4 ms·

im a factorio noob so just checking some intuitions > Example of 4 x 4 naïve Throughput-Limited belt balancer. This is not what we want. is this because a slo

by swyx 2y ago

im a factorio noob so just checking some intuitions > Example of 4 x 4 naïve Throughput-Limited belt balancer. This is not what we want. is this because a slowdown on belt #1 doesnt then get filled by belts 3 and 4? so this isn't a properly completely rebalancing system? > 4 x 4 Throughput-Unlimited belt balancer. This is what we want. but then this is weird too. the top left tunnel entrance thingy goes down and then immediately up again. why? maybe it tunnels all the way to the top right, in which case it has the same exact flaw as the first throughput limited example that we didnt want - belts 3 and 4 dont get to redistribute their stuff to it if belt 1 dies.

maverwa 2y ago
Yeah, the underground belts in the first and fourth row look odd, I currently don’t see a reason why the couldn’t be replaced by simple belts, which would be somewhat cheaper. Maybe that’s an additional UPS optimization applied in that design?
- kolui 2y ago
  I agree that using underground belts makes harder than it should to understand the example. I replaced it with simple belts. I re-calculated the design with the latest version of the code that has an optimization function that favors normal belts to underground ones https://github.com/gianluca-venturini/factorio-tools/blob/main/balancer.py#L440 https://github.com/gianluca-venturini/factorio-tools/blob/ma...
  - swyx 2y ago
    now my comment looks out of date :) thanks but also i am very intimidated by how much work you put into this game lol is this why i am a bad engineer
theptip 2y ago
A mixer can run at the full speed of its input belts (ie given two full belts input, it will output two full belts). In the naive solution you are effectively allocating a single belt output from each layer-1 mixer, so the system will run at half throughput. But the fan-out to a pair of mixers in layer-3 does mean that your 4 output belts are balanced, which might be good enough in some cases - for example of downstream smelters have lower capacity than the theoretical 4-belt max throughput.

by swyx 2y ago

maverwa 2y ago

Yeah, the underground belts in the first and fourth row look odd, I currently don’t see a reason why the couldn’t be replaced by simple belts, which would be somewhat cheaper. Maybe that’s an additional UPS optimization applied in that design?

kolui 2y ago
I agree that using underground belts makes harder than it should to understand the example. I replaced it with simple belts. I re-calculated the design with the latest version of the code that has an optimization function that favors normal belts to underground ones https://github.com/gianluca-venturini/factorio-tools/blob/main/balancer.py#L440 https://github.com/gianluca-venturini/factorio-tools/blob/ma...
- swyx 2y ago
  now my comment looks out of date :) thanks but also i am very intimidated by how much work you put into this game lol is this why i am a bad engineer

theptip 2y ago

A mixer can run at the full speed of its input belts (ie given two full belts input, it will output two full belts). In the naive solution you are effectively allocating a single belt output from each layer-1 mixer, so the system will run at half throughput. But the fan-out to a pair of mixers in layer-3 does mean that your 4 output belts are balanced, which might be good enough in some cases - for example of downstream smelters have lower capacity than the theoretical 4-belt max throughput.