RP managers problem..help!

[joseff amador]

tldr: Extra items that are "returning" to the default manager are not actually making it into the manager's chest. They just vanish once they return to the manager. Yes, the manager is set to "hold any amount of items" and yes, I put a single item in the manager's GUI to mark which kind of item it can hold.
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Long version:

Hi all. I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp of how the managers work, yet I am having a strange problem.

Manager A is set to "hold any amount of item" mode, and in the interface I set 1 charcoal. The manager is facing a chest that i keep stocked with charcoal. So far so good.

A pneumatic tube is running from Manager A to Manager B, who is set to "keep a certain # of items" mode, with 10 charcoal in its interface. This manager is connected to a Cargo Manager (Railcraft) that is set to provide charcoal to the passing cart which visits every few minutes.

When the Cargo Manager feeds the cart, manager B successfully requests charcoal until the inventory is satsified (10), and all the extra charcoal that was pulled into the pipe eventually makes it way back to Manager A.

Here is where the problem is.

The extra charcoal that re-enters Manager A does not actually make it into the "charcoal stock" chest. It just vanishes from existence once it hits the manager. I have sat there and watched dozens of charcoal coming into manager A, with the chest open (so that I can see its contents) and the incoming charcoal never actually shows up in the chest inventory.

1) Yes both managers are properly powered
2) Yes Manager A is set to "hold any amount of items" with a single charcoal in its inventory

Any clues?

 

[trunksbomb]

Can you replicate this problem in a controlled environment? I don't see a reason why the items would just disappear given your description.

Try it with just two managers, no Railcraft stuff. I'll do the same unless someone else has some insight.

Edit: Hm, happened to me as well. Emeralds in a priority 0 chest stocked to just keep emeralds. Manager with priority 1 set to keep 10 emeralds in stock. When I remove the initial 10 emeralds from the priority 1 chest, a few sets of emerald get sucked into the tubes as expected and the rest bounce back after the priority 1 chest has its share.. but they don't all make it back!

Edit 2: Actually, they're just getting stuck in the manager. If I take the emeralds out of the priority 1 chest, the backstuffed emeralds come back into the tubes.. however, they don't make it back into the chest. Breaking the manager, however, does not release them into the world..

A manager has two sets of lights, one facing the inventory it's managing and the other facing the I/O. When the inventory-facing lights are lit, it has fulfilled its item quota in that inventory. When the other set is lit, there's a backstuff in that manager. Removing items manually from the destination manager will cause them to come back through the tubes. Quickest way to clear that would be to change the destination to accept all of the item (charcoal) and watch it flood out of the lower priority manager.

 

[joseff amador]

So the manager must have an internal buffer that is holding the excess returning items. That seems odd given that it's job is to let the items back into the chest.

 

[trunksbomb]

I agree, the expected functionality would be to put the excess items pulled from its attached inventory back into the attached inventory, not backstuffing the manager. Unless we're both doing something wrong here, the manager seems oddly.. non-managerial.

If you've got a mixed chest containing items needed to be crafted with manager attached, and another manager set to pull items from this chest.. it will pull a few stacks of the first item, then a few stacks of the second, etc. This is all fine and dandy for the first recipe, but the backstuffed items will only come out in the order they were sent back, meaning not all of the items will leave the mixed-item manager.

 

[joseff amador]

It's almost like you need a 3rd, lower priority manager on the system to receive the excess items. I was under the impression that the manager could fulfill the role of both supplier and receiver.

 

[trunksbomb]

That would be my impression as well, but it seems to not be keen on receiving the very items it tried to supply to another manager.

Here's a very unexpected behavior..

Add one tube between the managers that leads to nowhere. Just drop it on there, anywhere. The items will no longer get backstuffed, but will be properly fed back into the attached inventory. It seems like it'll only function properly if the items have to consider more than one path. That is, only if your system is non-linear.

 

[joseff amador]

Wow...that did work.

And it was much simpler than the solution I set up Had a normal chest attached anywhere on the pipe between Manager A and Manager B. The overflow ended up in the chest, which I then used a transposer to pump the items out of it back into the original chest.

adding a single tube was much easier! Looks funny though

 

[trunksbomb]

Seems like an oversight in the code for managers. There's no reason a simple linear path between two managers would not be a valid setup. I guess, however, that most of Eloraam's testing was done in larger, multiple-manager situations where this scenario cannot happen.

 

[joseff amador]

Seems like she should be made aware of this.

 

[MilConDoin]

Someone else said in another thread, that setting the managers to IDs different to 0 and 1 worked for them, e.g. 0 and 2.

 

[jumpfight5]

I think it's 1 and 2, I'm somewhat sure the bug is with 0.