On its own, this mod doesn't do much - you get a mediocre LCD that can display a bit of text, two sensors that hardly anyone seems to ever use, and some blue wires (the digilines themselves). But once you get some other mods that work with this, that's when the fun starts...
Mesecons Luacontrollers (and similar mods, like mooncontroller) are the use that's initially most obvious. Connect two or more of them with digilines, and now you can pass arbitrary data back and forth between them. Now you can use multiple Luacontrollers working together to get more I/O pins, have two machines that run independently but also communicate with each other, or even just simplify wiring.
But then there are the peripherals (digistuff, LED Marquee, digiterms, Nixie Tubes...) - add some of those and now you can wire up a Luacontroller to just about anything you want. Just run digilines over to where you want it and place a button, sensor, piston, text or graphical display, touchscreen, light, or whatever, and now your Luacontroller can control an entire machine, moving parts and all, with just one wire.
By now, I've built hundreds of electronic devices using digilines, some of which have upwards of 1000 lines of code in the Luacontroller and over 100 digilines devices connected. Even at this scale the wiring was still practical - try doing that with just mesecons.
I do have an elevator mod of my own that does some similar things (celevator), you're welcome to take some ideas for fixes from that if you want. I do think there's still a place for this Real Elevators mod to exist despite that - it's almost like a "light" version of it.
For the particular points you've mentioned, the way I've dealt with them, or how I suggest fixing them:
Crashing on shutdown: I assume what's going on is that it's trying to save an entity itself to mod storage or something. The mechanism I've found to work best is to use the static_save=false property on the entities, so that when they unload they just disappear. Then I can just save data about where they were supposed to be at, and spawn new ones when the game starts again. No need to try to find the old ones again, they're just gone.
Door animations: I've found this to work best/smoothest by setting velocity instead of position. If you have the velocity follow half of a sine wave, this tends to be rather visually appealing for doors, much more so than a constant speed.
Call queuing: Going in the order of closest calls is probably good enough. Selective collective (separate up and down hall buttons) would be a nice boost for realism, if you want that.
Falling through upon arrival: The easiest solution I've found for this is to just teleport the player to slightly above the floor right after the elevator stops. In the particular case of celevator there's a bit more logic to it than that (celevator has cars larger than one node and allows riding on top) and I also teleport the player twice, about half a second apart, just in case they still fall through the first time.
I think this mod manages a pretty good balance of realism vs. practicality for use in a survival environment. It's rather straightforward to set up (just place elevators where you want, connect them with shafts, and put a motor on top) and yet doesn't feel too overpowered.
For creative use it's a little more lacking - it still works fine, it's just less realistic than creative builds tend to usually go for.
Something I would like to see is smoother motion - the sudden start/stop can be rather disorientating, and the doors just switch between open and closed with no animation. It's something you get used to after a while, but sometimes when you're in an unfamiliar building, a ride on one of these can turn into just a few seconds of having no idea what's going on, then suddenly ending up on a different floor.
This is certainly an interesting attempt at an elevator mod - it tries much harder to be realistic than any of the others that were available at the time, and generally succeeds at that (the smooth motion is especially nice, and I haven't seen the animated hoist ropes in any other elevator mod yet).
Unfortunately there are a few issues that prevent it from being much use:
Shutting down the server with an elevator built results in a crash
Trying to ride up results in falling through upon arrival
Lots of debugging spam in the chat when anything happens
Queue system is a bit unrealistic - it serves calls in the order the buttons were pressed, instead of as it arrives at each floor
Despite all that, it's still a fun mod to play with in singleplayer sometimes.
I'm not personally maintaining it any more, but the mt-mods fork is being maintained, and I would suggest using that one instead unless you need the advanced touchscreen: https://github.com/mt-mods/digistuff
I did try contacting rubenwardy about having my listing replaced with one for theirs (with it being provided as an "update" for users of mine) somewhat recently and never received a response. I had previously declined an offer for this setup a few years ago, but circumstances have changed since then and it's now something I would like to see happen.
What do you mean? If you're talking about digilines channels (like for the traffic lights) then there's nothing to create, you just set the traffic lights to whatever digilines channel you want, connect them to some other device, and have that device send messages on that channel.
This is a quirk of unifieddyes that I haven't found a good way to work around - for some reason unknown to me, white is palette entry 240 and not 0. I could try making a custom palette, but unifieddyes is.... not pleasant to work with and I don't really want to do that again.
I do remember poking at it a while back and finding that it was actually in tenths of a second for some reason - that was ages ago though, so it may have been fixed by now for all I know.
I can't seem to replicate the NIC issue here - your code results in "test" being sent on "led3" just like it should.
