old LTN discussion thread

[ssilk]

Seems like we need support for binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers.

My current problems are some issues, where I don't know what to do with them.
This (and I hope someone has an idea):

A) I have too much trains. Not in normal mode: then 90% of my trains are on the rails, driving, cause the distances in my factory are very far. No I would say in that moments I have too less trains. But when I let my factory pause a while the trains got less orders and they return all back to the depots. Now is it so, that they prefer of course the most nearest depot train stop (depends from their last order), cause the next is in most cases two kilometers away. Which leads to the situation of total traffic jam. I mean I build the depots BIG, but not THAT BIG. After the sixth train they block the main line and when that happens they deadlock the factory, when I increase production speed again.

The question is: how can I force the trains to use another depot, when there are more than two trains already waiting (without needing to rebuild it).

B) it takes so long until some requests are fulfilled. And some are never fulfilled.
For example: I need boilers. My main factory has always 100+ boilers and that is also provided into the train stop. I request 50 boilers at the target station and ... nothing comes.
I look into my main factory: still 100 provided and other stuff is delivered, no problem, but not the boilers. I pick up all boilers to bring it myself (a bit disappointed) the boiler production automatically begins to produce boilers and while I'm driving back I see the message: 50 boilers will be delivered now. And indeed, soon after I come back to that outpost and deployed my boiler the requested train comes. Further on boiler delivery is no problem. I call this an ugly hiccup.
I had that situation, that some item is not delivered, even when available, several times. My last successful atttempt was to stop the request for that item (request 0) and turn it on again.

The second issue into that direction is that the items I need are delivered, but it takes minutes before the request is acknowledged. For example I place fuel tanks and pipes until nothing is left. The pipes are requested immediately but the fuel tanks take MINUTES.

And the third issue is something I don't understand: let's say I have a train stop that requests 30000 steel bars. And two providers that provide each 60000.

So I would mean LTN needs two requests/two trains: one with 22400 steel bars (4 wagons a 5600) and a second with the rest.
But instead it picks up several trains. 15 or 20. The biggest brings 8000 steel, the smallest 240 (there is no min delivery set and default is 1000).

I'll try to make for each of that issues and save. But it's really difficult, cause the scenarios I describe take 10, 20, 30 minutes until I realize there is a problem.

[Optera]

Seems like we need support for binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers.

binary is supported, the guy simply displays it as nonsensical decimal

My current problems are some issues, where I don't know what to do with them.
This (and I hope someone has an idea):

A) I have too much trains. Not in normal mode: then 90% of my trains are on the rails, driving, cause the distances in my factory are very far. No I would say in that moments I have too less trains. But when I let my factory pause a while the trains got less orders and they return all back to the depots. Now is it so, that they prefer of course the most nearest depot train stop (depends from their last order), cause the next is in most cases two kilometers away. Which leads to the situation of total traffic jam. I mean I build the depots BIG, but not THAT BIG. After the sixth train they block the main line and when that happens they deadlock the factory, when I increase production speed again.

The question is: how can I force the trains to use another depot, when there are more than two trains already waiting (without needing to rebuild it).

I'm currently building an LTN based main bus with a distributed base.
Required depot space will be nuts for my base as well. My centralized Megabase (2 Rockets/min) needed 20+ L-6C-L (ore transport), ~10 L-4T-L (tanker), ~5 L-2C-L (supply). Going by that I guess this base will probably need 40+ L-6C-L.

If depots are apart, I give them different names "Schwarzwald - Depot long" "Desert - Depot Supply". Each has enough space should all it's trains go idle.
Distribution inside depots with the same name can be done by either chain signals or circuit control.

