[IC2 Exp][1.6.4][V1.118] Advanced Power Management V1.2.85-IC2_1.118

  • It seems the HV has the wrong display shows like 10mil energy but when full it and charge 1 empty crystal it drains like almost all of it.. Its really strange hehe.

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  • Looks like I need to disable wrenchable on the Emitters as well. I need to look at what IC2 is doing when a wrench is used to remove a block. It's not using the standard blockRemove callback because it's not invalidating the tile entity.


    Also, as to the HV bench, I've tested this and it does indeed display the correct energy. Did you have a bunch of overclockers in the upgrade slot? Every overclocker increases energy use for charging exponentially by 50% while increasing the charge rate exponentially by 30%.

  • Just a heads up, I'm working on an exciting new feature for the Charging Bench that should really take this to the next level. I'm really excited about it and can't wait to show all of you once I get it working! :) No ETA yet. Coming with this new version are a couple of bug fixes as well.


    Coming in the next version:
    Energy Storage upgrade effects now limited to 64. You can place more than that in but they won't do anything. This fixes an overpowered storage amount on the HV bench of 207 million EU as well as fixing the battery meter integer wrapping and causing the meter to stop displaying.
    Wrenches will (temporarily) no longer work on both the Charging Bench and Emitter blocks. This change is necessary to avoid issues with block removal not removing the underlying tile entity or removing the bench from the energy net. You can just use a pickaxe to remove the bench for now.

  • Looks like I need to disable wrenchable on the Emitters as well. I need to look at what IC2 is doing when a wrench is used to remove a block. It's not using the standard blockRemove callback because it's not invalidating the tile entity.


    Ah, I had seen your note about wrenching the bench, but not the emitters. It's good that they're the same bug, since it's one fix instead of two :D



    Also, as to the HV bench, I've tested this and it does indeed display the correct energy. Did you have a bunch of overclockers in the upgrade slot? Every overclocker increases energy use for charging exponentially by 50% while increasing the charge rate exponentially by 30%.


    I would just like to independently confirm that my HV bench appears to function correctly.



    Just a heads up, I'm working on an exciting new feature for the Charging Bench that should really take this to the next level. I'm really excited about it and can't wait to show all of you once I get it working! No ETA yet. Coming with this new version are a couple of bug fixes as well.


    Oooh, mysteries abound! Will this new feature be in the next version, or some later version?

  • The new feature, barring any unforeseen complications, will be in the next update. The wrench bug is because I (incorrectly) assumed that the IC2 API would remove the block when wrenched in a way that got onBlockDestroyedByPlayer for the block called. I have to track down what IC2 is doing so I can make sure that wrenches work correctly but I'm focused on the new feature for now. The Charging Bench can be removed with any pickaxe as it is; wrench support was more to just be consistent. The wrench drop rate is 100%.

  • As said. When testing with the Buildcraft prerelease, none of the pipes would connect to the charging benches. They don't seem to recognize it as a valid inventory.


    MC ver: 1.3.2
    IC 1.106
    BC 3.2.0pre7
    Forestry 1.5.0.2
    Railcraft 6.2.0
    Logistics Pipes 0.5.1pre8c

  • Updated posted! Please let me know what you guys think about the new features and of any bugs that you might uncover, or even just to say it works perfectly! The download in the opening post was updated.


    10/02/2012
    1.3.2.B3: Removed wrench support for now, use a pickaxe, or even your fists work.
    Added direct support for player armor slots in the GUI and added texture changes to show the charge level on the sides of the block.
    Limited energy storage upgrades to 64. You can add more but they will be ignored. It made no sense for the HV Charging Bench to allow over 200 million of EU to be stored.


    Known bugs: If you spawn armor in creative mode, then using the survival inventory tab from creative mode, shift-click it into the creative armor slots, then open the GUI of a Charging Bench, the armor disappears. This does not happen if you manually drag and drop the armor from the survival inventory tab onto the proper armor slot. From everything that I can tell this is a bug in vanilla Minecraft. It does not happen in survival mode so it isn't as serious as it could be, but you've been warned. I will continue to work on finding a fix for this as it's still annoying.


