New marker for pathfinding assistance/control

[Nightinggale]

The dupes have difficulties handling bases as they grow. They have little understanding of distance. Teaching them to understand automatically seems hard to do meaning what we need is a new tool to give instructions to dupes.

 

Imagine we place a marker. Click on it and it has 2 sliders. One is movement penalty and the other is task priority penalty. If we set task priority penalty to 10, if a dupe looks at a task where the dupe has to pass the marker, either to get to the task start or as movement for the task, the task priority will be lowered by 10, making it act like priority 4 if it's set to 5. Setting up such markers at strategic points will make the dupes more likely to do tasks locally while not downright banning them from doing task all over the base. Max penalty should be "don't do this" meaning the dupe prefers idle to passing with penalties.

 

If we reuse the door menu, then we can turn the penalty on or off depending on which way the dupe is going and it's possible to set the settings for each dupe individually if the player wants that. If we add an automation port, then we can use an automation signal to turn all penalties off. Clock sensors seems obvious to use here, though all sensors (modded or otherwise) could be used. Proposed sensors at the end of this post seems like good candidates as well.

 

Another marker building with the same sliders for penalties should trigger not on automation or dupe settings, but rather what the dupe is carrying. It has a list like storage with on/off boxes as well as a selector to tell if it triggers on left to right, right to left or both. This can be used to say set on an access chokepoint to a slime biome and then restrict that slime can't leave the slime biome, but it can enter. This can be very useful if you have 2 slime biomes and slime storage in each as it will then prevent dupes from taking slime from one and carrying it all through the base to reach the other one, contaminating everything on the way.

 

One version for germ count as well. Only pass through here if whatever you carry has less than (slider) germs on it, or less than (slider) germs on the dupe. Yes you can build decontamination buildings (sinks etc), but by restricting movement you can make 3 ways into a slime biome and 3 exits, but only one of them has decontamination for items, hence the other 2 exits will be shortcuts for dupes not carrying anything or carrying clean stuff.

 

Ideas for sensors to use for this:

Dupe sensor: same as critter sensor, but counting dupes in the room

 

Dupe passby sensor:

It counts how many dupes pass left to right and right to left. Trigger condition is then if left is bigger/smaller than right and a slider tells how much the difference should be. Place it at the only entrance to an area (like a different biome) and you can get it to trigger if more than say 3 dupes are in there at once. It may require a reset button because once constructed the "controlled" area might not be empty, hence counting incorrectly if the player can't reset when it becomes empty.

[Sasza22]

Interesting. I can alreay see dupes running around the other side of the base so they don`t pass the marker . Might work as a deterrent to dupes running too far. But if something like this could be implemented then why couldn`t there be a system that lowers the priority by 1 for every x tiles the dupe has to pass to get to it? It could have a slider as well (maybe even individual for each dupe).

[Nightinggale]

17 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

But if something like this could be implemented then why couldn`t there be a system that lowers the priority by 1 for every x tiles the dupe has to pass to get to it?

It's not like one approach will rule out the other. However I thought about adding a length restriction like that and I don't really like it. Imagine you need to fuel your coal generators but your coal and your generators are so far apart that the dupes decide not to do it even at priority 9. I can come up with more ways a fixed penalty can backfire, particularly if mixed with the mod, which allows bigger maps.

The big difference between markers and fixed penalties is that markers are manually set by players while fixed penalties happens behind the scene more hidden from the players. This makes markers more intuitive and most likely easier to figure out for new players.

I'm not against a penalty for every x tiles, but it shouldn't be fixed. It should be a slider somewhere since the player should be able to adjust the impact of this feature and even disable it entirely.

 

Another reason why markers could be very useful would be due to biomes. It can be used to make some dupes avoid cold while some other dupe avoids hot biomes, which the user can set depending on cloth. Slime biome is most likely visited by dupes with a strong immune system etc. It can be done right now with doors, but markers means they can enter if they have to, but avoids "wrong" biomes if given the choice. This kind of penalties are unrelated to distance.