B) it takes so long until some requests are fulfilled. And some are never fulfilled.
For example: I need boilers. My main factory has always 100+ boilers and that is also provided into the train stop. I request 50 boilers at the target station and ... nothing comes.
I look into my main factory: still 100 provided and other stuff is delivered, no problem, but not the boilers. I pick up all boilers to bring it myself (a bit disappointed) the boiler production automatically begins to produce boilers and while I'm driving back I see the message: 50 boilers will be delivered now. And indeed, soon after I come back to that outpost and deployed my boiler the requested train comes. Further on boiler delivery is no problem. I call this an ugly hiccup.
I had that situation, that some item is not delivered, even when available, several times. My last successful atttempt was to stop the request for that item (request 0) and turn it on again.

The second issue into that direction is that the items I need are delivered, but it takes minutes before the request is acknowledged. For example I place fuel tanks and pipes until nothing is left. The pipes are requested immediately but the fuel tanks take MINUTES.

I had similar hick-ups as you described, they all turned out to be due to errors in my combinator logic. I wish my combinator contraptions where as robust as LTN.

And the third issue is something I don't understand: let's say I have a train stop that requests 30000 steel bars. And two providers that provide each 60000.

So I would mean LTN needs two requests/two trains: one with 22400 steel bars (4 wagons a 5600) and a second with the rest.
But instead it picks up several trains. 15 or 20. The biggest brings 8000 steel, the smallest 240 (there is no min delivery set and default is 1000).

The only way LTN would behave like this is with Best Effort enabled and providers having different priorities.
Blueprint the affected providers and requester on a new map and see if it happens there too.

[NiftyManiac]

Trains cant even automatically be put on track. Would be kind of fun though to watch a 4x4 train assembler spewing out long trains like OTTD depots.

Train-deployer/train-assembler has been on my project list for some time, I just haven't come up with a sufficiently good in game mechanic for it...

I've started playing with something for this; I'll need it for Grey Goo Mk II. The problem with a depot is that I haven't thought of a good way of specifying info for it. Sure you could have a combinator with a bunch of locomotive and wagon signals, but that's just ugly. I've been thinking along the lines of a deployer building the length of a carriage that you place next to a set of rails. If you feed it a carriage, it deploys it (and sends it to the nearest station if the train is complete).

Feeding train composition into the deployer is easy.
Just take a look at the encoded train composition signal I'm using. It provides exact information of what type of carriage is at what position and can be decoded by a single arithmetic combinator in one tick.

I didn't say it'd be hard, I said it'd be ugly . I'm not a huge fan of complex signal interfaces to individual entities, let alone encoded ones. In most of factorio, you get complex behavior by connecting really simple component parts, and I think that's good to emulate.

Naturally LTN, recursive blueprints, and other mods do cool stuff with extensive signal interfaces, but I think with a train placer it might be better to provide a simple deployer component and let people build their own logic if they want to transmit train composition.

[Nilaus]

I am in the process of converting my entire base to Logistic Train Network (50+ trains with many stops) and I encountered what looks like an error. I'd like to hear if this is intended, you know of it or maybe it is me being blind.

I have Coal outposts serviced by 2+4 trains bringing it back to the main base and 1+2 trains internally in the base which feed from the main coal deopit in the base to each City Block.
Naturally I have set restriction on the Coal Outpost to be >= 4 and on the internal City Block requesters <= 3

Before adding the length restrictions the 1+2 Coal trains went to the Coal Outpost (and therefore only loaded in 1 wagon) instead of the internal distribution hub. As I added the length restriction to prevent this the internal Coal supply stopped. The Trains 1+2 Trains are simply just sitting there and never choosing the internal distribution hub.

I have created an album of the stops, maybe I am just not doing it right.... I hope someone can help point out the obvious error I've made or explain why it doesn't work. Thanks

http://imgur.com/a/GaBvU

[Optera]

I don't see any obvious errors in the screenshots.
Set log level to 4 "/c remote.call('LTN', 'log_level', 4)", let it run for a bit, don't mind the message spam, and send me factorio-current.log from factorio root directory.

