Logics Discussion Thread

[WimeSTone]

Greetings.

 

I got some suggestions for circuitry section.

 

First and the most needed change - signals table. Would help debugging drones a lot. A signal must have a name, type, initial value and may have a button.

Value types are numbers and bools. I doubt it is necessary to split numbers into float and int as it is both overwhelming for people who don't care about maths much and the limit of precision in part's settings is 0.1, which means "number" type can fit in int and be divided by 10 when used to avoid floating point errors. Strings are questionable as a type.

Something like this:

 

 

Then, a signal may be selected from a dropdown menu or by entering it's name. This gives much freedom for people who like doing everything with their own hands and for those who love the process of designing and watching their drone obliterating everything on it's own. Also, each part should have its own ID/name to use in circuits.

 

Second - circuits, sensors and wherever needed numeric input must have Edits in addition to Sliders. We love precise input. The simplest example - TNT has 20 range, but we can only set an approximation of that on sensor slider, it would be nice to set TNT detonation distance to 20 + some buffer.

 

Third - sensors must be able to detect ship itself. I want to create a real Mothership with tons of specialized drones, this requires self-awareness

 

Fourth - logic parts should be connected separately from ship connections. This part of ship design is the most misleading to my mind.

I would recommend restructuring logics by adding another layer over existing, so that logic parts would not affect ship center of mass that much, advanced circuits are hardly symmetrical...

On the drone editing level we will have a "Controller" box and wires/busses/wireless systems whatever connects entities to logic controller. Inside the controller, we edit the very logics with the same elements we've had outside:

 

 

Orange rects are input signals, green rects are output signals or connected entities. Controllers would have limits on input/output signals count - to make them justified.

 

Let it be, for now at least. What are your opinions on this subject?

[Lurkily]

A lot is good here.  If we're breaking logic into another layer, though, you can put it pretty much anywhere; your worries about center-of-mass affected by logic are basically over, unless your logic gets crazy.  You might as well contain logic entirely in the drone brain.

 

I think if we're going that route we might as well just build the logic in a separate interface, and leave it logical.  The failing of this is that you won't have a visual display of what logical elements are activating while your ship flies around, without another logic display to show what happens while in flight.