Roboport Improvements

[ElderAxe]

TL;DR

Roboports are a key component about RTS Style Remote Play and they should be more powerful.

What?

Here are my suggestions:
- In FFF #380; you mentioned ghost-building improvements and I believe you already implemented a similar functionality for Space Platforms. Roboports should be able to provide a list of ghost buildings that are missing materials in the robot network. With this addition, automating an outpost building would be much easier. I know that factorio scans all pending constructions and cycles through them to be able to build all possible ones. I hope this suggestion doesn't conflict with that logic.

- With FFF #374; we know that we can set requests for roboports now.
You only mentioned robots but I hope we can set repair pack requests as well. If not please add this functionality as well.
Also being able to read & set these requests with circuit connections would be great.

- Being able to select wires for each signal would be beneficial for roboports. So we can use the same roboport for multiple functions.

- In FFF #377; there was an announcement between the lines "We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this." It would be very convenient to have a roboport supply range of 64x64 instead of 50x50 So each roboport can fully cover 4 chunks. They would also align perfectly with fully extended power poles.

Why?

Developers mentioned that with 2.0 remote management of the factory will become very important and introduced new/improved features according to this approach. I enjoy automating things in the factory and I love that Factorio is very powerful when it comes to automation capabilities.

Some of these suggestions are possible with mods but I always tend to play with as less as possible mods and having these capabilities in vanilla would benefit everyone. Looking forward to having some roboport improvements in 2.0.

[FuryoftheStars]

- In FFF #377; there was an announcement between the lines "We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this." It would be very convenient to have a roboport supply range of 64x64 instead of 50x50 So each roboport can fully cover 4 chunks. They would also align perfectly with fully extended power poles.

This seems like a change for the sake of a change, or probably more specifically, the desire to have everything perfectly align.

Personally, I'm against that. I think roboports are fine as is with their range and there is no real reason or need to change them. I also happen to like the fact that not everything fits perfectly to a grid.

The mess this creates (including the wire connection behavior of powerpoles) I feel lends itself to the overall atmosphere of the game. The atomosphere that is seen with the original main menu background that's still visible if you disable the main menu simulations.

I think the reason why the devs increased the power pole connection length had nothing to do with chunk alignment and everything to do with the new rails having wider radius curves, which means the intersection sizes became bigger. Additionally, and this is more my feeling and guessing based on what the devs have and haven't done for robots over the years, roboports I don't think were originally intended to be used as a full "cover the entire megafactory in one network" type of thing, so expanding their range with the changes to rails like they did power poles isn't the same.

These are, of course, all of my personal opinions/feelings.

[mmmPI]

- In FFF #377; there was an announcement between the lines "We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this." It would be very convenient to have a roboport supply range of 64x64 instead of 50x50 So each roboport can fully cover 4 chunks. They would also align perfectly with fully extended power poles.

This seems like a change for the sake of a change, or probably more specifically, the desire to have everything perfectly align.

Personally, I'm against that. I think roboports are fine as is with their range and there is no real reason or need to change them. I also happen to like the fact that not everything fits perfectly to a grid.

I could understand a change for chunk aligment but maybe high quality robotport already have 64x64 coverage or more. If its 50 it seem like a waste to put 1 per chunk, but if it's 68 or 72 it feels ok to have some overlap and placing them as if they were 64x64 to me. => 0 will wait to see.

I think the change of wire color to ouput can be dealt with an addition decider combinator if i understood properly the changes announced to them. => -1

Roboport being able to provide a list of ghost buildings missing material => +1 +1 +1

[FuryoftheStars]

- In FFF #377; there was an announcement between the lines "We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this." It would be very convenient to have a roboport supply range of 64x64 instead of 50x50 So each roboport can fully cover 4 chunks. They would also align perfectly with fully extended power poles.

This seems like a change for the sake of a change, or probably more specifically, the desire to have everything perfectly align.

Personally, I'm against that. I think roboports are fine as is with their range and there is no real reason or need to change them. I also happen to like the fact that not everything fits perfectly to a grid.

I could understand a change for chunk aligment but maybe high quality robotport already have 64x64 coverage or more. If its 50 it seem like a waste to put 1 per chunk, but if it's 68 or 72 it feels ok to have some overlap and placing them as if they were 64x64 to me. => 0 will wait to see.

Well, I guess that's where my opinion differs. To me, just because one roboport cannot fully cover a chunk (or in this case, a 2x2 chunk) doesn't mean there's any "waste" going on. There's nothing, as far as I'm aware, that makes roboports perform better with a full 64x64 tile coverage (aside from needing less, but the same could be said if you made the coverage 55x55, or 100x100). In fact, if it weren't for the fact that the game generates and shows the map in chunks (and thus has the thicker chunk lines with the grid view), I'm willing to bet that aligning to 32x32 increments wouldn't even be a thing....

