better than "simply adding another combinator." Ok... Space Platform: I want to tell an inserter to change from "Insert only Metalic Asteroid Chunk" to "insert any Asteroid Chunk" within only three tiles (one for the inserter and two for the combinator).
Why should I spend 205 extra iron and 60 extra copper cables (plus rocket space and materials for the rocket parts)? That's the cost of the extra Space Platform Foundation and Combinator...

[IsaacOscar]

I do wonder why the dev's choose what circuit network features to add.
For example, having multiple conditions on a decider combinator is clearly redundant and just adds more complexity, just like adding multiple outputs would.

So I think either they should go the route of forcing people to do things the hwrd way with multiple combinators, or make things easy by adding common operations (in particular, I would like memory combinators! even though I can just build my own by hand)