Or maybe I want it the other way around?
If I remember correctly, with the Advanced Engineering skill level, you can make 1,500 steel with a full forge. I would prefer that it stop when there is no smeltable material, since smelting 30,000 iron takes more time than smelting 1,500 steel.
I would bet a large sum TFP will not add options that micromanage how the forge will work. So they would use a very simple algorithm. And I would bet a similarily large sum that algorithm would not stop if something is still crafting. I may be wrong, but I would assume this is what most players would want, because melting is not the reason someone uses a forge, the ultimate reason to use a forge is to craft something. If you disagree, so be it.
Well, adding 1 dialog is easier in my opinion than adding a complex condition. Why not open a dialog with the quantity when you right-click and by default there would be a figure of half a stack? I didn't like it, I entered the figure manually.
We simply have to disagree about the complexity. The condition itself can be easily written in one line, adding code for edge cases would probably add another handful of lines, nothing of it is complex. UI is manageable with a good toolkit, but there are a lot of moving parts. It has edge cases as well , you have to take into account that if that stack you are splitting is added to because it sits in the output slot of a forge you may have to change to total amount of the split while the dialog is open, always fun to handle and think of all those asychronous events.
The stopping algorithm is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Let's say I have a full forge, 6000 iron and 6000 clay are in the smelting slots. I decided to make 1 nail. I launched it. The nail was made, 1 piece of iron melted and became full. But there will be 1 piece short of clay in the forge and it cannot be melted, since it melts in 5 units. Such nuances must be taken into account.
Which stopping algorithm, the one where it stops after crafting is finished or stops when after crafting and melting is finished?
The only new event or result in this example is that the forge might have been stopped by the new algorithm and the "problem" sort of avoided at all. The piece of clay can't be melted but won't.
Apart from that your example is identical to simply having a full melt cue and the forge being full already. I don't see a difference whether 1 clay is stalling or 1000. You are correct that a turn-off-algorithm which only turns off when melting is complete needs to decide what to do in case the forge is full and still stuff in the melt cue. That is one edge cases and probably needs another conditional in the line where it is decided whether the forge is stopped, big deal.
And turning off the forge, whatever state it is in, seems a
very safe operations in all conditions, wouldn't you agree? After all, turning off is already done automatically when the fuel runs out or the player clicks on the on/off-switch, and after that it does harmlessly NOTHING each update tick.
n 1.0, a bug was already allowed with forges, with the Advanced Engineering skill pumped up, the maximum quantity is incorrectly calculated. In b336, this error has not yet been fixed. Judging by the fact that they could not fix it quickly, the calculation is already not so simple. And additional algorithms in the work will lead to even more bugs.
They have a huge bug list and some of those (for example) prevent console players from playing all together. There are a lot of high priority bugs from what I can see in General Support and you are concluding from the fact that this (IMHO) rather minor bug is not fixed that it is a hard to fix bug? Nope, I don't buy that.
