Hey,

First of all, thanks for putting this together and continuing to work on it. I'm a programmer as well and I know how much time and effort these projects require. The fact you do all of that for free is really amazing.

I love the idea of this mod and I was playing around with it to see if it fits my needs. Like other users have mentioned, there are some issues with these "unrecoverable errors" which cause the entire game to crash. I just wanted to post and mention that this is kind of a deal-breaker for me, as well as (I suspect) many others. If it's at all possible I wanted to suggest that you to put in some kind of global try/catch to detect and avoid these crashes before they occur. Basically, if a user tries to apply some new formula that causes an error, the mod should revert the combinator to its prior state (or leave it unchanged), give the user some kind of "general error" message, and close the dialogs.

Right now it takes me about 1 minute to load all of my mods, so along with save data and UI interaction I'm looking at 1-2 minutes of turnaround per mistake while I'm configuring one of these combinators. That can easily result in 30+ minutes of loading screens if I'm trying to setup something complex, or even if I'm just trying to learn the basics. Most of the time this will drive new users away immediately.

Like I said before, I really do appreciate all the work you're putting in here, for free, so I hope this comes off as constructive criticism and not just a complaint. I've never worked with Factorio mods before but I'm going to take a look at your github and see if I can make a pull request to address this change I'm suggesting. Hopefully I can contribute, but I wanted to give you this feedback in case you're interested.

Thanks for your work and good luck with the mod! :)

Hi, thank you for reporting this and sorry for taking so long to respond.

Sadly this mod is not high prioritized by me at the moment, but I am considering doing a big re-make of it that should be more intuitive to use.

Anyway, can you tell me exactly how to reproduce the problem? If so I should be able to find motivation to fix it.

Pull requests are also welcome :)

I have just uploaded Advanced Combinator 0.18.1 which should at least fix some of the possible errors. In order to fix more, I would like to know how to reproduce them.

One place I've seen a lot of crashes is trying to use the 'Each' signals. For example using 'Each' on the output. Like a simple 'Each * 5' = Each, as you can do with an arithmetic combinator. I'm guessing these combinators just can't loop over each/any/every type signals? If they don't work, maybe check for them and show an error instead of crashing.

I was trying to make something like, output every signal where the value on the red matches the value on the green. But I'm guessing that's impossible. Since you only seem to have 24 output slots/indexes I'm guessing that those things are a no-go.

@gridstop How are you trying to send the 'each' signals? Are you trying to edit the "code" manually to do it? If so, that's not possible.

If not, please let me know what your Advanced Combinator code looks like.

I am considering a big rewrite of this mod to better support such things you are asking for (when red matches the value on the green).

All combinators always have a limited number of slots they can use (some mods might have combinators that have a huge number of sluts, but it's never "infinite"), that can be "solved" by just applying 24 outputs and ignoring the rest (for example, the 24 with the highest numbers).