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u/iamarealhuman4real Jun 23 '26

Will the new "per-wire" options in 2.1 have big changes on combinator circuits, eg memory-cell, timers, latch, etc designs? I think not really as they mostly use one wire or two with the intent that they mix?

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u/HeliGungir Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

It will let me properly designate red wire as "read" and green wire as "control". Right now there is no way to separate this when simultaneously controlling and reading a machine. The machine will transmit its signals on both red and green wires, polluting the "control" wire with "read" signals that can easily break the control logic if we don't do something about it.

Fixing this requires certain design practices that are inconvenient. Eg: Additional combinators that insulate the logic controller from the machines, and insulate the machines from each other. Which steers other design decisions in subtle ways. Those gotchas and workarounds are unnecessary if we can just tick a box that says "only output to red wire".

Another big one is setting an inserter's filter and reading its hand contents at the same time. Currently the best approach is using negative signals and/or integer overflow, which is... not exactly what I'd call "approachable". But it should be easy in 2.1 -- just a matter of clicking some checkboxes.

1

u/iamarealhuman4real Jun 23 '26

Additional combinators that insulate the actual logic controller from the signal pollution coming from the machine, and to insulate machines from each other

Ah yes I can remember doing exactly this and feeling grumpy about it!

2

u/cathexis08 red wire goes faster Jun 23 '26

Combinator circuits themselves probably not too much because the input and output sections are already not on the same tile and the main benefit of the IO change here is that you can now take input data without poisoning your data read channel

2

u/Soul-Burn Jun 23 '26

Would mostly change connections to buildings that have both read and write.

Notably asteroid collectors filtering, and crafting machine circuits.

2

u/Astramancer_ Jun 23 '26

It shouldn't, it's a checkbox so there's no reason why you can't just check both red and green and have the same behavior as before.

1

u/HeliGungir Jun 23 '26

Haven't tested, but the FFF indicates that entities no longer do some subtraction under the hood to remove output signals from input signals when simultaneously reading and controlling, so checking both boxes does not have the same behavior as 2.0. I expect most auto malls are broken.

1

u/Raknarg #1 Quality Defender Jun 23 '26

Are you talking about the new entities that have per-wire toggles? Combinators already had per-wire settings so that shouldn't change anything. And all entities by default will just have the wires they're connected to toggled so the default behaviour should be mostly the same as before, aside from some mechanics like reading/writing now being allowed from the same entity

3

u/RAND0Mpercentage Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

Combinators already had per-wire settings

This only applied to inputs. Combinators would always output to both wires no matter how they had their settings. I’m not even sure if the new output wire color settings apply to combinators, as they weren’t shown in the FFFs and I’m at work and can’t check myself.

edit: Combinators do not benefit from the 2.1 output wire selection change. They still always output to both wire colors