Gate Magnet

[Captain Maim]

I was thinking, after trying to reprogram a contraption, only to find all the expression chips were buried inside it, with no way I could find to get them out for reprogramming. That we need a gate magnet tool. Something to yank out those chips temporarily so they can be rewired or reprogrammed before being let go to return to the inside of the contraption where they shouldn't be anyway but always seem to end up somehow (after Adv Duplication.)

The idea of the tool is it attracts gates and wire components that you are pointing at which may have sunk down into something. You point at them, they come out and you fix them, possibly reweld them to the surface again, or let them snap back to their previous location(s).

I also (similarly) wish there was a way to retrieve parts that fall through the map when I remove a weld. I know that I can stop that if I freeze them first but once they fall it's just so sad that I have to cut them loose and rewire them without hope of just welding them back on again. (I'd like to be able to suck them out of the floor... But that's less bothersome than chips that sink into objects.)

[Squeakyneb]

Sounds a bit odd, but I think its a great idea!

WANT!!!

[Pyro-Fire]

lol, just freeze everything.

[Captain Maim]

I've tried freezing it, it doesn't unbury most of the components. It's really aggravating cause I want to redo it so it doesn't use so many things. But I can't without getting those expression chips.

I've tried shaking it, I've tried using the gravity gun on it. I've tried scraping it across the ground. I've tried using the Quantum Storage Device (super bad idea, it obliterates all welds, wire components and anything that's not a prop.)

I've tried no clipping, I can see the chips but I cannot interact with them at all. One chip is up and looks fine but cannot be touched (I'm not even sure what it does or is.) It's extremely obnoxious.

In an effort to stem this I've started piling chips on top of larger wire objects. That works but it doesn't help me recover the work I did on some contraptions.

[Amaroq]

I've never once had this problem with duplications. It sounds very odd to me.

[Jat Goodwin]

I think hes trying to pack a assload of gates and crap into a area the size of a bottle cap. Ever try using expressions?

But I like the idea, Maybe we could get some kind of "shrink wrap" for the wire components.

Wait, I just got an idea. What if you had a tool that after you got done wiring up your gates you used a tool on your contraption and it auto made a expression?

[Captain Maim]

Yeah I use expression gates, I prefer them to others, they get names and I can pack a whole feature set into one chip. But I wasn't able to save them until recently and so I didn't get all the useful ones I'd made saved. And the one that runs all the I/O for one of my better contraptions is sunken into a PHX plate. All I can see are wires protruding from a spot in the metal. It's so sad. I wish I could delete the plate without deleting the chips, then I could just weld them all to a new plate.

Actually I've been taking like all the chips related to say... a radio. and putting them all over it's surface (3 choice gates and an expression gate and a timer is what I have on the surface of one radio.) The radio card model is partially submerged in the PHX plate but the chips are still accessible, one is poking out with just it's corner.


I really like the idea of making a tool that takes a whole contraption's functions and compressing them to an expression chip! That could be really useful!

I've noticed with Adv Dup that it tends to inexactly reproduce my work. That is, I take an original duplication and I spawn it until it's not got weird things like PHX plates that sink down below where they are supposed to be. Should I post pictures or something? I just know that I've taken a 1x1 PHX and turned it into a hover robot and sometimes the PHX sorta sags while the wire parts float at the right height. Or it moves up and covers over the wire parts.

This has basically been happening to me the whole time I've been using wiremod (which started at revision 666. I updated it this morning but adv dup hasn't changed since I first updated when I got it.)


(Edit: I was freezing it until a recent update then that stopped surfacing the chips, now they wont' come out now matter what I do.)

[Black Phoenix]

Get separate panel for wiring, and weight it twice more than weight of chips on it (each one weights 1 usually)

[Jat Goodwin]

I suggest you find out if you can un-parent the chips. That way you can delete the palates and stuff. As for the adv dupe, That's just the shit you have to put up with when you use that tool. pyro-fire sorta has a fix for it, go look in his sig further up the page.

[Captain Maim]

Yeah actually an unparent / parenting tool would be just fine too. Then I could delete the offending plate and reweld it.

Roping stuff eh? I'll have to watch the demo, I'm not 100% sure what his idea involves and I wonder what other ways there are to deal with it. Frankly I just wish Adv Dup wouldn't do things like that in the first place. It's like the only way to save anything you do, so I wish it would save things better. It suffers from random spawn errors and mutant spawn duplications (if you dup the wrong dup of a good thing, you end up making all later dups mutated.)

I recovered the lines from the expression chip I was after from the adv dup text itself. However. I don't remember all the wiring I did and that's not something I know how to sight read from the file. It probably won't be so bad, most of everything is just stuffed into a few expression chips anyway. I'll just rebuild it and try some tricks to keep the chips from sinking into the mud.

I think that the 1x2 PHX plate weighs more than the chips... And I can't access the chips, which is the point of this post. So.. I'm not sure what that'll do but I suppose it's worth a shot to make my PHX very heavy and hope it drops below the chips.