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Device network
A device network consist of a set of devices that share field accross each other. These devices must be connected through power and data transferring calbe (currently blue) and must have access to electricity to operate. Devices on the same network can share their field values with every other device on the network depending whether the other device's field is input or output.
Field type
Each device can have a set of device fields. These fields can be of 3 type: input, output or IO (input + output).
- Input fields are purely for controlling the device. The device itself does not changes the value of an input field but changes it's way of operation e.g.: ThrusterPowerLevel. The thruster increases or decreases it's current thrust based on what you set the ThrusterPowerLevel field to, but on it's own it will never change the value of the field.
- Output fields are the exact opposite. No matter what you write into these fields it will never affect how the device operates. Output fields are only for monitoring the devices' states. The devices periodically writes values into their output fields overwriting whatever was in there previously. An example is the "CurrentThrust" field of the thruster, you can not modify the thruster with that field, and whenever the thruster changes it's thrust level, it overwrites this field with the new value,.
- IO fields are the combination of both input and output. You can manually write a value in them and that will change the operation of the device but on the other hand some events within the device (e.g.: pulling a lever) will cause the device to also write a new value into the field.
Value propagation
Whenever a device changes it's own field's value, the change is propagated through the network. Every other device will update their fields of the same name to the new value. Updating the field through the Universal tool does not cause a change propagation but manual events (e.g.: pulling a lever) does. The propagation affects both input and output fields of every device on the same network.