[MOD] (Alpha 8) A2B: conveyor belts & co. [v0.8.0]

[harpo99999]

noone, a suggestion for a possible improvement for the selectors ie when an output is blocked they behave like the splitters ie blocked output diverts to unblocked output, this way I ould have a circling stock on the conveyers and when space forms in  one of the selected outputs the selected item (when it comes around again is sent out through the selector)

[noone]

Hay harpo99999,

Thanks for the suggestion. I am somewhat reluctant to implement this because the precise feature of the selector is to be 'absolute', i.e. you can use it to sort items and it will never fail. I can see why it would be useful in some cases, but it would also be very annoying in others, (i.e. sending unwanted items to far-away places).

My proposition in your case (if you want to avoid blocking a belt completely with a single selector) is to place a 'splitter' ahead of the selector, and create a small loop around the selector. That way, 50% of the items will by-pass the selector, even if stuck. It is not 'exactly' what you want, but in practice it should achieve similar results.

Hope that helps - let me know how this works out for you ...

[harpo99999]

I have tried the suggested method with a loop back to before the initial split off the food selector, but the five selectors in the main select of individual foods  to feed the kitchen keep getting filled up and I have to manually turn off  the selecting of the food so that the other foods continue the orbit till there is space.
here is ascreenshot of my colony (note only 8 colonistshttps://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8023186/pics/screenshot4.png

[noone]

Here is how I would do it. It takes a bit more space, but it does exactly what you want. You could also compact the design even more, but I kept it 'airy' so that it's easy to see what is happening in the screenshot. Basically, each selector is surrounded by an 'overflow loop' - do it for all selectors, and you're in business.

Also, do you really need to split items in five different belts ? I understand the meat and veggies ought to be different, but you may not need to split berries from potatoes (assuming it is what you do, I can't really tell). That'd save you some space.

Hope that helps !

By the way, that's a nice set of conveyor belts that you built. Very impressive !

[attachment deleted by admin: too old]

[harpo99999]

the system does split all the vegetables onto their own unloader just to maximise the available food, the first two in the loop do split the meats, then the argive, then berries, and the last uses a splitter to keep the cirulating and filled lines for the potatos/and overflow, and even in this system I have had some times where the kitchen has run out of food and the cooks have had to grab ingredients from the gardens directly(btw I was also using the cooks as researchers so wanted to minimise the cooking time)

[Marcm]

One seriouse usability problem with  "A2B: conveyor belts & co." is IMHO its unloading mechanism. In quantity (stack sizes) as well as quality(wrong item).

Just one wrong item or if the stack size at the end is full and it gets jammed. Worse even, this builds up along the belt and eventually blocks the hole system.

Even concrete trucks use a better sollution so this makes one big logic gap as your system even has teleporter parts but no allocation parts. Maybe simply make a conveyor version of aka adapt the "temporary stock area" at the back of each Deepdriller in "Mining&Co.: Deepdriller Mark II"-mod?

[noone]

Hey Marcm,

Thanks for the suggestion. I understand your concern about the unloading system, but I do not think that making a larger receiving area (Deepdriller-style) will solve it. In my case, when I grow potatoes, I grow *a lot* of potatoes. And changing the receiving area from 1x1 to e.g. 2x4 will not change anything but only delay the unavoidable, and the belt still gets filled (which I don't mind, but to each his own).

The quick answer to your request is: "A2B deals with transporting material, not with storing material. And what you want here is a better storage solution, as the Unloader is just designed to unload stuff. So we at A2B can't do anything for you in this case." But that would be rude of me to just say that

Regarding wrong items blocking the output, well, I had a professor of analysis once that said: "Garbage in, garbage out !" The Loaders and Selectors let you carefully tune what you want on your belts, and if set up properly, you should not get any wrong items at the end of the line. Yes, it can get tricky if you have a complex belt system - but that's the fun and beauty of a complex belt system - one wrong step, and it all breaks, and yet isn't it beautiful when it all works smoothly ?

