[Dominik]Generator's smoke issue.

[bobingabout]

Related mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Bobingabout/bobpower

I add a fluid (oil burning) generator. It's basically a steam engine that burns fluids instead of steam.

However, I noticed it doesn't actually produce steam, so I looked into it.

First issue... the steam engine has smoke frequency set to 10/32, where the boiler (or more accurately it's burner energy_source) has it set to 15, that's a huge difference in definition, but it seems like Boiler is basing it around "this much per second" where the steam engine is basing it around "this much per tick".
What makes me think that? well, I copy paste the smoke definition from the boiler onto my oil generator, setting frequency to 15, and it was spewing out a very thick black cloud, looked nothing like the boiler.

So, I try and set it to 10/32 like a steam engine and... this is the main issue right here. THERE WAS NO SMOKE.
It seems if you set it to any value less than 1, it generates no smoke at all, which leaves you in a position where you have to choose between LOTS of smoke, and no smoke at all.

Also, it's nice that on the generator defines smoke as a table, not a single entry, allowing you to specify more than 1 smoke source. My generator has 2.

So that's the bug, setting frequency to less than 1 causes it to produce no smoke at all when in burns_fluid mode.

[bobingabout]

Additional: if you do set it to 1, but the generator isn't running at 100% speed, you still get no smoke.

[Dominik]

The issue was actually different. The timer for the smoke generation was the animation frames. And since generator has no animation, it can't generate smoke. So I have added different timer for it.