And of course I already covered my opinion from the other point of view for the sake of just aligning everything to each other in my other post.

[mmmPI]

And of course I already covered my opinion from the other point of view for the sake of just aligning everything to each other in my other post.

Yep i agree it' just personnal opinion in favor of the chunk aligment, i'm not really using it myself because my prefered grid is substation one for production, so i would need to find a way to place roboports in that grid, i'd rather have a little robotport overlapping than substations, and those are definitly 2 items that i will try to seek quality versions to have longer range and thus needing less of them for a grid pattern.

For roboport going from 50x50 to 64x64, i see it as a net improvement particularly when making tilable solar pannel array with a robotport embedded to make it easy to self expand. Much less roboport needed and here i'd rather avoid roboport overlap as there is not much traffic once it's built, but if one can use quality there i'm fine with regular roboport staying 50x50.


Allowing robotport to display ghost of missing buildings is the real +1 for me !

[SupplyDepoo]

Chunk boundaries matter when it comes to multiple inserters interacting with a single entity. Within the same chunk, multiple inserters will alternate, but when the inserters are in different chunks, one will always take priority.

[FuryoftheStars]

Chunk boundaries matter when it comes to multiple inserters interacting with a single entity. Within the same chunk, multiple inserters will alternate, but when the inserters are in different chunks, one will always take priority.

This is most likely to do with the way they've done entity updates (chunk by chunk), but ultimately means nothing for bots or roboport range.

[Koub]

- In FFF #377; there was an announcement between the lines "We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this." It would be very convenient to have a roboport supply range of 64x64 instead of 50x50 So each roboport can fully cover 4 chunks. They would also align perfectly with fully extended power poles.

Why 64x64 and not 32x32 ?

[FuryoftheStars]

- In FFF #377; there was an announcement between the lines "We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this." It would be very convenient to have a roboport supply range of 64x64 instead of 50x50 So each roboport can fully cover 4 chunks. They would also align perfectly with fully extended power poles.

Why 64x64 and not 32x32 ?

I'm sure their reasoning was increases coverage while maintaining increments of the big electric poles (every other).

[Koub]

Well 1x1 chunk would still allow perfect chunk alignment.

[mmmPI]

Yes but 32x32 would require 4x as many roboport if you make a solar tile to copypaste remotely. Or the tile itself is made 4x smaller. It is still possible to make smaller tile with overlap, but the largest tile is limited by the range of the legendary roboport.

[Silari]

- In FFF #377; there was an announcement between the lines "We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this." It would be very convenient to have a roboport supply range of 64x64 instead of 50x50 So each roboport can fully cover 4 chunks. They would also align perfectly with fully extended power poles.

Why 64x64 and not 32x32 ?

I'm sure their reasoning was increases coverage while maintaining increments of the big electric poles (every other).

and that players will react strongly negatively to a nerf, as opposed to a buff.

[wobbycarly]

Maybe I'll make a shameless plug and reshare my idea for an improvement to roboports.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=64648

[Cerberus]

Additionally, and this is more my feeling and guessing based on what the devs have and haven't done for robots over the years, roboports I don't think were originally intended to be used as a full "cover the entire megafactory in one network" type of thing

But you MUST cover your entire megafactory if you want to do remote building. Otherwise you must produce every building there is in every network. Or do a lot of manual work with the spidertron if you already have him. Unless this feature requested in this topic, with roboports releasing a list of buildings that are ghosts and missing construction material in their network, in which case you could call for a supply line by belt or train. But that isn't without its own hassle (bringing deconstructed or canceled items back to the main network for yellow chest storage for example) and having to wait pretty long for the buildings to arrive.

That said, I am against 64x64 increase, because everything with standard settings is already cheap enough. We should not root for making the game easier. But maybe tier X quality will allow the topic starter to make things chunk aligned indeed.
Unless the price of a roboport gets a lot more expensive. More than the 28% needed to go from 50 to 64, because there are two dimensions you benefit from a range increase, and you benefit from extra space as well as less hassle from adding roboports to already existing and saturated parts of your factory. So the price should nearly double or actually double, then.

Chunk boundaries matter when it comes to multiple inserters interacting with a single entity. Within the same chunk, multiple inserters will alternate, but when the inserters are in different chunks, one will always take priority.

Wow, I didn't know that! Very useful info. I already avoid multiple inserters from the same assembler machine intuitively. But not always. Will have to keep in mind.