  • This is actually an issue with Buildcraft and is fixed in a pull request that was merged in after BC 3.2.0pre7 was released. That said, I may change my code to extend BlockContainer instead of just block to possibly avoid this kind of thing with other mods.


    https://github.com/SirSengir/BuildCraft/pull/293

  • Great work reviving this great mod.


    However your "slight" modifications pretty much ruined the Charging bench for me, as the two reasons I used it were:


    a) it was much cheaper
    b) it didn't have the stupid energy storage.


    To a): you are right, it may have been overpowered, however the storage ability of the mfu/mfsu is the thing that should be expensive, not the charging ability. I mean, I can produce HV, but I can't use it to charge tools without a building giant battery??
    And to b): I don't like playing with battery boxes, that are highly unreallistic IMHO, instead I try to create auto-balancing generator arrays, permanently-on generators etc... With the original charging bench it was possible, but not with this one (Ok, I could create a setting that activates splitter cable once item detectors count off the items that were put inside...). Basically a HV charging bench "steals" 10 million EU that I am never going to see again, unless it is used as a regular battery.


    That's why I am asking you, if it were possible to add an option (through config or creating a second set of benches) to reduce the capacity to minimum (I would imagine that would be one packetsize), possibly making the benches cheaper in the process.


  • Thank you for your feedback. Let me see if I can elaborate on the thought process that went into designing the new bench to work the way it does before addressing your suggestion.


    With the old bench, it would charge one item at a time, not all items in it at the same time. It also had an internal storage of EU, much more than one packet size worth, and if you wanted to actually charge up your items fast, you'd have to add a lot of energy storage upgrades just to get it to store enough internally so it could charge those at the tools fast. Otherwise, it was limited to how fast you could dump energy into it in real time.


    With the new charging bench, you can dump in energy and store it for charging use later. The bench is capable of pulling out as much EU a tick from internal storage as needed to maintain the charge rate defined by the item * the overclock rate until the internal energy reserves are depleted. With the modifications you are asking for, you would be required to input, in real time, that much EU a tick, if you wanted to maintain the same charge rate. A good example is charging up a full suit of quantum armor. With 5 overclockers, you'll charge up all four pieces in about 15 seconds and spend just over 8 million EU doing it. That's a EU/T of over 26,000. With an internal storage of one packet worth of EU, you'd need to provide over 26 thousand EU/T input into the bench to maintain that charge rate.


    I don't think of the HV bench as "stealing" 10 million EU that you'll never see again. I see it as storing 10 million EU so it's ready to recharge that suit of quantum armor, nano armor, or other tools. It's not wasting EU sitting there, it doesn't ask for more from the Energy Net than it can take in and it never uses any EU unless it's actually charging an item. If you don't put any overclockers into it it won't waste a single EU of power. Anything that goes into the charging bench will come back out into items placed into it to charge. The faster charge rates and the ability to charge up to 12 items at a time absolutely require a sizable internal buffer of energy because it simply isn't practical to supply it with the kind of input needed in real time.


    Now, all that said, if you are set on wanting a version that only contains a single packet size (32, 128, 512) of internal storage, I don't see that adding that feature would be a problem. I can make it a configuration file option and add three new recipes for those reduced benches that do not require the batbox, MFE or MFSU as a component. There are plenty of meta values left on the blockID this uses so that won't be an issue. I'm not sure how well it'll charge up multiple items at a time though since right now, it dumps one tick worth of power (adjusted by the overclock charge rate) into the first item, then moves to the next in the list, until it either runs out of internal storage power, or reaches the end of the storage. That all happens per tick. With a greatly limited internal storage, I'm not sure if it'll charge anything faster than 32, 128 or 512 eu/t. I can see it charging up multiple low EU/T items (such as tools), but things like quantum and nano armor, I'm not so sure. I'll have to do some testing.


