Joerg,
I disagree with you on several points.
First, 90% of the time a conveyor system is a "pushed" system. What I mean by that is that the things on the system are usually pushed by the conveyor they're on, not by themselves. Therefore the things on the system follow the speed of the motor that is pushing them. If you want to change the speed of an item, you change the speed of the conveyor the item is on. If you have to do that in real life, why not have the simulation implement it that way as well? The only "standard conveyor" exceptions that I've seen so far is perhaps gravity flow conveyors and if you want to actually simulate slippage, but I think those are usually less critical elements of a simulation. So in implementing the new conveyor system where the items follow the speed of the conveyor, we are implementing to 90% of conveyor systems. The basic conveyor on the other hand implemented to 10% of cases, and for users to simulate the 90%, they often had to loop through the content of the conveyor to set item states whenever something changed. In the 10% of cases where items are actually self-driven, i.e. the motor is actually part of the item that is moving, I think the AGV module can cover a lot of that space (and if it doesn't, our development should be aimed to make it cover more). I think the AGV module and Conveyor modules split the space pretty well: if it's self-driven, use AGV's, if it's conveyor-driven, use conveyors. I do not regret the decision to make the new conveyor system conveyor-driven.
Secondly, we want people to use the new conveyor module, BY DEFAULT. So, when we asked ourselves, do we install the conveyor module by default, the answer was a definite yes. Then, do we leave in the old conveyors as well, so that new users will be presented with two completely different sets of conveyors to choose from in their library? To me the obvious answer to that is no, because we'd just be confusing new users. In addition, now that we have the new conveyor system, we want to push people to use the new system as much as possible, for tech support reasons. The fewer different types of objects that people are using (especially when their functionalities are redundant), the easier it is for our tech support staff to support our user base. So we want to get people up on the new stuff as quickly as possible. And I don't want to spend any more development time fixing bugs in the basic conveyor. For these reasons, I don't regret putting the new conveyor system in and removing the old conveyor system by default. Perhaps we're pushing our older users a bit fast, but that was our decision. Old users who have to have the old stuff can still tick the box in their preferences.
Regarding the look of the conveyors, I wanted to make the conveyors look awesome in render mode, with real rollers, not just a texture mapped onto a plane. The problem is, with FlexSim's current version of OpenGL, we can't use instanced rendering, which can significantly improve render speed for the rollers. Right now a big system in render mode will render pretty slow. So I decided to make it draw in "CAD" mode by default. Perhaps that will change once we get instanced rendering in. For now it is what it is. I personally think it looks clean and nice for laying a conveyor system out over a cad drawing. The only drawback may be that it's not consistent (although neither is our default flowitem box, or astar, or agv networks, or network nodes, or object connections...).
BTW, if you don't want the conveyor system to float above the grid, if you set the default conveyor type's leg height to 0, it will be put on the ground by default. Usually though I think you want it above the ground, because that's the way most conveyor systems are.
Last edited by Anthony Johnson; 02-18-2015 at 03:50 PM.
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