Robo-crafting.

[worfc]

[worfc]

Ooo, I just realized that I do have some pictures. These are from the in-game help for sensors, to give an idea of how they work.

(NOTE: the help describes them as "bumped"-item sensors, but that functionality will soon be made generic, to accept a signal from any item-source (bumpers, inventory, the crafting-selected view, etc.)

Sensor-help 1

sensor-help-1.png (113.14 KiB) Viewed 5414 times

The attachment sensor-help-2.png is no longer available

[rkda]

It sounds like this is a plug inside the robot interface that connects to the existing manual crafting interface. It would be nice if the two things worked together. Have the hot pins of the interface plug respond to the selections in the existing crafting interface. That way we can both use it to create the sensors we need, and to test complex crafting logic during development.

While making sensors, wire the blank sensor up to the crafting itemID pin, and then open the crafting interface and select the thing you want the sensor to detect. Then later, when building the robot-does-the-work logic, you can again, use the manual crafting interface to see your circuit come to life as specific items are selected in the crafting interface. It will also be important to be able to step through the items, in the same sequence as the automatic version, while doing manual testing. Although this can be accomplished by simply not connecting up the craft-1-of-these pins in the logic under development.

Each robot (when you get to the point where you have multiple robots) will need a separate crafting interface, so that they don't conflict with each other. The outside manual crafting table interface should not conflict with the robot internal interface. When inside the robot interface, the crafting table should be specific to that robot.

- When outside, in the main farm, manual mode crafting, does it interact with a (or more than one) robot that is crafting at the time?
- Which robot do the mats get pulled from?
- What if 1 robot has some mats, and a different robot has the rest?
- - Does this block or succeed?
- Which robot gets the crafting table results?
- What if multiple robots have the mats, who do the mats get pulled from?

Some early thoughts...looking forward to see what others have to say about the idea.

[worfc]

Yes, the plug inside the robot connects to the existing interface. Yes, if the player selects an item in the crafting view, that would alter the selected item for that robot. Yes, this will simplify the "manual" method of creating desired sensors.

While I have some debug switches I can flip to help me with development, I'm not too keen on creating features that are not intended for final-game use. While I fully support the idea of "code to assist QA in doing its job", I'm just a one-man shop, and I really need to focus on getting the game to playable/shippable! I don't mean to seem overly bureaucratic about it but, for now, it works best for me if beta-testers report bugs (as you have been) and I use my tools to track them down (as I have been.) Thanks!

That said, I think most of what you asked for as QA-features is planned as actual features, so we're good, there!

Each robot =does= have a separate crafting (and market) interface, to go with their individual inventories. Currently, the "out in the farm" buttons default to your first robot. When we get later in beta, I may remove those buttons as ambiguous, since they really belong to the individual robots.

If one robot has 1/2 the mats needed to craft something, and another robot has the other 1/2, neither of them can craft until they work out how to transfer mats between them. "Chop-chop!"

Similarly, individual robots buy/sell things at market. Robot#1 can't sell robot#2's goods and robot#3 can't buy items on behalf of robot#4.

I understand that there was some confusion early on, as "inventory" was presented as "player" inventory. It is really "robot" inventory.

A key concept of the game is: The player doesn't do things. The player programs robots to do things.