Turreus wrote:As someone who's been toying with circuits on here for a while, I feel the need to weigh in on this:
As it stands, circuitry has only two limits: the parts available to use, and the time/patience demanded to assemble such a complex machine. As I see it, circuitry NEEDS at least one of these things to avoid going completely off the rails; if you can create complex machines in seconds with a pasted code, then it'll either be abused every round by players seeking to annoy everyone else, or hyper-optimized powergamers aiming to trivialize as much of the station's tasks as possible (one of which I expect to be me).
If it comes down to it, and we can choose to remove one (and I do firmly believe it must ONLY be one) of these limitations: I'd rather have cooler parts to work with, and more ways for my machines to interact with and manipulate the world around them. I'd rather the tools be amazing in potential rather than accessibility.
and to be honest? with enough experience, you don't need a one-button solution to put together a circuit; even complex devices are just a few clicks from being put together once you understand how they work. Circuit cloning would just make things easier on the lazy folks, the ones who don't even understand how it works and just pastes the codes others make. Perhaps it's elitist of me to say that, but I do think some things should take actual effort to master.
That's about it from me.
I very highly doubt we are going to get new circuits anytime soon, the person who was porting newer parts to Polaris from TG stopped after they denied the cloning merge. Cloning is an integral part of the original design, and without it this version will never hold a candle to the original. Circuit cloning would very much make things easier for me, and I definitely understand how it works, I make my own designs. I spent many hours experimenting to learn how everything works. All I want is the ability to save my designs here.
And circuitry has a third limit which everyone seems to be dismissing, part cost. A single large machine could easily cost you 15 metal sheets, so you certainly can't mass produce stuff to do everything, especially if we made cloning cost more resources than hand assembly.