Active Light With Factory or Computer

[Bishamonten]

Add the ability to link Lights to Factories or Effect Computers.

When the Factory or Effect is 'Active' the light will light up. Or maybe link a 'Not' logic between the two.

The problem with using a switch or button to turn on/off a factory is you don't know if the factory is already in use. By eliminating the middle man and just give factories, or lights to detect an 'On' status, the ability to send a signal to lights you create a neat and effective way of finding out whats on and what's not.

For Effect Computers this further create design features to have lights come 'On' in a ship bridge to indicate that say, Ion Effect, Stealth, Overdrive are active/inactive.

Pushing further you could even allow a light to turn 'On' when a system is fully charged or 'Off' when it's not, like the Scanner or Jump Drive.

 

[Auriga_Nexus]

This ties in with my idea of having factory modules output logic signals in general. Basically I find it stupid that factories can accept/be controlled by logic, but not vice versa.

Here's my idea: factories and storage areas have two possible logic outputs, which one you get determines on whether you hook an activation module or a button. With the activation module it would send 1(true) when the factory is actively producing and 0 when inactive or with nothing in production. With a pulse button, however, it would instead trigger the button every time it cycles.

If you combine this with a decrementor/logic counter, (which is laughably easy thanks to the new flipflop blocks), you can control how many runs the factory produces without having to babysit the damn thing. Right now you have to sit there and check the factory storage every 2 minutes, otherwise you risk the factory running indefinitely and eating up resources. By allowing factories and storage to trigger logic pulses, you can automatically shut down the factory after a specified amount of runs via logic, thus allowing you to do other things while you are producing blocks for your big ship blueprint.

As for weapons... well those would be useful as well. For toggle-able computers such as Jammer/Cloaker and Ion/Stop/etc, they can work the same as factories and storages with activation modules. For cycle-able weapons, the activation module is true when they are in their cycle (i.e. missile reload time), and false when ready, or vice versa. The jump drive would have a dual setup like the factories - the activation module would be true when charged and false when not charged, and the pulse button would trigger when you jump.

As far as I'm concerned this needs to happen yesterday, if only for the applications towards logic controlled production. Devs, Councilmen (and women), Ceiling Cat Schema-nyan... get on it!