[Nilaus]

I don't see any obvious errors in the screenshots.
Set log level to 4 "/c remote.call('LTN', 'log_level', 4)", let it run for a bit, don't mind the message spam, and send me factorio-current.log from factorio root directory.

At least it is nothing obvious then I have found another solution, which was actually proposed by Light: To use Crushed Coal or Wood Pellets. It doesn't solve the problem, but it circumvents it so I can proceed.

There is one other thing that bugs me. If there are more than X (somewhere between 6 and 10) items that cannot be delivered then it goes into a spamming loop with error messages where it repeats errors perpetually. Then I have to disable some requests to proceed. I do not know if you have built something that displays 5 errors and then the next 5 errors and it somehow loops if there are too many errors?

[adrenaline]

Hi there,

I have a question to LTN.

I'd like to build a main station for coal. So that every mining train station sends their coal to the main station. The main station itself unloads the coal to a provider station. Every other requester station (e.g. the train station for the steam engines) should request their coal only from the main station. I've tried it, but in fact I've build a requester-provider loop (like in the drones-network).

Is there a possible way to set up such a station?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Optera]

Hi there,

I have a question to LTN.

I'd like to build a main station for coal. So that every mining train station sends their coal to the main station. The main station itself unloads the coal to a provider station. Every other requester station (e.g. the train station for the steam engines) should request their coal only from the main station. I've tried it, but in fact I've build a requester-provider loop (like in the drones-network).

Is there a possible way to set up such a station?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Intermediate stations are a design concept made obsolete by LTN. Are your mines so far away that letting LTN generate direct mine -> requester deliveries is not responsive enough?

The only way to do that is to use different train lengths for mine -> main station and main station -> requester.
If I had to go vast distances I'd use a 10+ length train, which are infeasible for anything except long distances anyway.

[Light]

This mod is absolutely wonderful. No more spending hours trying to get headache inducing combinator magic depots to work. Now the train bus is seamless and quick to configure.

Are depots meant to be affected by the min/max length variable? I couldn't keep my smaller trains out of larger depots or vice versa despite using it. This was corrected by naming the smaller stations something different, so it was no big deal. Just curious on that one.

[Optera]

This mod is absolutely wonderful. No more spending hours trying to get headache inducing combinator magic depots to work. Now the train bus is seamless and quick to configure.

Are depots meant to be affected by the min/max length variable? I couldn't keep my smaller trains out of larger depots or vice versa despite using it. This was corrected by naming the smaller stations something different, so it was no big deal. Just curious on that one.

Limiting depots with min/max can't be done with the way schedules and train pathfinding works.
All you can do is name different sized depots differently. A train will always return to the closest depot with the same name it was sent to by the player. There's no sane way for me to make some trains go to "Depot" and others go to "Depot".

While my train bus is now combinator free, my loading stations keep growing into insane complexity.

[Light]

Once I noticed liquid tankers were supported and worked quite seamlessly, I attempted to create a mixed liquid station with 4 liquids per tank with pumps attached to circuits to only move the fluid that's needed. It worked great for two trips but that second pump had just 2 liquid stored from the previous run and it instantly contaminated the tanker. Instantly shot down my dream thanks to the pump retaining 2 fluid... Seriously hate the fluid mechanics of this game, but what a joy it would have been if it worked.

If anyone knows a way to clean the pump out after each use, please let me know. Would love to set up a station containing multiple fluid storage without it being 40 car lengths long or a barrel frenzy.

[Ghostling]

Hello Again Optera.

first of all, thanks for the bug fix for MP. we now seem to have found something new, not a thing we can't work around but it do cause de-sync and i have host a certain way to work around it.
the problem is; we now get a message spam as seen in the picture (hope you see it) we are running 70+ trains and 180+ stations (about 80 of them er depots) the work around is to wait for everybody to join, then ask them not to move before i set log level to zero.

any ideas for this one ?

