[0.18.46] In-game Steam Engine available power doesn't agree with itself

[sawbladex]

In the linked screenshot, you can see that the steam engine UI element says that it has 900 kW of power available. I have 5 of such steam engines, yet the overall available power on the electric network screen is 4.8 MW instead of the expected 4.5 MW.

I have circled in red the elements of the screen shot that seem wierd.

https://preview.redd.it/iaq6mmw3jhg51.j ... 114b2f08f7


I have heard it has something to do with the steam engine energy buffer being used on a tick basis to determine power available (which makes some sense as a practice, but because the buffer has a max energy consistent with 960 kW, it says 960kW in the network screen.

Which makes sense for being close enough when the total available power for a network wasn't shown directly, but gets weird when the steam engine UI element doesn't say that it has 960 power available as well. (I suspect this is because saying that steam engines can maintain 960 kW for a tick is way too confusing for most factorio players, and gets the wrong idea across about something ... that is mostly a implementation detail, rather than something tied to the platonic ideal of a steam engine in Factorio (a machine that produces 900 kW of power when fed enough steam per second with a full enough steam buffer)

I think this is a information display bug, but the correct way to display it may not be just fixing the values to match, given that I don't know the reason that the ingame Steam Engine's 900 kW doesn't add up. The value could be calculated just in time based on the users having it under the cursor. Or could not. After all, I couldn't find a luaentity value that obviously matches the intent of the available power value.

It may be worth punting the work on fixing this to figure out how Factorio should handle accumulators as the switch producer consumers on the available power, as the current behavior of for being a producer is kinda weird, in that 3 charging accumulators count the same as one steam engine, roughly.

Maybe have the max accumulator charge/discharge rate for the network as a value, and don't include it as part of the available power? Again, don't know enough about the implementation to know if this is easy or not.

[Bilka]

Duplicate 82509

[sawbladex]

I strongly disagree with the statement that this is not a bug.

If the logic says on the network screen that steam engines have a bit more than 960 kW of electric when not maxed out of load. Than the pane that shows up when you go over a steam engine should say so as well.