[A13] A2B: conveyor belts & co. [v0.13.2]

[Riddle78]

My underground belts are only between the Undertakers,not under them. Furthermore,as the Undertakers and underground belts seem to lack built-in power lines like the rest of the pieces,I manually ran power lines through each and every one of them.

[FMJ Penguin]

So yeah, I really wanna use this mod. Looks like good fun and all but I feel like I'm gonna have a seizure from those arrows tick...tick...tick...tick...... Not poking fun or joking at all. Anyone tell me how to "stop" the arrows from animating or moving at all would be fine too. Thanks guys

Get motion sickness easier the older I get I swear.... 

[blub01]

My underground belts are only between the Undertakers,not under them. Furthermore,as the Undertakers and underground belts seem to lack built-in power lines like the rest of the pieces,I manually ran power lines through each and every one of them.

You don't have to do that, to reduce wiring(and lag maybe?) only the powered undertakers consume power, based on the number of underground belts attached to them.

[pigman999999999]

Hello!
First time poster here, Since Droids are out of action I have been exploring your mod for my hauling needs.
And those needs are great, I tend to deal with raids of 800 to 1500+ pawns and once my guns stop reaping I need to haul all those bodies and loot for processing and storage for sale.

I have set up a small teleport network for body transport, it is basic and likely overkill, I know I can refine it.


My issue is each of those loaders will only take a single task at a time, aka one body so if I have 30 hauling drones (I do) the first 6 will take bodies to the loaders but the other 24 will carry the corpse's all the way back to the morgue.
Am I doing something wrong with the loader setup or is this a known issue? It would be nice if the loader would take stacks of say 100+ and then just keep pushing the stacks out into the belts until empty.

if you want some bots https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=3612.0

[Ectoplasm]

I have set up a small teleport network for body transport, it is basic and likely overkill, I know I can refine it.

My issue is each of those loaders will only take a single task at a time, aka one body so if I have 30 hauling drones (I do) the first 6 will take bodies to the loaders but the other 24 will carry the corpse's all the way back to the morgue.
Am I doing something wrong with the loader setup or is this a known issue? It would be nice if the loader would take stacks of say 100+ and then just keep pushing the stacks out into the belts until empty.

This is inbuilt behavior of vanilla, mipen said that pawns reserve stuff they want to use to stop issues with 2 pawns trying to use the same item etc, so I believe this is what's happening in this instance. Perhaps though something along the lines of hoppers could be integrated in to the loader system? So it would be possible to stack items in them, and they get moved along when possible? I don't know if this is possible, or even easily implementable.. Just a thought, one of those random thoughts us non-coders have without realising the potential complexity of what we just said

I was building some belts to move my crops from the farms to the freezer in my last colony, an issue I had was the similar to yours, but also the range on the loader, if a pawn was close to the loader they'd use it rather than haul the goods manually back to the freezer, but the catchment area for the loader seems quite small, so unless the pawns is close to the loader, they'll ignore it. Might it be possible to add a system similar to cook stoves or stone cutting tables for example, where you can change the size of the area the pawn will look for ingredients?

[Mrshilka]

Alas no way around it I found in the end. I have a large warehouse near my killzone now with 60 loaders in it that accept anything and then reroute all the items to different teleporters.

As for Robots yes I am using those lovely little hauling drones as I stated in my original post, I buy as many as I can find and like to have 30 to 40 of them to hands the raid influx.

[1000101]

This is simple the core hauling mechanic, A2B does nothing special.  The loaders are simply storage buildings just like the equipment rack.  The only difference is, the belt system moves the items from the loader through the belts.

Once a spot is take, be is a storage area, and equipment rack, etc, a pawn will find somewhere else for it to go.  The pawns have no concept of conveyor belts.  They don't know the loader will be free five seconds after they walk away.  They simply take it items to the highest priority storage that is closest to them, no more, no less.

Any changes in "radius" or things of that nature need to be directed to Tynan, he wrote the haul mechanic which drives it all.

