What's new in IC2... a small Dev and Change Blog

Update News:

add a new Item : Refined Iron Shaft

Balance Change Rotors:
make all Rotors more expensive and complex for their level

Rotor(Steel) need now a Shaft(iron) so 9 Iron Ingot expensive

Rotor (Carbon) now need a Shaft(Refined Iron) so 9 Refined Iron Ingot expensive

this first change is necessary to make Rotor(Steel) useful more changes on Rotor (Carbon) will follow

last but not least a a smal Buff for Slag make it lees pointless

Bug Tracker Fix of the Day:

fixed IC2 Fluid Reactor does not form railcraft incompatability@tomcat

Update News:

add a new Item : MFSU Upgrade kit can use to Upgrade MFE and Chargepad(MFE) to MFSU Size.

Balance Change Rotors:

Rotor(Iron) need now a Shaft(iron) so 9 Iron Ingot expensive

Rotor(Wood) need now 1 Iron Ingot but Buff Runtime from 1h --> 3h

Bug Tracker Fix of the Day:

Crash when taking a crystal memory out of the scanner.@Diti

Today only briefly RL steals my time
working at a way to move this Post to Wiki "Blog" but have never worked with it..take time to understand it

I've spent the last few days on refining the IC2-ex energy net, getting almost to a point where I can switch the simulation model to real current+voltage.

IC2 has been using real electric circuit analysis with a resistor network representing the in game world since the beginnings of IC2-ex. So far it simply used ideal current sources with the current set to the amount of energy, effectively modelling the energy flow proportionally to the current as calculated by the analysis. Since current doesn't ever vanish and always goes somewhere, such a system is lossless. The actual loss in electricity comes from voltage drop, which is dependent on the current and resistance of a path.

The final design will be internally using voltage and current, power (EU/t) through voltage * current and energy (EU) through power * time. Current is hidden from the user, but it can be easily calculated by power / voltage. Voltage is following the standard tiers, i.e. (8,) 32, 128, 512, etc. A transformer will be able to take e.g. 512V 1A and output 128V 4A, which means that the output and input power is identical, but the higher current causes more loss. We may decide on scaling the values up some for more industrial type dimensions.

Recent developments added tracing the current+voltage back to the individual blocks, thus allowing the eu reader and eventually explosions/melting/shocking. The first simulation pass only calculates the voltage at every intersection and endpoint on an optimized copy of the grid, another pass was needed to correctly determine voltage + current for every single tile. With the new EU Reader GUI Thunderdark built around my backend code you can easily measure the energy flow for every energy source, sink or conductor.

Another more internal feature was being able to reject excess energy from blocks, which the api specifies as supported, but wasn't implemented yet in IC2-ex. Blocks like the Energy-O-Mat use this to precisely request a certain amount of energy.

After that the concept for simulating how energy sources could be properly as linear (=non ideal) sources while still being cache friendly for low CPU usage and without significant limitations for the user has been finalized and implemented, including the formulas to calculate the various parameters. It's now mostly a matter of flipping a compile time switch to get voltage and loss, some testing and possibly tweaking excluded.

The very new IC2-ex build 606 fixed some nasty bugs in creating and modifying the graph representing the energy net. It also improved support for multi blocks like the reactor and connections to multiple sides of the same block by merging them nicely. The following picture shows the internal representation of a simple non-optimized enet grid from connecting a nuclear reactor on 3 sides to a mfe over a few cables. The nodes are blocks, the edges the connections between them and the numbers at the edges represent the resistance.

There's a huge amount of trickery and complex code behind creating, managing and using those graphs, but it's also very powerful and efficient for what it does.

in the next time less updates by me.. start redesigne crop systen and it take all my dev time