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 665C20F86/

[Optera]

Hello Again Optera.

first of all, thanks for the bug fix for MP. we now seem to have found something new, not a thing we can't work around but it do cause de-sync and i have host a certain way to work around it.
the problem is; we now get a message spam as seen in the picture (hope you see it) we are running 70+ trains and 180+ stations (about 80 of them er depots) the work around is to wait for everybody to join, then ask them not to move before i set log level to zero.

any ideas for this one ?

Using the remote call to set log level to 0 is the most unstable way to fix spam.
I recommend using message_filter_size in config.lua. The default 10 works for medium networks or those that constantly provide nearly everything. Going by that screenshot setting it to 15 or 20 should be fine for you.

Don't be alarmed when seeing all messages each time a player joins. I'm resetting buffer so new players see the messages they might have missed.

[Thoralf]

Hi guys,

As a big fan of this mod and Nilaus' Factorio series on Youtube, I encountered a similar issue that Nilaus also encountered in his factory. Namely that it can be difficult to have an omni-purpose train station with many different items being delivered. I have solved this issue for myself, so I thought I'd share:

The station is unloaded with the full power of 12 stack inserters, even of only a single item type is delivered. It doesn't matter if the items are in the wrong car either (or if the cargo is spread across both). This was my primary concern, as I wanted to have this station serviced by my standard 1-2-1 trains which usually have a full cargo of two wagons of the same item. It also does not unload any items that are not requested.

ComplexStationOverview.png (2.15 MiB) Viewed 7905 times

The top part of the station is fairly simple. The warehouses from the warehousing mod are exactly six spaces wide, so I can have up to 12 items being loaded (I use a 1-2-1 train setup), six into each warehouse and then onto a belt with a filter inserter. If you want, you can setup filter inserters between the warehouses in case an item ends up in the wrong warehouse. Works fine, but its super big and I would have had to remodel the entire station and city square to fit two such stations.

The bottom station is thus where the magic happens. The main component that I was lacking was actually another one of Optera's mods called Inventory Sensors, which allows you to read out the contents on a train car.

• This design uses 4 of these inventory sensors, they work just like wiring up a chest and tell you the contents of the object in front of them. This lets us use circuitry on the contents of the train car in front.
• Now that we can look inside the train cars, they are perfectly used as a 6 by 2 sized buffer chest, with two filter stack inserters between them (we will use those later to balance items between cars).
• The bottom two sensors (they look like greenish constant combinators) are wired together by a red wire onto a pole, which feeds into decider combinator, outputting "1 each" for "each > 1". We now have an output value of 1 for each item type in the cars. The same is done for the top two train cars, which have their own separate constant combinators, again outputting "each" for "each > 1"
• The red constant combinators are outputting the requests for the station. The right combinator contains the six inputs for the right hand side, and the left combinator the inputs for the six belts on the left. They are wired via a green wire on the back poles to provide the total requests for the station. You can also add your normal LTN conditions (train length etc.) without breaking the rest of the circuit.
• The requested items of each constant combinator are connected by red wire to an adjacent combinator, which once again converts them to ones: each < 1 output 1 each.
• Via a red wire, we wire together the outputs of the three center combinators to the input of the arithmetic combinator. This is essentially summing the item types of the two requester combinators with what is actually in the train cars. We subtract 1 from each and output each, then connect the output to all 12 stack inserters, so that if any requested item is in either of the cars, it will now get unloaded until no requested items are left in the train. This is done by effectively subtracting all item types which aren't present in the train from those that are.
• Finally, we use the outputs of the outermost decider combinators connected to our inventory sensors for the train wagons (outputting a 1 for each present item type as before) to each feed into their own arithmetic combinator in the center do the same thing for the two stack filter inserters between (add together with requested items on that half of the station, subtract 1, feed into the corresponding balancing stack inserter between the two cars).

I hope this is useful to some of you.

Thanks for making the mod!

