Bug? Spidertron as Landfiller

[()Alf]

I wonder, when i use a Spidertron as remote Landfiller, there are only 1-3 waves of landfilling activities of the the drones, then it stops.
As soon as i move the Spidertron a bit, it restarts again but still stops after same logic - everything while cargo still has plenty of landfill left.

[RiO]

Are you sure you haven't landfilled everything that's within range already with those 1-3 waves? Have you looked at the roboport construction range of the spidertron?

[()Alf]

There are still holes within the range. I had this versions ago, still this is an issue. Stationary HUBs do all good, it's just the Spidertron-Hub.

[Leeux]

Did you preplace a big area of landfill ahead of time? The more ghosts there are in the map pending of construction the worse the robots perform... and ghost tiles are the worse for that.

It's often called 'robot lag', it's related to how the game handles pending construction requests, whether they are covered with a roboport or not. The same would happen if you marked a lot of trees for deconstruction, for example. Or placed a big build made up of a lot of individual entities somewhere in the map, doesn't matter if it's far away or not.

Basically, from what I gathered, the game has to maintain a list of all the pending construction jobs and pick from amongst them those that are covered by robotport and in range of construction bots and, the bigger the pending construction request list, the longer it takes to choose works to perform from them in a given frame. Also, to worsen matters I think the game throttles itself only checking up to a number of pending requests per frame, so the more there are the longer it takes for robots to react to pending construction nearby.

I may be wrong on some details, but from what I observed it always happens like that: big pending ghost list somewhere in the map => robot lag

Best workaround is not to pre fill ahead of time a big area with tiles (those are the worst offenders) but instead place only the ones that you're going to fill in a given trip.

Also, a trick that often works, is to delete the pending construction jobs and immediately do an UNDO operation... that often tends to make the robots respond faster, not sure why.

It's one of the few areas of the game that are not that well optimized, but to be fair I don't know how they'd even start optimizing it better...

[()Alf]

The range of mobile ports are not filled. Just after i move the ST a step, it triggers the bots to move out and continue the filling. If i playe static ports on ground, the area is filled - the Spidertron is just idling after 2-3 Waves.

Maybe you like to test it with a Spidertron, filling a Cityblock.

[Leeux]

Is your FPS low in-game, perhaps?

I have a pack of about 6 to 10 (don't remember exactly) spidertrons landfillers on my vanilla megabase and they often exhibit the issue you're mentioning, but my FPS are in the low 50s, often 40s in that save. Perhaps that could also be related, not sure.

It's something that often bothered me too, and the closest to an answer I got is the robot lag I mentioned in my post. I read about that in a post in the official forums, I think...

I can't test atm, I'm supposed to be at work :P

[RiO]

Originally posted by Leeux:

Did you preplace a big area of landfill ahead of time? The more ghosts there are in the map pending of construction the worse the robots perform... and ghost tiles are the worse for that.

Yup. This was going to be my next question as well.

Originally posted by ()Alf:

The range of mobile ports are not filled. Just after i move the ST a step, it triggers the bots to move out and continue the filling. If i playe static ports on ground, the area is filled - the Spidertron is just idling after 2-3 Waves.

Maybe you like to test it with a Spidertron, filling a Cityblock.

What you're experiencing is construction queue lag.
There's only a finite number of tasks handed out to bots every game tick.
Orders issued on the tick itself or bots added to a network on the tick itself iirc take priority and everything else gets queued and then slowly trickles out.

Portable roboports moving above certain speeds don't respond to construction orders. In fact; they're taken out of the job system and are reintroduced when the port slows down to acceptable speed again. So moving the Spidertron re-kickstarts those robots as 'newly introduced to the system' and allows them to pick orders from the queue immediately.

You can probably get a similar effect with your own personal robots.
And then toggling the personal roboport off and back on.

[()Alf]

OMG...
I move the Spidertron to a spot, i am very far and long time away. I see the spidertron placing the landfill 2-3waves only watching radar. it just stopps pushing bots out planting those landfills. After some time (destroyed some nests) i remember "hey, there were my landfiller-spidertron - check for it and see, it didn't fill all spots. So i move that spidertron 1 step, and it starts sending out that bots and filling that landfillghosts - but only again those 1-3 waves of bots (difficult to say how many waves).

