Packet Support for Everything

**Razara** · 07-17-2007

I was thinking that it would save a great deal of time if packet support was added for such things as hoverballs, gps, beacon sensor, etc.
If the object has more than one input or output a Packet output is added to the list. This would pack all the information into one easy input or output. Each packet value would correspond to the input number. For example with hoverballs: The new input list would look like: A: ZVelocity,B: HoverMode, C: SetZTarget, D: Packet
and the outputs would be: A: ZPos, B: XPos, C: YPos, D: Packet

Now the first value of the input packet would be ZVelocity, the second Hovermode, etc. Same for outputs, except with the outputs of course.

This feature would allow users to still use the old means of using these devices, but also adds a faster version to it.
The packets could come from either expression chips or cpu chips(I think that it has packet support, not 100% on that) or just the wire duplexers.

**Shandolum** · 07-17-2007

I could see great use of doing this with the vector function in the expressions with X,Y,Z coordinates. Would save a lot of time.

**Syranide** · 07-18-2007

Basically, there is already "typed" input/output-support in wiremod, but the expression gate doesn't type check so the current packet support is rather shoddy. But it is planned for v2 (if ever), proper packet support, with typed inputs/outputs, including native constructs for accessing packets, and not send/recv.

However, I actually thought about this a few days ago, what is possible already is to have some magic, right-click on other wiremod entities, and have the expression gate automatically create a "packet"-gate for that entity. Which would easily allow you to connect to GPS-coordinates using only one input etc, the only problem I see is that it would require you to know the index of the inputs, although that could be fixable by simply adding the inputs and outputs as comments in the "magic expression gate".