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Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

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Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 2:24 pm
by Foreros
I have few questions because I'm working on a megabase and I want to know exactly what to do.
A nuclear reactor how many heat exchanger can feed at max?
And the steam can be stored in storage tanks?
I'm planning a totally separated steam creation and energy sreation sectors, but interacting.
Then I want planning it carefully for avoid waste of space.
After this, a next question is:
if I connect all the heat doors of a reactor in a circular circuit where reactors are in the center and exchanger are on a side, there are waste of heat in the process or it is like other resources and wont dissipate over time?

Last question is a little information for planning a mod or ask someone to work on it for me.
Can a robot (specifically a construction robot) be modded to collect ores from fields?
In some fields (the smaller one) place mines and belts is a watse of time and resources, so it's easier send few idle construction robots to dig it for me instead.
I've thought about adding a "acid storage slot" in roboports and let robots take 1 unit of acid for dig uranium, if needed, or take a single ore from the targeted field.
I'm undecided if let existing construction robots do it or made a new entity that do the job instead.
I've not see this as existing mod, so I'm asking here for it.

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 4:44 pm
by nljr
Foreros wrote:I have few questions because I'm working on a megabase and I want to know exactly what to do.
A nuclear reactor how many heat exchanger can feed at max?
It varies! https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... ar_ratios/
Foreros wrote:And the steam can be stored in storage tanks?
Yes! And it's incredibly dense energy storage. It also makes it easier to power off a nuclear power plant when the load is light.
Foreros wrote:I have few questions because I'm working on a megabase and I want to know exactly what to do.
if I connect all the heat doors of a reactor in a circular circuit where reactors are in the center and exchanger are on a side, there are waste of heat in the process or it is like other resources and wont dissipate over time?
I've heard many times that heat pipes are lossy, but I personally have never tried confirming it. I always try to minimize the length of heat pipes.

But surrounding a reactor with heat pipes is a bad idea regardless. You gain capacity from each nuclear reactor for every reactor that's directly adjacent. 2 reactors can give 4 times the power of 1, but they have to be in direct contact on all 3 heat contacts.

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:08 pm
by Foreros
nljr wrote:
Foreros wrote:I have few questions because I'm working on a megabase and I want to know exactly what to do.
if I connect all the heat doors of a reactor in a circular circuit where reactors are in the center and exchanger are on a side, there are waste of heat in the process or it is like other resources and wont dissipate over time?
I've heard many times that heat pipes are lossy, but I personally have never tried confirming it. I always try to minimize the length of heat pipes.

But surrounding a reactor with heat pipes is a bad idea regardless. You gain capacity from each nuclear reactor for every reactor that's directly adjacent. 2 reactors can give 4 times the power of 1, but they have to be in direct contact on all 3 heat contacts.
So if I put a 2x6 reactor line I can have a lot of extra heat without problems?
Ok, the main problem is to have belt send fuel to each of them, but I think I can do it with few underground belts and inserters placed ad hoc for it.
The greater issue is "How many exchanger I can feed with this solution?".
I will check the link for get an answer and I think it can be a great solution.
This will plain a great solution, for me, if the "endless fuel capsule creation" trick I've created will work. I've only to check if I can feed enough of them. I hope I can use storages and exchange enough.
I will use lot of speed and production modules. :P

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:42 pm
by Foreros
Do you think something like this will work good?

This is a blueprint for let you see it working in your game.
My blueprint for nuclear steam generation block
I can add lot of exchanger rows, but the main idea is that.
I will put many storage tanks on each side of the steam production and place a little far away a lot of turbines.

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:51 pm
by torne
Foreros wrote:Can a robot (specifically a construction robot) be modded to collect ores from fields?
In some fields (the smaller one) place mines and belts is a watse of time and resources, so it's easier send few idle construction robots to dig it for me instead.
I've thought about adding a "acid storage slot" in roboports and let robots take 1 unit of acid for dig uranium, if needed, or take a single ore from the targeted field.
I'm undecided if let existing construction robots do it or made a new entity that do the job instead.
I've not see this as existing mod, so I'm asking here for it.
No. Robots' behaviour is hardcoded in the game engine; only their parameters can be changed (like speed, cargo capacity, energy usage, battery size, etc). There's also no way to change the types of inventory that an entity has - roboports can only store robots and repair packs, and mods can't alter this.

Mods that introduce new ways of mining typically work by just defining new types of miner entity - sometimes making them invisible and moving them around in the mod script to fake a "mobile" mining source. There's a number of ways to fake something similar to what you're describing: for example, https://mods.factorio.com/mods/judos/robotMiningSite appears to make invisible logistics chests on each tile of ore and then just destroys the ore on the ground a bit at a time while creating a corresponding amount of ore in the invisible chest, causing logistics robots to fly back and forth as if they were doing the mining (but they're actually just transporting items between logistics chests as usual). There's also https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Afforess/LogisticsMining which has robots place and remove temporary miners (visible ones) whose output is redirected into invisible chests for logistics pickup.

