While using Futurepack for an extended time now i noticed that it is very hard to tell if a calculation module is actually contributing to speeding up research or not. I played the Exoria pack and a lot of confusion and questions regarding Futurepack that came up on the Discord where related to the calculation module. What would be nice, is having some way of telling if a calculation module works or not, apart from the research going quicker (wich is sometimes hard to tell, without a reference point). I'm not talking exact numbers necessesarily but just a indication if working or not. I will suggest some ideas i came up with to make this work but i have no idea of how feasible they are to implement.

1. Having the lights on the module correspond to the working state of the module.
2. Have the researcher display the number of connected operational modules.
3. Give the module itself a gui that states it's capabilties and/or network state.
4. Give the module an error message, similar to how the machine notices you about burned chips, to indicate that something is not right and it is not providing a speed bonus to research.

These are some ideas how to improve the accesibilty of the research system and would make it easier for players to know if they are doing it right. The way it is now, there is a lot of guesswork involved wich makes research often more frustrating than it should be.

#495

The randomness is caused by 2 factors:

1. it shows the amount of answer packages it got since the last second, in larger network it can flicker between 0 and 3 or 1 and 2, if you have 3 calculation modules. If you have 4 the variations increase. As you can have multiple researches and calc modules in a single network it is not possible to disablay a constant number, as only some parts are calculated by each module and then syncronised with the main researcher. 2) If I increse the update amount it would need alot more bandwith to play, and I live in germany so even the current state is barrely playable for me.

about second suggestion... it actually displays it when you hover you mouse on NE bar while researching something, but in some weird way: the number randomly changes from 0 to total amount of calculation modules you have

I never noticed that. That is at least something but the randomness does not really help to see if all your modules are working. And it's not really intuitive I would say but that could just be me.

code sie this would be possible but then each researcher would display the same amount of calc modules connected and I dont know if this is better/worse for the end user. (Maybe we just display both :D)

Imo that would be better. From what i understand that number would be the maximum amount of calc modules aviable if only one researcher was researching something. There would have to be a clarification, that if you use multiple researches with the same calc modules that they split the work and can't work for both. That would be totally fine for me at least. All i want is some way of checking if calc modules are setup right or not. That would accomplish this.

So the way i understand it, there is no way to implement an easy way to get the working state of a calculation module given how the mod internally works. What about giving the calculation module something that says "Hey, therotically i can speed up research now".? You have to forgive me if those ideas are utter nonesence code-wise. I have only a very bare understanding in that topic and nothing specific on the working of this mod.

code sie this would be possible but then each researcher would display the same amount of calc modules connected and I dont know if this is better/worse for the end user. (Maybe we just display both :D)

If it would say "connected to $n calc modules", this would be a great help even if they are shared.