I'm absolutely in favor of increasing the limit as the difference of reading 1024 characters of code is fairly insignificant of reading 128000, assuming that it's properly compiled, anyway.

I think increasing the character count will make it easier for beginner Lua users

My two cents, but:

Strongly disagree with raising the character limit far enough to make any meaningful difference.

Right now, you can accomplish most reasonable things in an MC, and it maintains the feeling that you're writing for a Microcontroller, not just arbitrary PC code. It fits in the theme of the game; thinking outside the box to solve problems.

If the limit is removed, I wouldn't be surprised if within 2 months there are a number of "does everything" MCs that far surpass the rest, and destroy any motivation for actually writing your own - and any reason for anybody using logic nodes beyond the most trivial cases.

I also don't believe that many people are actually writing code that butts up against the 4K limit as much as it can sound in discord. A significant number of such scripts are poorly written (e.g. huge amounts of code duplication) and even fewer of them are actually minified effectively (which would surely be the logical thing to do, if this was a serious issue).

Similar to asking for more addon features all the time, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a feature requested by people who will simply move onto the next complaint rather than make use of it.

sry @nameous, but I have difficulties to accept your argument. The same argument could be used to remove or resist workshop, because it is full of better creations than you ever will manage to come up with. It is engineering game and if you are in it for engineering, nothing can force you to use creations of other people. It is up to you to decide what you do yourself and what parts of complexity outsource. For example I never had used workshop content to play as it was my own creation in any similar games, but rather used it as learning material and inspiration for ideas what else I could aim for. Also, this makes game more accessible for different kinds of people:

1. Not everyone wants to create here (grabs creations of others and focus on other stuff, like missions, fighting with other players, etc.. what ever drives their boat);
2. Even more players are not willing to code, no difference is that LUA or Visual scripting. These can spend tons of hours detailing builds, but do not want to be bothered with logic part (they rely on friends or workshop already);
3. Then there are people who play the game just for logic creation. If game has scripting support, these people tend to stop wasting time with visual scripting and eventually end-up diving into editors instead. It is natural that complexity of their creations will increase and the more complex problem you solve, there is less likelihood for one "perfect" solution to exist. It is just a reality.. Even if one single MC starts to dominate in usages, it is not bad thing at all as more people know how it works, can help each other and finally devs get something clear to optimize for.

I intentionally had listed different types of players within SW community. Because:

• "Right now, you can accomplish most reasonable things in an MC" - it is just what it is reasonable for you, your playstyle;
• "it maintains the feeling that you're writing for a Microcontroller, not just arbitrary PC code" - you again and your preferences. It is good news, that game has Visual Scripting, so you can have that feeling. I encourage continuing using it if that deepens your immersion. LUA questions do not interfere with that, you can ignore them like that does not exist at all.
• "I also don't believe that many people are actually writing code that butts up against the 4K limit as much as it can sound in discord." I can assure you that nobody writes over 4K as there is a limit. And discussion is about changing one number (4096) to different one, not introducing new feature like LUA support. So questions about amounts of people are much less relevant here. There are people who are happy and this question is about reducing frustration for even more people. Those who do not need - they are happy already, glad to hear that you are one of those. But, those who care and need (basically the 3rd group of players) - sadly face questionable limit;

<...>

<...>

Regarding code quality. That may be not obvious, but limits, especially of current size forces you to do copy/pasting. You can't waste characters for some generic program logic, you prepare isolated pieces of code which can work both stand alone or together and then selectively paste depending on needs of your creation. Duplication is unavoidable in such cases and it is direct consequence of limits, not another way around. 