[ElderAxe]

Chunk boundaries matter when it comes to multiple inserters interacting with a single entity. Within the same chunk, multiple inserters will alternate, but when the inserters are in different chunks, one will always take priority.

This is not the case anymore. Inserters can still alternate across multiple chunks.

ezgif.com-optimize.gif (2.68 MiB) Viewed 1017 times

[ElderAxe]

- In FFF #377; there was an announcement between the lines "We have increased the big electric pole range to 32 to go along with this." It would be very convenient to have a roboport supply range of 64x64 instead of 50x50 So each roboport can fully cover 4 chunks. They would also align perfectly with fully extended power poles.

Why 64x64 and not 32x32 ?

Reducing it to 32x32 doesn't add any benefit at all. It would be ok if they introduce T1 with 32x32 and T2 with 64x64 coverage. Similar to personal roboports.

Maybe I'll make a shameless plug and reshare my idea for an improvement to roboports.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=64648

I would love to have a supply range as a customizable setting. But I don't think they will add this much powerful functionality to it.

I could understand a change for chunk aligment but maybe high quality robotport already have 64x64 coverage or more. If its 50 it seem like a waste to put 1 per chunk, but if it's 68 or 72 it feels ok to have some overlap and placing them as if they were 64x64 to me. => 0 will wait to see.

Increasing the range with the quality of the building would add more complexity. Most of my blueprints are sensitive about the roboport coverage. So Any blueprint that is planned with isolated robot networks in mind would force it to a specific quality. Probably the basic version since it's the only one that would be available all the time. Instead, I would prefer a higher-tier building (T1,T2) like personal roboports. But since they introduced quality for building. I doubt that they will also introduce new tiered buildings as well

Increasing the range with research would also cause unexpected behavior for already placed roboports. Previously isolated robot networks could become connected when the research is completed.

I think the change of wire color to ouput can be dealt with an addition decider combinator if i understood properly the changes announced to them. => -1

Using a decider combinator won't solve all use cases if they implement some ideas I recommended.
For example, you'll read the network contents and missing buildings at the same time. They will all be present at the same time and it won't be possible to differentiate between two groups of signals. To solve this you need to put 2 roboports to read each data separately.

[mmmPI]

Increasing the range with the quality of the building would add more complexity. Most of my blueprints are sensitive about the roboport coverage. So Any blueprint that is planned with isolated robot networks in mind would force it to a specific quality. Probably the basic version since it's the only one that would be available all the time. Instead, I would prefer a higher-tier building (T1,T2) like personal roboports. But since they introduced quality for building. I doubt that they will also introduce new tiered buildings as well

Increasing the range with research would also cause unexpected behavior for already placed roboports. Previously isolated robot networks could become connected when the research is completed.

That is also the case for substations as you mentionned in your OP, using a "too high" quality substation can mess up power switch or back up power design connecting grids. I think it's part of the player task to not put the wrong building at the wrong place

I had another read at the "quality" FFF and the only mention about roboports is that they recharge robots faster. I don't know why i thought it would increase the coverage of the roboport having them of higher quality. It seem more inline with your wishes that you can upgrade the busiest roboport for a net boost without worrying about connecting different networks while doing so.

I think the change of wire color to ouput can be dealt with an addition decider combinator if i understood properly the changes announced to them. => -1

Using a decider combinator won't solve all use cases if they implement some ideas I recommended.
For example, you'll read the network contents and missing buildings at the same time. They will all be present at the same time and it won't be possible to differentiate between two groups of signals. To solve this you need to put 2 roboports to read each data separately.

Agreed !

[FuryoftheStars]

Additionally, and this is more my feeling and guessing based on what the devs have and haven't done for robots over the years, roboports I don't think were originally intended to be used as a full "cover the entire megafactory in one network" type of thing

But you MUST cover your entire megafactory if you want to do remote building. Otherwise you must produce every building there is in every network. Or do a lot of manual work with the spidertron if you already have him. Unless this feature requested in this topic, with roboports releasing a list of buildings that are ghosts and missing construction material in their network, in which case you could call for a supply line by belt or train. But that isn't without its own hassle (bringing deconstructed or canceled items back to the main network for yellow chest storage for example) and having to wait pretty long for the buildings to arrive.

While I would argue that the entire megafactory doesn't necessarily require coverage (there are going to be areas that don't actually need coverage because there's nothing there or it's not an area that you're ever going to need to change, anyway), I'll point out my main point was the "one network" piece. A single, huge, monolithic bot network has a few inherent issues with it, most notably bot response time (though I do know the devs have made some improvements to this in 2.0).