[Ectoplasm]

It dawned on me (I'm slow!) That the hopper idea I mentioned above wouldn't work anyway, as the pawns would still reserve it to put stuff in it.. So the next pawn would skip the hopper to find somewhere else to take their goodies anyway.

[Ultimate Shrek Fan]

Is there a reason why my pawns are unloading the unloader?

[1000101]

You probably have some other storage location with a higher priority, or the item is needed and it hasn't been "locked down" by the belt system yet.

[EvilChef]

Ok, i dont know if im doing something wrong here or what, but i cant use the belts at all as they lag like crazy. Checking the log it appears it's a texture issue. Somehow 2 of the textures are'nt found. 1: the blueprint texture. 2: 1 of the animation textures. Am i missing something obvious here? i have the 3 latest files downloaded as in Core, selectors and teleport.... they are loaded in that order.

[1000101]

Will look into it, thanks for the report.

[SpeedDaemon]

Digging the concept. I'm building my conveyor system now,to get my metals from my extractors to the stockpiles. However,I have noticed a VERY big issue. Undertakers,set to lift mode,draw well over eight thousand units of energy per tick to run,each. Please tell me this isn't intentional.

EDIT: Here,have a screenshot.

- snip -

The important bit is highlighted in red. The one to the left of that one,which is already turned off,draws over eight thousand watts. THAT one draws twelve thousand. Any idea why? If it's intentional... Why? It's impossible to get enough power to fuel such a system,if that's the case.

That I have not seen in my tests before.  I would suspect that you have a complete connection of underground belts under your "sorting room" to the left.  Make sure that there are no underground belt sections under the three undertakers and selector in that room.  If you have a complete straight line connecting the underground belt sections, they could indeed draw more than you'd expect.  If they are not connected and that lift is only powering those 12 sections, then there must be a bug.  Double check your configuration, I suspect that there are unintentional underground belt sections in certain places causing them to all link into one giant network.

This has gotta be a bug. The power usage for the powered lifts seems to consistently be 50 + ( num_powered_componets * 1000W ) instead of 10W per or whatever it's supposed to be.

Unfortunately power per component doesn't seem to be in the XML, so the only way I've found to work around this is every time I build an underground section, save, exit, edit the base power usage of the lifts to 50 + (( total_underground * -990)/total_lifts) to compensate, and restart...

[1000101]

For the powered lifts, the power per comp is taken from xml for the standard belt component (10W).

Code Select Expand

PowerComponent.PowerOutput = -( PowerComponent.props.basePowerConsumption + poweredCount * A2BData.powerPerUndercover );
Where

Code Select Expand

dll source:
            var baseBelt = DefDatabase<ThingDef>.GetNamed( "A2BBelt" );
            if( baseBelt != null ){
                var beltComps = baseBelt.CompDefFor<CompPowerTrader>();
                if( beltComps != null )
                    A2BData.powerPerUndercover = beltComps.basePowerConsumption;
            }

xml:
<basePowerConsumption>10</basePowerConsumption>
If you are getting the 1000W/unit, that means that the game can't find "A2BBelt."

Code Select Expand

public static float                 powerPerUndercover = 1000f;

While others have reported this issue I can not reproduce it and the belt system always draws the correct amount for me.

Try reducing your mods so only A2B is loaded and test on a new colony to see if the problem persists, if not then some other mod is breaking things (changing defNames).  If it does, please use the github issue tracker and provide as much detail as possible, especially on how to reproduce the error.  Unreproducible errors can't be fixed and are simply considered junk bugs (ie, not real bugs).

[SpeedDaemon]

If you are getting the 1000W/unit, that means that the game can't find "A2BBelt."

Yeah, there may be a larger issue... I just powered up a section of normal belt, and it immediately spammed my error console to death, with the normal belt graphics flickering like crazy.

Only have (in order):
CCL
CCL-VT
FixBone
RedistHeat
A2B Conveyors
A2B Selectors

A2B was added after this colony was started, so I'll try starting a fresh world/colony.