A lot of Factorio modding is about coming up with clever ways to combine the base types of entity that the game engine provides to create novel effects. There's a huge performance difference between modifying the state of the world directly in the lua script of a mod, and having built-in game entities do most of the work in the engine, so some effects are easier to do than others, and some have difficult-to-avoid performance issues.

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2017 8:55 am
by Foreros
I could only say thanks to you for your explain truly clear and detailed.
I have to examine few mods and check how I can do something similar...
You open me a wolrd of possibility, but I have to think carefully on how do it.
Thanks a lot. :)

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2017 9:50 am
by impetus maximus
*pssst Robot Mining Site Mod.
again, spoiler= for blueprints! lol

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2017 12:21 pm
by Foreros
Already posted, just want to check it for see if it's doing what I'm looking for. :D
There's a link to it in the Torne post. ;)

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2017 1:09 pm
by impetus maximus
so there is. i really need to slow down and read. :P

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2017 9:02 am
by Foreros
Examined the mod I have few differences between my idea and the mod itself.
If I build a sort of mine with a large range than electric that allow robot enter and wait a fixed time before exit with an ore collected from the patch and only the patch where the "mine" is created?
My idea is to build a structure that use bots and only of the specifickind, but that can dig even under existing structures.
The mod only "dig" on open squares and this give to electric mines an enormous advantage compared to any other miner building.
The AAI mod is great because the miners are very useful in this, but I want try to have something similar, better if bot related, that give resources sending bots underground (or something like this) for get resources.
A mod with a "wide range mine" that collect ores only when there are bots inside and with speed related to the bots inside it can be made in a mod? Something like a mine working with speed based on the number of bots it contain for give to each an ore to move in a logistic chest arounnd there or totally inside the logistic area of roboports.
With a max numbers of bots storage of 50 or 100, just for avoid 2000 bots digging inside a single mine and depleting the mine in few nimutes. :P
Do you think it can be done?
If yes, I will start learning the mod building training, otherwise I will drop it.

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:20 pm
by torne
You can certainly make a miner entity with a large mining range (the mining range is separate from the size of the entity, as you see with electric mining drills). You can't directly make mining dependent on bots; mining just mines ore (given power) and dumps it somewhere.

You could probably have a "building" made of multiple entities whose combined effect is like what you describe, though, and I'd probably handle it similarly to the existing mods. What might work is something along the lines of:

1) Make a reskinned version of logistic robots to be your actual mining robots; make them look different, don't give the player any way to make them directly.
2) Make a dummy item that the player *can* make which is called "Mining robot" and has a recipe, but isn't really a type of robot (just a basic do-nothing-special item).
3) Make a large area mining drill that runs fast.
4) Put an active provider chest at the "output" of the drill, so that everything the drill mines is inserted directly into the provider. Have the provider belong to a different force (not the player), so that the player and the player's logistics bots can't directly interact with it. Limit the chest to a small capacity, so that even though the drill runs fast, it will be blocked on outputting to the chest because it's full unless the robots are constantly emptying it.
5) Make a roboport and a storage chest belonging to the mining force as well. The mining robots will carry the ore from the active provider to the storage chest, and the more robots you have, the faster they will go.
6) Then you'll need some way to get robots into the system and the ore out, because if the entities belong to another force the player can't interact with them directly. I'd look at how the existing mod that works similarly to this works, probably? Or something like having a "regular" player-owned logistics chest next to the mining-force storage chest with an inserter between (and a similar arrangement for the mining robots in the other direction).

You can make a bunch of these entities invisible to make the overall thing just look like one building, and just have your mod detect the main building being placed and put down all the other invisible entities in the right relative locations (and delete them again if the main building is destroyed).


So, yeah, I'm pretty sure you can get an effect very similar to or identical to what you're describing, and you may be able to use one of the existing mods as a basis for it if their license permits modifications. Don't take my word that all this definitely works - I've done a little bit of modding but am definitely not an expert. It seems like a generally viable plan, though :)

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2017 6:02 pm
by Foreros
Thanks. You've given me the desire to start learning and try it.
I will put it in mods, if I find it very interesting and maybe I get a decent amount of download. :P
Thanks again. ^_^
p.s.: Officially I dont take another mod as basis engine for mine, but maybe I go look on how people do some things and choose the better way for do it based on my preferences.
I will for sure name persons who have suggested ways to do things. :D

Re: Few questions, both tecnical and about creating a mod

Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2017 1:44 pm
by Foreros
Thought about it.
I think better idea is to made an "Active Provider Chest" with capacity of 1 or 2 slots connected to the logistic net, that collect ores like a mine and fill fast the "chest slots", then call robot for take the ores and send them inside the logistic system.
In this way I can use "constriction robots" go and collect them, but I need something for made the chest accessible only to a specific kind of robots, because the idea was not to use ligistic robots fot this operations. :P
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