FFF-309 / Robots

[mrsimple]

TL;DR

Robots should slow down in "air spaces" that contain many robots.

What and why ?

I know I'm a bit late and I assume this topic is chewed down to the bone, someone might have already posted this idea, but I think it can be a cost-efficient feature.
FFF-309 mentioned the robot hindering feature of calculating paths with the intention of reducing the robot efficiency. It could be enough to "just" count robots in a certain area, and reduce their movement speed because they "have to move around each other". This way you don't calculate actual paths and still get the effect you want out of it.
Again, sorry if this post is too redundant, my only intention was to give an improving idea.

Edit:

It's a related idea but somewhat different. If you calculate air spaces, it would be reasonable to take movement direction into account. Taking that idea further, it would be nice to be able to define air lanes that the bots should follow. I think this would deepen the bot experience because it doesn't just give you an ultimate solution, you would have to work for higher output.

I extended the post because I wasn't sure what the policy is, I hope it's okay.

[Tekky]

I like the idea of bots slowing down in crowded areas. That way, the throughput of bots would be significantly reduced, making belts more important.

Taking that idea further, it would be nice to be able to define air lanes that the bots should follow.

That would make pathfinding a lot more work (i.e. less UPS), as the bots would - instead of moving directly from A to B - be forced to find an air lane path to their destination.

[mrsimple]

I've been thinking about it for a while, and you could reduce the need for calculation with a proper data structure.
The idea has multiple steps and I will refine the problem step-by-step for usability.

Let's say you make paths for bots similarly as you make them for trains. You need to connect the boxes with a series of virtual lines. You can branch off from lines just like with trains so you can create a network for bot moving.At this point you can calculate the next direction for each destination in each node.
When you change the network you can recalculate these next directions maybe with a Dijkstra algorithm and if there are no major changes it should stop after a while so you don't have to refresh the entire network.
Now I know that it would be a pain to draw a network connecting every box, that would kill even just a railway station loadoff infrastructure and storing this many box directions for each node would eat the memory in a second. To solve this I would suggest defining zones for free flight. In these zones bots can do what they are doing now but if they need to fly from one zone to another then the two zones need to be connected by at least one path. And the zones should also keep track of which connecting line leads to which other zone with the shortest way possible.

And at this point we can play with making the virtual path a real path with factorio buildings similar to electrical poles for example. What do you think?