Thanks! Yeah, it's a nice design, very elegant with how little you actually have to program manually, and how much is just copy/paste. Of course, despite that I still ended up creating one the hard way first for the first part of the video. 😀
i have an idea to improve it a bit, you could have constant combinators at all the stations, sending a signal over 1 of the lines, showing how many chests that station has, and which resource it holds, like 6 iron plates on the green line being 6 crates for iron plates at that station. You could use that info to automaticly update the value that x needs to be devided by, so you dont have to do that by yourself. And this would leave the other line free for the actual iron count.
That's an interesting idea - it would mean that if you added in an additional iron mine or more storage in the smeltery (or more smelteries!) the system would update automatically. It does mean that both cables are tied up with this system and you can't use them for anything else. Alternatively, you could send different signals - you could send an A for each iron plate chest for example, and this would allow you to do everything on a single cable, however it's slightly less simple to understand. A nice idea though - I like it!
Or you could encode it into the signal itself. The maximum range of values is - 2^31 to 2^31 - 1, or about +/- 2 billion. If we assume that you won't get close to that limit, then we could use the excess to code the number of chests. The simplest way to do this would just be to use the first two (or so) digits to encode the number of chests, and the remainder gives the actual value of the item. Then the display at the other end can easily decode by dividing by 10000000. The integer result is the number of chests, the remainder is the count. If you do get close to the limit, then you could reduce the number of digits the actual count uses by reducing the number significant digits - if you have 2 billion iron plates, the tens digit isn't really all that important. At this point we are using floating point representation. The only problem here is adding together signals from different stations won't work for the exponent. You could also use the negatives by just treating it as an unsigned integer as well.
@@PanozGTR2 Interestingly, we were having a discussion along these lines over on the Discord server, and yes, I think that should indeed be quite possible! A station is going to typically have less than 100,000 plates, so yeah, storing the number of stations or the number of chests in the tens of millions allows for about 100 stations before it becomes an issue.
The grid of non-overlappng wires in rows and columns reminds me of the circuit diagrams for the PalmPilot screen, and for keyboards, where it's used to figure out which row and column was clicked. It's neat to see it here used for outputting information instead of reading it in!
Thanks! Yeah, it's handy to have an easy way to see how supplies are going. You can hook it up to alarms as well! Check out the sequel to this video to see some of my ... sillier graph ideas!
Hello Laurance, do you have a playlist with all your tutorials? I already made 3 or 4 runs on factorio, but now I am trying to make a real good megabase, and all those hints really help with good setups
I do indeed! It's linked from the end of the video and the description, but that is a bit hard to spot because they're not very well labelled. The playlist is here: ru-vid.com/group/PLALTzJaRcgW_HiwViLzH0owcxI1UoThKD I'm glad you're finding them useful! I'm starting to make blueprints available to channel supporters through the Discord server, but I can definitely understand if you prefer to make them yourself!
I like the design! Maybe with the upcoming legendary or modded substations the graph will fit in between them? Also, would it be useful with a logarithmic scale perhaps? Thanks for the walkthrough!
Yeah, with the pylon substations from Space Exploration, you could easily fit it between two of them, even with a much bigger graph! I like the log scale idea, you could implement that by having each light multiply the Y value by, say, 1.5 instead of adding 10, although then you'd need to feed in a number at the bottom so it doesn't start at zero.
