Two circuit questions

[tasadar]

So with SA they introduced the new Selector combinator, for the circuit inclined, what exactly does that bring to the game that was lacking previously? Simplifies prior logic that can be implemented and introduces new logic to interact with?

And my second question is green and red and now global(radar) circuit conditions... What are ways that you use the green and red separation logic? I can understand local circuit networks and the discrete wires, but I'm more asking philosophically for inspiration/thought experiment to understand others usage of different circuit

[Dertin]

So, first of i am very bad in geting my ideas into writen text. if you wanna talk about this topic a bit more feel free to add me and we can have a chat.

then for the first question:
The selector combinator, as far as i understand it, lets you use metadata about items.

example where i use it:
My trainnetwork is based on requester stations and offering stations. before i had to change every stations logic a bit depending on the type of resource i wanna have there. Best example are ores (stacksize 50) and plates (Stacksize 100). So i had to alter the logic on the station to start offering on diferent item counts as one wagon can hold 2 times the amout of plates then it can hold ores.
With the new block i have one memorycell that gets the item that enters the chests, the selector combinator then gives the stacksize of that item out and therefor i do not have to alter stuff, just a bit more programming into the station to use that stacksize in the equation.

The second question: the seperated red and green wires.
i often use on stations a so called chest equilizing technique to make sure every chest is mostly even filled so the transfer from chest to train goes as fast as possible (not just the first chest full and one arm doing it all)
to do this i get all information from the chests with the green wire, calculate some and distribute all that information to all arms i wanna equilize. most times its just (for each / chestcound*-1) then i connect every arm also to its own chest with the red wire. this way the arm knows the negative number from green and its own chest inventory. as one is negative and one is positive i can use smaller/bigger than 0 to fill or empty the chests that have the most or least items.

hope this inspires you a bit but if you got more questions please reach out. i am happy to help but its easier in talking. I Speak english and German

[jagholin]

selector combinator does some very specific things, and mostly not that interesting. Other combinators also received some very useful upgrades.

Constant combinator can now be linked to a logistic group, and these groups are *global*. Meaning, you can easily adjust behavior of all your circuits that have constant combinator connected to the same group. To me this is #1 change.

Decider combinator is completely reworked and is now significantly more powerful. RS latches and other common building blocks are now just a single decider combinator, instead of a network of several combinators that were needed before. As result, you need fewer combinators to produce a logic circuit, making it easier to understand later.

Also every combinator now has a comment field. That's also a great addition.

[Hurkyl]

I have used the selector combinator for two things:

• When looking at logistics requests (or similar collections signals), the selector lets me identify which request is the biggest. This lets me highlight it for my information, or even to automatically set recipes for trying to create items to fulfill the request.
  
• The selector yields some specialized information about items, like stack size. I have used this to do some computations regarding which items I wanted to automatically craft.

[Fel]

The selector allows you to get access to stuff you couldn't without hard-coding it yourself (stack size).
Random input was not really feasible before.
Select input has a relatively limited use but it's nice to be able to do it either way.
Really not sure what count inputs is supposed to solve since you could already do it with a decider combinator doing "anything != 0 output A to 1", we can even specify the input (red, green or both) with the decider combinator.

At the very least, stack size can be pretty useful for setting train stop limits, you no longer need to set it yourself in an arythmetic combinator or in a constant combinator and change it for every item you set (although you would still need a constant combinator for unloading stations to tell what item to look the stack size for in case the chests are empty but the value no longer needs to be changed and it can be replaced by a chest with the item in it as well).


Being able to separate the inputs from red and green adds a whole layer of things you can do without highly complex setups.
For example, you can compare the value from the red and the green, to each other or separately thanks to the (new) ability to have multiple conditions as well.
You can also substract the two directly, which previously needed one to go through a multiplication by -1.
Or multiply/divide them, which was impossible without setting one of the two signals to a completely separate one with another arythmetic combinator.

Most of it won't matter much to people that barely used circuit network, but it greatly expands the possibilities for those that are into more complex setups.

[Peez Machine]

I use a bunch of selector combinators to create quality bounds. So for example, I pass in a signal for a bunch of stuff I want to make, one signal for the low quality bound, one for the high quality bound, and it passes through signals for all of the items at all of the valid qualities in that range (which then gets passed to an auto-factory that rotates between recipes).

[tasadar]

Fascinating and thank you everyone(and anyone else) who answered. Very excited to get the sandbox to Fulgora and Gleba and play with all these tools, had never found the inspiration pre-SA to get beyond logistic limits or backup-power settings.

German bro, you're German, you were born to play this or Forklift Simulator. Language and grammar are merely tools to facilitate mind to mind communication, yours was great.

[AlliedKhajiit]

I used the selector to read the rocket stack size of items (to get their weight essentially) to calculate how many rockets are needed to launch to satisfy the requests of platforms. Not that it's particularly useful information, but it's neat to know

[bwc153]

A practical example of one I've seen the Selector Combinator is for DocJade's AutoRails. There's a Constant Combinator where you input all of the resources your train network is transporting, and the selector combinator selects one of those signals to verify a station needs the resource or not, if it does it dispatches an idle train to pick it up if one is available

Originally posted by Peez Machine:

I use a bunch of selector combinators to create quality bounds. So for example, I pass in a signal for a bunch of stuff I want to make, one signal for the low quality bound, one for the high quality bound, and it passes through signals for all of the items at all of the valid qualities in that range (which then gets passed to an auto-factory that rotates between recipes).

Do you have more information about this? This seems very helpful for managing quality.

[Peez Machine]

Originally posted by bwc153:

Do you have more information about this? This seems very helpful for managing quality.

Here's a blueprint

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Between the BP and combinator descriptions you can probably figure it out. To set the low-quality floor, detach green wires from the output for the quals you don't want (so if you want Rare at minimum, detach the green output wires from the Normal and Uncommon quality transfers.