Heat pipe and power pole connection masks

[Quorken]

This would determine which other heat pipes/power poles a given heat pipe/power pole could connect to.
Would work the same as fluidboxes's connection filters.
Machines would also have a power_connection_mask that determines which power poles they can receive power from.

This would allow for heat-like and power-like systems, where you have some system that works similarly to, say, electrical power, where you have a system of producers and consumers connected via a grid of connectors, but doesn't actually interact with the baseline power grid.

Or modders could enforce a "connection/voltage hierarchy", like a few power network overhaul mods try to, where big power poles are the 'backbone" of your network, and can only connect to medium/small power poles via transformer machines, which are lossy. If a mod adds an "extent" feature (or this is added for power networks in the base games), this could potentially allow for interesting challenges, where players have to plan out their networks more carefully, and decide if a given resource outpost is worth it - maybe it doesn't operate frequently, and the power loss from the transformer supplying the mining drills' drain outweighs the benefit of setting it up.

Lamps, for instance, would have a power_connection_mask that allows them to connect to big power poles, but few other machines would be able to do so.

The one tricky thing about this would be global power networks - do you have several global networks, one for each possible connection mask, with consumers/producers connecting to all the corresponding networks? Or do you have one global network that all consumers/producers connect to, and leave it to mods to decide how to handle it?

[protocol_1903]

I imagine it would be one global network for each type of connection category, then each entity connects to every network that it is compatible with.

[Quorken]

I imagine it would be one global network for each type of connection category, then each entity connects to every network that it is compatible with.

That would be preferable. I just hope that wouldn't be too much work for the devs - I'd rather just have connection masks for non-global surfaces, than nothing at all.
I think there's a ton of potential in this idea.

Edit: Could be that you set whether a given connection mask is global, too - so instead of a single "global" variable for a surface, it'd be per-connection mask. That would definitely be a breaking change, though.

[protocol_1903]

To be honest a lot of this sounds like breaking changes, i dont see any of it happening before 2.1 (although i love to be proven wrong)

[Quorken]

To be honest a lot of this sounds like breaking changes, i dont see any of it happening before 2.1 (although i love to be proven wrong)

That was actually why I brought it up now - the devs have outright said they're working towards 2.1 now.