Sadly, I do not have enough free time these days to try implementing a larger receiver area. I am not totally against it as an option to the user to be honest, and will keep it on my to do list. But in the meantime, you can already do 'the same' with the current system. Have a look here: https://github.com/noone57/RW_A2B/wiki/Screenshots
(especially the last part about stockpile priorities).

You can set up a stockpile near the Unloader as big as you want, and provided there is no stockpile right outside the Unloader itself, your colonists will fill this stockpile with material spitted our from the belt. So in practice it's everything you want, just not fully automated ...

As an aside, not sure to understand your analogy with the concrete trucks: of course they only pour concrete (and not e.g. water) as they are filled with concrete only ... try filling the A2B belts with potatoes, and we at A2B can assure you that only potatoes will come out ... And if you refer to the fact that concrete flows everywhere on the floor while Rimworld potatoes do not, well, I guess fluid dynamics is to blame there ...

Hope that helps. If you feel like coding a larger receiver area or a 'compacting storage unit' to plug at the end of the A2B belt, I'll happily consider adding these to the mod. Alternatively, I'll suggest checking your Loaders' settings and playing with stockpiles at the end of the belt to solve your issues.

Thank you for contacting the A2B helpline ! Hope the above helps.

[Pear]

I have encountered an issue with a build-up within the conveyors. I have my conveyors hooked up to a timer power switch, since I don't need them at night, but I think that might be causing issues with turning the power on and off, causing items to get "stuck" inside one, (now multiple), conveyor units, while spitting out what was stored, resulting in a double inventory. This is an issue, because it refuses to pass a stack of items to the next object, if it's over the normal stack size (such as more than 75 potatoes). This extened stack size seems to be capped at 150 (for potatoes, nothing else tested).

I had shrugged it off, since normally you can just disable power, have a colonist remove the extra stack, and reenable power on the jammed unit, and it'll continue as normal, but now my loaders are jammed, and I have nowhere to put them taters anymore.

[noone]

Hi Pear,

Not sure I fully understand your problem. Splitters do get jammed from time to time if you have a build-up on the line. Some might call this a bug but I decided it was rather 'fun' and so it has become a feature. It reflects the fact that splitters are low-tech things, unlike Selectors that always work.

Can you confirm that your jamming problem is with a splitter ? I would not expect a jamming issue with another belt item.

[harpo99999]

I also have had jams on the belts after power outages

[Iwillbenicetou]

Anything that will make food from a farm go on a belt automatically? Even if it is really inefficient and relies on rows upon rows of conveyor belts?

[Pear]

Hi Pear,

Not sure I fully understand your problem. Splitters do get jammed from time to time if you have a build-up on the line. Some might call this a bug but I decided it was rather 'fun' and so it has become a feature. It reflects the fact that splitters are low-tech things, unlike Selectors that always work.

Can you confirm that your jamming problem is with a splitter ? I would not expect a jamming issue with another belt item.

When the power goes out, and goes back on, sometimes a conveyor object will have a massive stack inside of it (150 max size, it seems), without visually displaying the item, or moving it to the next conveyor. I've had this happen with conveyors, selectors, and loaders so far.

http://i.imgur.com/m9x7Lct.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/c53W2y2.jpg

[Sion]

I get all kinds of security warnings when I try to download the no source code file.
Both from my browser and from my firewall.

This is what my firewall says about it:

Warning: Unsafe Website Blocked!
s3.amazonaws.com
This website has been blocked temporarily because of the following reason(s):
HTTPS Site: Blocked site uses S-HTTP encryption. You may have received a browser security message before loading this unencrypted warning page.

[skullywag]

Blocking aws? Thats a lot of the internet...

[noone]

Well, I don't know about the warnings, but I can confirm that s3.amazonaws.com is indeed where the file is being fetched from when I download it myself.

You're the first to report such warnings (doesn't mean you're alone, though), and no one reported anything nasty happening upon download. So I'd say you can happily ignore everything. This being said, I shall not be responsible if anything happens to your computer if you decide to indeed ignore these warnings I'm just fairly sure that it will all be fine.