Suggestion: Light Bulbs

1st Official Post

    I'm not sure if this has been suggested before, but I think having EU powered light bulbs would be extremely useful for Industrial Craft. Image having a city full of buildings and all of the lights in the city are being powered by electricity made in a nearby power plant. Someone could also then sabotage the power plant. My original plan was to use Luminators; but I found out that they are completely broken in IC2 and you need to request power in order for them to turn on. So in theory, you would have to have a furnace or some other machines constantly running in order for your house to get light. The light bulbs would always be on if they have cables attached to them. In order to turn them off, you could use a piston to yank out the wire and turn off all the lights. An alternative method would be to use redstone + electricity to turn the light bulbs on and off.


    I think this is one massive feature of IC that is heavily needed. Anyone else think so?

    Quick question: Are you wanting a new Light Bulb instead of fixing the Luminator?


    A lighting system that uses electricity rather than being "free" would be nice, but I think the perception is that most players wouldn't use it since they would choose the free (Torch, Redstone, Glowstone) light source every time. Also, since they run on EU, and atm IC doesn't seem capable of sending fractions of EUs, it would have to use 1 EU per light. That seems way too expensive. Then there's the packet transmission calculations per tick for all those lights, and if you're talking about a city that could add a fair amount of work for the CPU/server.


    I imagine something like this: You have a Light Control Panel that's 1/2 block that can have up to X number of lights assigned to it. Then you have the lights themselves, which have a GUI that allows you to set a number, which has to match the number on a nearby Light Control Panel in order to operate. Lights must be placed within Y range of the assigned Light Control Panel. No wiring between the Light Control Panel and the lights is necessary. The Light Control Panel then must receive electricity via wire. This would then allow individual lights to have < 1 EU consumption because they all get added together at the Light Control Panel. The panel would require a minimum of 1 EU to operate any lights at all.


    Once that system was in place, then you could start looking at fancy features like replacing the on/off switch with a dimmer switch. It would be cool if it could be coded in such a way that the visible light could be reduced while still telling the game that the light level is high enough to prevent mob spawning. Add whatever cool ideas are desired to make it competitive with lights sources that don't require electricity.

    Awesome. The Luminator would not be useless because 1. They look like fluorescent lights. 2. They would take real energy. And on a server, you could disallow using torches in a house and only Luminators. Also, if the Luminators worked like I said in my original post, than no, I would not want them to be replaced by light bulbs. The only problem I can see with Luminators is, how do you tell them when to turn on? Also, 4 block ID's? Why not only 2? And yes, having a dimmer would truly be an amazing feature.

    could not just code the removal of lights in the house it does not work that way... Though I do like a idea of just disabling say all torches period and bring in new lights into the game or do what notch WAS suppose to do and see if you can make lights say burn out after 10 minutes of placing them.


    TBH I think IC is suppose to be about Lights and Power and when I found out theirs not a single light or a 10 times brighter light or something crazy I was like WTF hehe.

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    Quote from Kane Hart

    could not just code the removal of lights in the house it does not work that way... Though I do like a idea of just disabling say all torches period and bring in new lights into the game or do what notch WAS suppose to do and see if you can make lights say burn out after 10 minutes of placing them.

    Then how do you spelunk if you cant see your way out O.o

    this idea is i want to make suggest as well. something that works well with IndustrialCraft². like light blubs, mining lights, etc.
    something that works in your house theme.


    also LED lights too :D