Make MechComp printers subject to jamming, like regular printers.

[Grek]

Printers used to be able to generate lots and lots of printouts. If moused over or allowed to catch fire, they would cause massive lag. To fix this, printer jamming was introduced: there's a small chance on every print job that the printer will jam and stop working. It can be manually fixed by someone attending it, but if it isn't fixed, further print jobs break the printer completely.

MechComp Thermal Printers can now print out lots of thermal paper all at once. It's causing the same problems for the same reasons. I see no reason not to port over the same solution.

[69andahalf]

But hasn't lag caused by this been fixed in the most recent version, so why would this be necessary?

[Vitatroll]

I think this was brought up by a round where a dude hooked up 10-20 thermal printers to the loafer. I actually got d/c'ed, so I don't know the after effects.

Stuff like that is really more of a loafer (and people, but I've done worse) problem than a thermal printer problem. Though having that many run on a single tile is kinda silly. Maybe have them check to see if there's another printer on that tile? One printer per tile shouldn't really lag the server. At least it never has for me.

[Roomba]

As mentioned, it's the same problem with the regular printers: once they catch fire, you have a never-ending series of paper fires and smoke clouds being produced non-stop, and the only way to clear it all is to disconnect them one by one. I can't imagine running them all with the loafer, itself a lag generator, is helping much either, even with the new lag-free server.

[Noah Buttes]

Personally, I love the idea of using thermal printers to fuel the loafer. It'd be a shame to see such a creative use of mechanical components be put out of commission due to concerns over lag.

The fire thing is annoying as shit though. Maybe make thermal paper fire resistant or something.

[Erik]

As mentioned, it's the same problem with the regular printers: once they catch fire, you have a never-ending series of paper fires and smoke clouds being produced non-stop.

Yes, this itself is quite bad because you literally keep spamming the delete queue with useless crap, not to speak about your FPS dying from the smoke.