Are you perhaps running this on an excessively slow connection that results in the timeout (I think 500ms) being hit?
This is a Lua script I've been using for this myself: https://gist.github.com/cheapie/e4edc2ea274750c235c984d972703803
Runs outside of the game, requires lua-imlib2, and takes one argument (the path to an image file). It'll then spew two things - the image in table format (as a digiscreen would need) and in the "packed" format for the "loadpacked" command of digistuff's GPU.
Do make sure you scale the image to whatever size you want ahead of time - it won't try to do that for you, and will process whatever resolution the input is whether that's what you want or not.
On its own, this mod doesn't do much - you get a mediocre LCD that can display a bit of text, two sensors that hardly anyone seems to ever use, and some blue wires (the digilines themselves). But once you get some other mods that work with this, that's when the fun starts...
Mesecons Luacontrollers (and similar mods, like mooncontroller) are the use that's initially most obvious. Connect two or more of them with digilines, and now you can pass arbitrary data back and forth between them. Now you can use multiple Luacontrollers working together to get more I/O pins, have two machines that run independently but also communicate with each other, or even just simplify wiring.
But then there are the peripherals (digistuff, LED Marquee, digiterms, Nixie Tubes...) - add some of those and now you can wire up a Luacontroller to just about anything you want. Just run digilines over to where you want it and place a button, sensor, piston, text or graphical display, touchscreen, light, or whatever, and now your Luacontroller can control an entire machine, moving parts and all, with just one wire.
By now, I've built hundreds of electronic devices using digilines, some of which have upwards of 1000 lines of code in the Luacontroller and over 100 digilines devices connected. Even at this scale the wiring was still practical - try doing that with just mesecons.
I do have an elevator mod of my own that does some similar things (celevator), you're welcome to take some ideas for fixes from that if you want. I do think there's still a place for this Real Elevators mod to exist despite that - it's almost like a "light" version of it.
For the particular points you've mentioned, the way I've dealt with them, or how I suggest fixing them:
I think this mod manages a pretty good balance of realism vs. practicality for use in a survival environment. It's rather straightforward to set up (just place elevators where you want, connect them with shafts, and put a motor on top) and yet doesn't feel too overpowered.
For creative use it's a little more lacking - it still works fine, it's just less realistic than creative builds tend to usually go for.
Something I would like to see is smoother motion - the sudden start/stop can be rather disorientating, and the doors just switch between open and closed with no animation. It's something you get used to after a while, but sometimes when you're in an unfamiliar building, a ride on one of these can turn into just a few seconds of having no idea what's going on, then suddenly ending up on a different floor.
This is certainly an interesting attempt at an elevator mod - it tries much harder to be realistic than any of the others that were available at the time, and generally succeeds at that (the smooth motion is especially nice, and I haven't seen the animated hoist ropes in any other elevator mod yet).
Unfortunately there are a few issues that prevent it from being much use:
Despite all that, it's still a fun mod to play with in singleplayer sometimes.
I'm not personally maintaining it any more, but the mt-mods fork is being maintained, and I would suggest using that one instead unless you need the advanced touchscreen: https://github.com/mt-mods/digistuff
I did try contacting rubenwardy about having my listing replaced with one for theirs (with it being provided as an "update" for users of mine) somewhat recently and never received a response. I had previously declined an offer for this setup a few years ago, but circumstances have changed since then and it's now something I would like to see happen.
What do you mean? If you're talking about digilines channels (like for the traffic lights) then there's nothing to create, you just set the traffic lights to whatever digilines channel you want, connect them to some other device, and have that device send messages on that channel.
This is a quirk of unifieddyes that I haven't found a good way to work around - for some reason unknown to me, white is palette entry 240 and not 0. I could try making a custom palette, but unifieddyes is.... not pleasant to work with and I don't really want to do that again.
I do remember poking at it a while back and finding that it was actually in tenths of a second for some reason - that was ages ago though, so it may have been fixed by now for all I know.
I can't seem to replicate the NIC issue here - your code results in "test" being sent on "led3" just like it should.
Are you perhaps running this on an excessively slow connection that results in the timeout (I think 500ms) being hit?
This is a Lua script I've been using for this myself: https://gist.github.com/cheapie/e4edc2ea274750c235c984d972703803
Runs outside of the game, requires lua-imlib2, and takes one argument (the path to an image file). It'll then spew two things - the image in table format (as a digiscreen would need) and in the "packed" format for the "loadpacked" command of digistuff's GPU.
Do make sure you scale the image to whatever size you want ahead of time - it won't try to do that for you, and will process whatever resolution the input is whether that's what you want or not.