corona_wind

Bump. Are the devs considering adding this at all or is it a lost cause?

How do you even manage to deliver bio barrels as programmer? Those planets are so heavily guarded by turrets and wildlife I ground to a halt there

It was that day. It should work now

Coping with drone brains on the order of a Solarbotics kit, you have to take what you can get. Many things are going to be impossible until complex logic is implemented, and even then, much will still be difficult. With enough speed and luck, these rollers can explore a large portion of planets with tunnels to the core (to the point I use them for core hammerhead missions). Sometimes I use timed boosters to aim them specifically at certain lodes.

2 sensors, 2 engines. What tells it where to aim? Absolutely nothing. What tells it when to mine? Absolutely nothing.

Try the camera tracker part.

For that matter, the gun itself can rotate! It just doesn't have a 'nearest enemy' setting.

OK. This is by no means n exhaustive list, but covers a lot of basics. Subject to possible change in the future, tested as of Apr 10, 2020. Enemies: Bees, turrets, etc. It seems to exclude passive creatures like purple blobs. Enemy structures: I know this includes hives. It probably includes a lot more. Obstacles: Purple blobs, scrap, the Nimbatus, and the bucket. Collectable items: Cargo containers, black boxes, the alien artifact, etc. Probably situational. Own drone: You get three guesses, and the first two don't count. Resources: Ore and nothing but ore so far. Projectiles: This detects enemy projectiles, including acid bee puke and corporate guns. Mission Target: This one is situational. In artifact missions, it responds to burned-out statues. In corporate lab missions, it responds to shield generators and the lab. In hammerhead missions, it responds to hammerheads. Et cetera. It's especially helpful to use "mission target" with a direction indicator, because it changes! Light one dead statue, and it will direct you to the next one. Light the last statue, and it will point you to the artifact. Blow up one shield generator, and it'll point you to the next. Things I haven't tested: Laser bees, hot and cold planet enemies, those weird glowy rocks of unknown purpose, meteors, funky meteors, lots of corporate hardware, etc.

Best turret I've managed so far: It's notable that direction indicators now have a 'nearest enemy' setting, which they didn't when I made this. They're a bit unwieldy, but would eliminate the time wasted scanning empty space.

Camera trackers put a ping on the map when the nimbatus has high enough sensor capability now. So this has been implemented!

We've seen each others' awesomest creations, now let's share our most spectacular mistakes. Keep in mind these ones of mine are all fully automatic drones! ...it just vaporized... "What's understeering?" *points to image* "Oh. What's oversteering?" *points to image, again* "Oh. What's windup?" *points to image a third time* It is persistent, at least... "Jitters a little in the lab, but how bad can it be?" Why are you going UNDER the bucket? NOOOOOO! A failure to eject. These critters don't give up! I waited 20 minutes!

I'm sure I have sensed the container with distance sensors, but darned if I can remember what setting made it do so. Maybe I'll make a table. Of course, the table may change...

When a new design hits every wall and still crosses finish seconds faster than my last best, that's a good sign. I refined it into this. Technically a very very short dragger, the dragger part does the fine steering, and the back engines only do very very rough steering to avoid walls or make especially tight turns. (Plus a few more logic tricks.) This means the back 4 engines spend nearly all their time active. 33.6 seconds on Cygnus. Still has issues with deceleration pads and can't finish other courses. [edit] 33.5! Top 20!

We have the position indicator which SORT OF does this, but it doesn't appear on the map. That is a great idea.

My favourite designs have a kind of callous simplicity. "That's right, I beat your design with three engines and a dead weasel." They do a lot with minimum parts. This is why rotary designs make me happy. Four engines and a direction indicator can race. Two engines and two wall-sensors can climb and mine. And they're really fun to watch. Take a close look at what's happening. Each sensor drives the OPPOSITE engine, carrying it around, making the far side spin up and around and hammer to the wall -- just in time to switch to the other one. Direction sensors do exactly the same thing, in midair. By changing the angle of the indicator, you can make it follow the target, flee it, or track a right-angle to it (something VTOLs cannot do). You can mirror them without breaking them. You never need to worry about turning, because they are always turning. You only need one mining tool to cover all directions. Et cetera. Their biggest drawback, is they don't lend themselves to large designs. The racer is about as big as they can go. But you can pack along something larger in a factory to launch later.

This is the best GIF I can get when in testing. I have to crop and upscale to show any features.

Direction indicator trick: Lock-on signal. The inverter is set with "!LOCKED" as input, and "LOCKED" as output. Now the direction indicator can tell you when its dead-on. Bonus: Using a NOR gate instead of an inverter, gives you a free logic input which will disable the "LOCKED" signal whenever you want.

Oh, and lastly: AND/OR gates are not universal. Because they can't invert, you can't build all possible machines from them. NOR gates are universal. You can build anything out of them, including AND logic. So are NAND, but they don't get the full benefit of 4 inputs the way NOR does. (And NOR gates cannot be piled up to make bigger NOR gates the way NAND can.)

And what good is a NOR gate? It's helpful to think of them as "disable gates". If any of the inputs are true, turn this off! Do not ask "what engine do I turn on for this sensor?" Ask "what engine do I turn off for this sensor?" etc. And anywhere you want to put an inverter, put a NOR gate instead. You'll thank yourself later, when you find any reason you want to inhibit that signal. This drone completes the "retrieve alien artifact" mission and has loads of different behaviours. I select between them by abusing extra NOR gate inputs. Inhibit all nor gates except these ones... Then, inhibit all nor gates except *those* ones... And at the end, I turn off all engines with the KILL signal, letting it fall right back into the bucket and carry the prize with it.

I don't think its possible. It's not a matter of how tags work -- it's how gates work in general. Pile up two gates with the same outputs, the game or's them. Changing that behaviour would mean needing a whole new logic engine. HOWEVER! Invert your logic and what you're imagining is already possible. I use primarily nor-gate logic. With tags+keys, they work just great as 4-input nor gates, which makes them by far the most space-efficient gate in Nimbatus. It's also possible to build a 4-input NAND with 2 gates instead of 3. Just assign the same key as output and it works. Plot out the logic of (A NAND B) OR (C NAND D) and you'll see it's identical to (A NAND B NAND C NAND D).

We do now. Then, we did not.

Programmer mode artifact retrieval! ...and the mass of gates powering it is easily as big as the entire rest of the thing. This was hard! Seven sensors in this thing. Distance sensors, right to left: 1) MissionTarget. Detects torches to activate the plasma gun. Also the artifact, unfortunately. 2) Collectible Items. Disables the gun. "Don't shoot at the priceless artifact, moron." 3) Collectible items, again. Tells when it's in the right place to be towed and activates magnet. Direction sensors, clockwise from top right: 1) Mission target. Directs the drone horizontally across the landscape until it's straight over a target, then precision-drops. 2) Gravity. keeps drone upright. 3) Container. Sends the drone back home to the container, plus some tilt so it doesn't actually hit the container. 4) Drone core. Tells it when it's right above the bucket, forcing it to disable all engines. And the altimeter, to give it a reference altitude to flee to whenever it hasn't found a target yet. The musical instruments are debugging. A low tone when it's towing, a high tone when it's found the bucket.

We could cut the number of gates by 1/2 if we just had an 'invert input' checkbox. And another decent fraction with an output-enable/disable for sensors. Soooooo many of those NOR gates are just inverters...

This bug still stands, but NOR gates still work - logic 1 outputted with no inputs assigned - if you need a workaround. (Why would you want an unassigned input? Leaving yourself room to add things later.)

misunderstood, ignore