So, I am getting annoyed at my income fluctuating, due to belt only producing every second or third tick, but the income updating every tick.
I think the solution is to only update it every sixth ticks, which is a multiple of all three possible belt speeds, and so should ensure a more smooth income.
Hadron collider has a processing time of 4. That’d put it out of sync too.
I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not, but in that case you’d need to change it to 12 which has just about everything (except 5) as a factor.
But then wouldn’t that mean that you’d only get income updates 2-3 times a month? :-/
I think that instead of daily profit, it could be an average daily profit, using last 5-10 days. It’s a middle-point betwen updating everyday and updating each X days.
Actually it is the avg profit at present. Tim said in his latest vlog that it is a 3-day moving average. Problem is that increasing it (5 day or 6 day moving avg)means slower feedback to the player, i.e if I build a new line or make some changes it will take me more time to see if my profits have gone up or down.
I have been contemplating this for the best part of 3 months. XD
You could use a “running average” over the last 12 days to make it fluctuate less. Keep track of 12 days of income in a queue of max length 12. Display the average over this queue. Each day add the new income to the queue. Once it’s 12 long, also remove the oldest value. Production cycles with length 2, 3, 4 will no longer cause fluctuations. Note how longer cycles can be artificially created, but there’s little economic incentive to do so.
A running average of l=12d will lag behind actual profits currently made by 6 days.
There’s also the concept of an ‘exponential running average’, yet this only works accurately with positive numbers. The idea of the algorithm is to each day, multiply the running estimate by 11/12, then add 1/12th of the income for that day.