Any helpful?

[knighttemplar1960]

You can set multiple way points with your spidertron so it moves on its own and paints the area. Then you just have to watch power storage for the roboports in the spidertron.

[Нагризолич]

This is how drone behaviour works. Orders are gradually issued per chunk where roboport cover can reach. Just don't move it for a while, they will fill everything eventually.

[()Alf]

I try to fill a cityblock, walking there it starts placing landfill kinda random so there are still holes and not closed area. It just stops even with enough energy of those botports inside the spidertron.
In principle i think you could replicate this by yourself. Moving a spidertron full with landfill to the edge of water and mark the water for landfill, not everything in the range of the botport should be filled but it stops before leaving some holes.

[PunCrathod]

How many tiles have you requested to be filled&paved. Construction queue is split between groundtiles and rest. And those queues are global for the entire map. And it will only do max_successful_attempts_per_tick_per_construction_queue :default 5: and max_failed_attempts_per_tick_per_construction_queue :default 1: whichever comes first. So if you have ordered a lot of tiles to be paved over it can take minutes for it to attempt the ones near the spidetron again.

For example if you queue a 100x100 area to be landfilled/paved that is 10k tiles. The queue will take 2.7 minutes to roll through all of them. And if you are doing city blocks and paving multiple of them at the same time you can easily get to a point where it takes 10+ minutes to come back to the ones near the spidetron.

[()Alf]

I can watch the spidertron doing the surrounding space just partially, i could even sit in there and doing that live. It's about, that the area which could be filled by all means are not because the bots are only waving out 2-3 times and then idle inside of the spidertron until i do just 1 step with the spidertron, then it restarts and fill the gaps left over (and still leaving over some gaps after those 2-3 waves).

As far as i remember correctly, if i am the bots source and just sitting in the spidertron, it works fine, just a problem when the spidertron do it autonomously.

[Leeux]

I've seen the issue the OP refers too... at least, if I understand him/her correctly.

Is not so much that the robots take their time picking up jobs to complete, that also happens and it's the issue we've been mentioning, but that after some number of jobs done, the robots stop going out at all, even when the batteries are full and there are still pending construction jobs in range to do.

And only go out again after you move the spidertron a bit, but it happens also with any mobile roboport network (it has happened to me with the angel's crawler, for example.)

Now, I'm not entirely sure if the robots stall perpetually, or just take an extraordinary abnormal long time to cycle through and then start working again, as when it happened to me, I normally just move the vehicle and I'm done with that, but I have had cases where I went back to look after a long time after giving the placing orders, and there were still missing spots even when many minutes had passed when they should have been done with that. If in those cases you move the vehicle a bit, they immediately fly again and continue the job.

I don't recall ever seeing it happen with fixed robot networks at all, but I might be misremembering.

I doesn't happen 100% of the time (for me at least) so it's difficult to know what's going on or why. I'm fairly certain that also happens when there's no big list of ghost pending to be placed at all in the map... as that would be an explanation, but I have had this happen even when just placing landfill/building entities in an area, when no other construction jobs are pending.

It's been a long time since I've played with access to spidertrons (been playing mod overhauls too much) so my memory can be a little fuzzy on the details :P

[()Alf]

Test it and report back if you like - Have enough landfill in inventory of the spidertron. Having 3x 2nd grade roboports, 2 reactors and 4x 2nd grade batteries also plenty of landfill.

Walk to the sea so that at least about half of the roboport influence range should place the landfill and fill that square. In my case there are gaps left, i move a step and then it continues to place the landfill to that square. Roboports have enough energy, even if i leave for minutes and come back to the spidertron, it's not retriggered by itself.

I wish i could do a video, but currently i'm not aware of how or where to upload it (i don't want to get back to YT).

[PunCrathod]

Would it be possible for someone experiencing this possibly a bug to make a save when the robots stop working then test that they start working when you move the spidetron and then upload it somewhere.