Blueprint String:

Code: Select all

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Edit: One thing I forgot to mention, I am using Bob's inserters, so those stack filter inserters have a longer arm to reach the two tiles into the train car. Otherwise you would need to re-position the combinators and output into small buffer chests or a mixed belt first.

[ssilk]

Description is good, blueprint is better.
Please add also the mods and mod versions you used.

[Optera]

Small hint. When it's not coupled to a stationary target, Inventory Sensor does use a quite a bit of CPU as it has to constantly perform scans for trains or cars.
Using WideChests, Warehousing, or anything similar (even EqualizerChests, although it uses on_tick to balance between chests) instead of your stationary wagons yields much better performance.

[Thoralf]

Added the Blueprint.

Small hint. When it's not coupled to a stationary target, Inventory Sensor does use a quite a bit of CPU as it has to constantly perform scans for trains or cars.
Using WideChests, Warehousing, or anything similar (even EqualizerChests, although it uses on_tick to balance between chests) instead of your stationary wagons yields much better performance.

My initial design used the 3x3 storehouses, but then I have to balance across 4 different containers which makes the combinators messier. Would you recommend the wide chest mod instead?

Also, any ideas how I can achieve the same thing without having to rely on the inventory sensor if that is CPU intensive? I would like to have more stations like this with multiple inputs/outputs in some of my other utility city blocks for making low frequency items (military/utility).

What would be really useful is if the station were to output the cargo contents of any present train, maybe as a different colour signal to the standard info.

[Optera]

My initial design used the 3x3 storehouses, but then I have to balance across 4 different containers which makes the combinators messier. Would you recommend the wide chest mod instead?

Also, any ideas how I can achieve the same thing without having to rely on the inventory sensor if that is CPU intensive? I would like to have more stations like this with multiple inputs/outputs in some of my other utility city blocks for making low frequency items (military/utility).

Wide Chest is very nice once you flag all it's generated chests as hidden. For some reason the author hadn't done that when I last checked the original mod.

I hope I made IS use as little cpu time as possible. It is infinitely more cpu intensive than base game functions for wiring up chests however.

What would be really useful is if the station were to output the cargo contents of any present train, maybe as a different colour signal to the standard info.

I'm not going to add a feature that is confirmed for 0.15.

[Ghostling]

Hello Again Optera.

first of all, thanks for the bug fix for MP. we now seem to have found something new, not a thing we can't work around but it do cause de-sync and i have host a certain way to work around it.
the problem is; we now get a message spam as seen in the picture (hope you see it) we are running 70+ trains and 180+ stations (about 80 of them er depots) the work around is to wait for everybody to join, then ask them not to move before i set log level to zero.

any ideas for this one ?

Using the remote call to set log level to 0 is the most unstable way to fix spam.
I recommend using message_filter_size in config.lua. The default 10 works for medium networks or those that constantly provide nearly everything. Going by that screenshot setting it to 15 or 20 should be fine for you.

Don't be alarmed when seeing all messages each time a player joins. I'm resetting buffer so new players see the messages they might have missed.

Thank you alot for the very quick response. i've set the message_filter_size to 20, and we have only have had one de-sync, with no loop.

now i just need to figure out how you use the combo of filter inserters and logickobinators.

and as a foot note, we are now over the 80 trains and 190 stations. thanks for a great mod.

[Thordus]

Hi Optera
Thanks for your nice mod. Love it.

I have a suggestion to improve your mod. You need two more signals for the requester train stops. First signal is the “min. Priority” and second the “max. Priority”. With them you can request items only from provider with equal or higher/lower priority.

Short Example:
You have 4 mines with the priority of 1, 2, 3, 4 and a requester train stop.
When the requester have a max. priority of 2 only the mines with the priority 1 and 2 can send items to the requester.
With min. Priority 2 only the mines with 2, 3 and 4 can send.
With min. Priority 2 and max. Priority 3 you only mine 2 and 3 can send.

Is it possible to implement something like this?