Same applies to "even fewer of them are actually minified effectively (which would surely be the logical thing to do, if this was a serious issue)". You complain about badly written code and then point into not minified one. Good code is maintainable and understandable by everyone who attempts to read it. When you face issue and get stuck you want to be able to show it to others for ideas and help. You will minify it only in those cases when you absolutely need and before that will check can copy/paste approach help you to avoid limits or not. And you will do the least severe minification possible. So again, reality is kinda opposite and your argument does not really prove anything. The fact that there is not that much "effectively" minified code, just proves that community by copy/pasting things manages to navigate through limits quite well, not another way around as you imply... :shrug:

Final side-note regarding motivation. If the fact that someone is better than you demotivates you, you have an issue which very likely will turn your life into failure. Sooner you learn how to deal with that, sooner you will get on a path for success. Average people are called "average" because that is majority of us. Average people yield average results. Average results are average, not the best. It is quite average for average person to have difficulties to accept the fact that he is part of "average". When average person faces his "averageness" it is quite average to become creative about artificial obstacles for those who are better instead of focusing on own improvement by following good example. Do not be that average of averages. :) And I do not think your feelings and motivation related arguments should have impact on solutions for LUA limit question.

Back to the main topic and reason why I came here..

Here is my understanding why limits are needed. For SP there could be none of them at all - if you crash your game you are the only one to suffer. Different story when creations go into workshop or are used in multiplayer, where you have no control on what machines people will use them. (I have no idea where those scripts are being executed, server or client side, so am assuming the worst - everyone runs them). Resource hungry script may severely damage experience of other players and also contribute to bad reputation of game.

My main issue with current character count based limit is that it does not solve an issue above, but creates additional inconvenience for creators. Not amount of whitespace or length of variable names crash/slow down servers/computers, but computational load coming from scripts. I never had a chance to implement LUA support, so do not know what tools are available to analyze script which is going to be run. But limiting script's computational complexity - amounts of operations/function calls per tick could be much more valuable approach than simplistic character count limit. So:

1. if there are no script complexity safeguards in place already and it is possible, that is direction I would suggest to go, when that is done character limits could be removed all together, unless there are issues with editor itself (i.e. starts to freeze game if text buffer is too large. Really hope 4096 limit does not come from that :D)
2. if more advanced complexity safeguards are not an option:
3. at very least, please filter out whitespace duplicates and comments from char limit usage calculations. Effectively would extend limit and allow us to have more readable and understandable code. Also should be no challenge to implement.
4. consider increasing it to some objectively necessary max size. Like guys above had said, I do not think it is 4096 anymore. For comparing Space Engineers have it at 100k, but they do complexity analysis too and it is C# used as scripting language (not saying SW should switch, lol).
5. similar to a. just I have no idea how difficult it may be to implement without diving into more serious parsing of source code - count user variable and function names like they were of one character length. More extreme approach could be simpler - filter out comments and not necessary whitespaces, then count all words and punctuation signs then use resulting number for limits.. :) This could remove any need for minifying our scripts.

For example lets take default code in new LUA block (does practically nothing and already uses 600/4096, but is good resource to learn):

If you apply my suggestion 2.a, code above would be interpreted as 212/4096 (3 times difference)

If you apply extreme version of 2.c it's limit use would be seen as 99/4096 (without not necessary whitespace removal between function arguments, around operators and assignment signs) - 6 times difference, or 82/4096 without unnecessary whitespace - 7 times difference. Big difference and I think it reflects reality much more than current implementation and helps to maintain

code in comprehendible form.

I Agree with Krienas here, writing efficient Lua is good but having to split it over multiple scripts isn't and will make the game lagg more then having a bigger a character limit. So instead of having a standard limit on execution time (currently 1 second) I suggest the following:

• Make the character limit way higher (64K).
• Add a slider to the general settings tab to change execution time from 200ms to 2000ms, which should also be able to be used in servers. (note: make an exception for the first tick)
• Lua library block, functions defined in this microcontroller block should be able to be accessed by all Lua blocks in the micro controller, however this Lua library block shouldn't have any inputs/outputs.
• The current execution time limit is max time, not average. So instead of basing it of max time there should be another slider in the general tab (again also in server config) limiting the average execution time of the last 10 seconds. (note: make an exception for the first tick)

This issue has been automatically closed as implemented due to a related developer task being marked as live in milestone 2024-12-18 RELEASE: MINOR UPDATE v.