Drive activity leds like AE1?
aadje93 opened this issue · 9 comments
Describe the feature
in AE 1 we had the B:gfxDrivesHighDef=true / false option to either enable or disable the drive activity leds. I realy liked those flashing leds in the disk racks making it look like servers in a tower with the controller being my "mainframe"
In the AE2 client config and server config (playing ATM8) i couldn't find this option anymore, can we still enable this? Or is it completely removed due to performance hits?
I'm playing on a pretty beefy computer + server so i would realy like those leds flashing again :)
Reasons why it should be considered
Immersion, was a great option on AE1
Additional details
in AE1 we had the config option B:gfxDrivesHighDef;
What exactly did this do? Did the cells that are being interacted with blink for a bit? Sounds pretty cool! 😄
Yes on AE1 the drives dod blink om activity, was pretty fun bit did cause some lagg on low spec server/cliënt thats why there was a config option to disable it. But on AE 2 it seems completely removed?
this option had a bad reputation for being an FPS killer in the past the way it was implemented, but practically yes the LED blinked and so did the cables
currently the LEDs indicate unpowered(dark/grey), free(green), item types full(yellow) or completely full (red)
maybe add a blue flash whenever items are moved in/out of the cell
but without knowing the implications to sync access and rendering, this sounds like it has to be either imprecise(mening it does not indicate each an every update) or may have an significant impact on the rendering performance
something like an additional but only temporary internal state that is set during tick when something has changed inside the drive and causes the rendering to update the LED for a certain time with blue for 100ms and then for at least 100-200ms show the actual state to not signalling permanently blue on an very active drive and limit the syncing with the simulation
OR
make an activity counter that indicates the number of accesses over a cerrtain time (as an moving average) and in rendering update the LED in some random pattern that is more flickery the higher the counter gets to decouple it even more but have a more active look
For me it 2as nice to see activity, so a average over time to prevent fps killing would be very nice.
currently the LEDs indicate unpowered(dark/grey), free(green), item types full(yellow) or completely full (red)
and blue for “some items and types, but not full on either”
yeah i know the current state, but my request/idea was bringing back the activity blinking from AE1 ;), doesnt have to be in sync. But just like a network port blinking like 1x/s if there "is" activity in the past 2 secs or so is a nice adition, and if i calculate correctly it shouldn't be more then 1/40ticks caclulation. (note bytes stored in disk, 40 ticks later check difference, difference >1 blink for 2x or so every 20 ticks)
currently the LEDs indicate unpowered(dark/grey), free(green), item types full(yellow) or completely full (red)
and blue for “some items and types, but not full on either”
well it's light blue, activity could be a more solid blue then, but yeah i totally forgot :D