Beacon interface / Beacons without inventory

[Natha]

Similar to the Electric Energ Interface, a Beacon Interface would be nice which allows to arbitrarily set the effects runtime without dealing with module items.
Alternatively or in addition, allow machines that are effect receivers to apply effects on them during runtime

[protocol_1903]

1000% yes, please

I've been wanting to do more with beacons (particularly for nonstandard beacons) but these issues, especially the latter one, have stopped all of my attempts.

[Quezler]

Yes this would be very nice, i needed something like this for several of my mods so i ended up writing https://mods.factorio.com/mod/beacon-interface, but a beacon interface prototype would be preferable.

[braxbro]

Similar to the Electric Energ Interface, a Beacon Interface would be nice which allows to arbitrarily set the effects runtime without dealing with module items.
Alternatively or in addition, allow machines that are effect receivers to apply effects on them during runtime

For the latter, surface effects exist - but this would actually be genuinely useful for other applications, where surface effects are too broad and indelicate.

[Quezler]

Surface effects are basically unusable for the reasons we'd need a beacon interface, it affecting every entity on a surface that has opted in to it is way too broad and is a nightmare for anything aiming for cross-mod compatibility, currently its at most a gimic to give everything some speed or base quality but its not able to do any finegrained control.