Autocrafters cannot accept item groups in their crafting grid, for example leaves, tree, wood, and many other groups which work naturally with crafting guides and user interfaces. (Listed on GitHub)
Injectors and tubes are not smart, and do not provide any versions that are smart which don't require extensive digilines detectors and Lua, which can know to stop pushing items if the next-in-line storage or tubeline are inoperable or full. It can even be lazy and deactivate the line on single spillage.
Injectors erroneously push items into the wrong containers, possibly skipping or losing instructions.
Tube routing is not intelligent, causing backups, spills, breakages, empty machines, and other problems. There should be automatic load-balancing with a toggle to select the old random switching or splitting/ round-robin.
Vacuum and other tube segments cannot properly interact with source liquids and flowing blocks, or falling blocks.
Large or complex constructs using pipeworks are known to have a major impact on server performance, and which some objects become out of sync or break when flooded. Abstracting the systems out of physical gamespace, and generalizing, network/ route mapping, scheduling, balancing, backgrounding, and offloading may have a positive impact on any server that runs this. Additional ways to allow servers the freedom to use pipeworks may include removing or reducing active objects and activities, reducing the thrashing of registered entities, simplifying and optimizing looping scripts, and scheduling all calculations while accurately tracking simulation speed and correcting for hiccups.
There are probably other common-use-case issues as well that are intuitively and reasonably desired which other players have discovered.
Injectors and tubes are not smart, and do not provide any versions that are smart which don't require extensive digilines detectors and Lua, which can know to stop pushing items if the next-in-line storage or tubeline are inoperable or full.
There's sorting tubes that do not require Lua or digilines, for most generic use cases these are often good enough. Lua tube on other hand detects stacks and can be used to route stacks programmatically but does require writing Lua code for tube.
Tube routing is not intelligent, causing backups, spills, breakages, empty machines, and other problems. There should be automatic load-balancing with a toggle to select the old random switching or splitting/ round-robin.
Load balancing can be done pretty well, it is not round-robin but random. Random distribution however is pretty much uniform, in one of my tests some about 10k stacks ended up exactly even to both sides of T-junction created using regular tubes. Teleport tubes are another option for load balancing.
Large or complex constructs using pipeworks are known to have a major impact on server performance, and which some objects become out of sync or break when flooded.
While mod is pretty heavy this is problem mostly if tube system is not designed well, large and complex systems can be done without causing major impact on server performance but it is also true that tube system can cause large problems with server performance if system is not designed well enough.
For public servers where anyone can build anything some monitoring system or restriction mods (like stack TTL in tubes) is must when large and complex systems come into play. Definitely could be improved.
Injectors erroneously push items into the wrong containers, possibly skipping or losing instructions.
This should probably be bug report and added to pipeworks issue tracker, funny enough there was some discussion about this just few days ago :)
I think this review was very good pointing out many things that should be added to user manual and it seems that there probably should also be some kind of server admin manual / cheatsheet.
Autocrafters cannot accept item groups in their crafting grid, for example leaves, tree, wood, and many other groups which work naturally with crafting guides and user interfaces. (Listed on GitHub)
Injectors and tubes are not smart, and do not provide any versions that are smart which don't require extensive digilines detectors and Lua, which can know to stop pushing items if the next-in-line storage or tubeline are inoperable or full. It can even be lazy and deactivate the line on single spillage.
Injectors erroneously push items into the wrong containers, possibly skipping or losing instructions.
Tube routing is not intelligent, causing backups, spills, breakages, empty machines, and other problems. There should be automatic load-balancing with a toggle to select the old random switching or splitting/ round-robin.
Vacuum and other tube segments cannot properly interact with source liquids and flowing blocks, or falling blocks.
Large or complex constructs using pipeworks are known to have a major impact on server performance, and which some objects become out of sync or break when flooded. Abstracting the systems out of physical gamespace, and generalizing, network/ route mapping, scheduling, balancing, backgrounding, and offloading may have a positive impact on any server that runs this. Additional ways to allow servers the freedom to use pipeworks may include removing or reducing active objects and activities, reducing the thrashing of registered entities, simplifying and optimizing looping scripts, and scheduling all calculations while accurately tracking simulation speed and correcting for hiccups.
There are probably other common-use-case issues as well that are intuitively and reasonably desired which other players have discovered.
There's sorting tubes that do not require Lua or digilines, for most generic use cases these are often good enough. Lua tube on other hand detects stacks and can be used to route stacks programmatically but does require writing Lua code for tube.
Load balancing can be done pretty well, it is not round-robin but random. Random distribution however is pretty much uniform, in one of my tests some about 10k stacks ended up exactly even to both sides of T-junction created using regular tubes. Teleport tubes are another option for load balancing.
While mod is pretty heavy this is problem mostly if tube system is not designed well, large and complex systems can be done without causing major impact on server performance but it is also true that tube system can cause large problems with server performance if system is not designed well enough. For public servers where anyone can build anything some monitoring system or restriction mods (like stack TTL in tubes) is must when large and complex systems come into play. Definitely could be improved.
This should probably be bug report and added to pipeworks issue tracker, funny enough there was some discussion about this just few days ago :) I think this review was very good pointing out many things that should be added to user manual and it seems that there probably should also be some kind of server admin manual / cheatsheet.
Lots of very good information, thank you for replying!