VOTE: Significant development / Reduce your wiring

[andy1976uk]

OK, this request should be very easy to implement on an individual basis, but I'm requesting that it gets added to essentially every component in Wiremod. I'd be willing to do this if given the requisite code and SVN access, even if temporary.

The idea is that every component would have somekind of Pack/Table output (in addition to, or perhaps instead of, it's current outputs). All of the outputs would be within this table and would have to be used with an E-gate. As expression gate usage is increasingly ubiquitous and in everyone's best interests, it seems pragmatic to me. The benefit of this is a substanial decrease in the amount of required wiring which would not only add to the aesthetic qualities of your contraptions but most likely improve performance too.

A simple example: You have an E-Gate setup to process outputs from a GPS and a Gyroscope. Instead of having individual wire connections for X Y Z, Pitch, Roll, Yaw etc, you could have 1 "packed" output for GPS and another one for the gyro, then within the E-gate you use the Recv() function to unpack the data.

There you've immediately reduced the need for 4 wires and with a pretty simple application.

Does it make sense? Is it desirable? Are there any drawbacks? Do you want it?

[moogle_man]

Looks pretty cool, it just might be a bit difficult for noobs to deal with, but other then that I'm all for it!

[Syranide]

This is on the list of ideas that should eventually make it into egate2, not sure exactly how it would look/work but it's intended, it would make it alot neater to be able to connect components instead of single outputs and inputs. It could even be that instead of being a table of values, you get an "object" for it instead that can contain various additional functions, to give you even more control.

It will not be added to egate1 though, because packet support is seriously bad for it because of the way it works (packets can dissappear over time etc) and it would be highly unintuitive what value does what.