    Let me know if you still want the changes you described and if so, I'll get to work on an update with those changes. No promises on how quickly that will be out, though I'll try to get it done within a week.

  • Well you are right that if the storage isn't high enough, fast-charging would fail totally. I don't know if it's currently possible to drain energy from multiple sources at once, but if it was, setting the buffer to packetsize*16 (16x the maximum overclocker rate, or isn't it?), should work (it would result in 512,2048 and 8192 storage sizes, which still fine), while it would require the engineer to provide the energy in real-time (as other machine do when highly overclocked)

    I don't think of the HV bench as "stealing" 10 million EU that you'll never see again. I see it as storing 10 million EU so it's ready to recharge that suit of quantum armor, nano armor, or other tools. It's not wasting EU sitting there, it doesn't ask for more from the Energy Net than it can take in and it never uses any EU unless it's actually charging an item. If you don't put any overclockers into it it won't waste a single EU of power. Anything that goes into the charging bench will come back out into items placed into it to charge. The faster charge rates and the ability to charge up to 12 items at a time absolutely require a sizable internal buffer of energy because it simply isn't practical to supply it with the kind of input needed in real time.

    That depends on how much energy you operate with. If I ran a nuclear reactor, it's no problem to just fill it up and then recharge at will. Lately I tend to play with low-energy setups, running just several machines and basic tools, I would never use up 10 million energy on tools... not in the entire lifetime (we restart worlds relativelly often).


    On the other hand, both LV and MV benches store relatively little energy, considering what one might want to charge (40k vs 60k batpack, 600k vs 200+300 laser+LP), the only problem is the HV bench. (Which I never use, so you can propably ignore my entire suggestion :))


    However, it could still be useful if it was cheaper... That way, one could charge items, as fast as he can provide energy in real-time. That, of course, would be much weaker than the current charging bench, as it wouldn't be able to charge more than one item with no overclockers. However as this is quite a balance-changing feature, it would be up to you if you wanted to implement it.

  • Well you are right that if the storage isn't high enough, fast-charging would fail totally. I don't know if it's currently possible to drain energy from multiple sources at once, but if it was, setting the buffer to packetsize*16 (16x the maximum overclocker rate, or isn't it?), should work (it would result in 512,2048 and 8192 storage sizes, which still fine), while it would require the engineer to provide the energy in real-time (as other machine do when highly overclocked) That depends on how much energy you operate with. If I ran a nuclear reactor, it's no problem to just fill it up and then recharge at will. Lately I tend to play with low-energy setups, running just several machines and basic tools, I would never use up 10 million energy on tools... not in the entire lifetime (we restart worlds relativelly often).


    On the other hand, both LV and MV benches store relatively little energy, considering what one might want to charge (40k vs 60k batpack, 600k vs 200+300 laser+LP), the only problem is the HV bench. (Which I never use, so you can propably ignore my entire suggestion :))


    However, it could still be useful if it was cheaper... That way, one could charge items, as fast as he can provide energy in real-time. That, of course, would be much weaker than the current charging bench, as it wouldn't be able to charge more than one item with no overclockers. However as this is quite a balance-changing feature, it would be up to you if you wanted to implement it.


    In the world I'm running right now, I have two 100 eu/t reactors running, but I could just as easily do with solars or other sources. I haven't yet crafted a HV bench because I haven't made any quantum armor. The nano armor is a tier 2 item and can be recharged in the MV bench. My MV bench has 4 energy storage upgrades in it, increasing the capacity to 840,000 EU. I'm patient so I don't have any overclockers. This is enough to fully charge two complete nano armor suits and still have some left over. I also have a LV bench that I use for tool recharging.


    I'll have to think about what I want to do with this suggestion and run it past Tallinu who's coauthoring this to see what he thinks.


  • If all you use is batpack and tools, the LV bench is probably just fine, and you're most likely right that you won't ever need the HV bench. If you have a batbox collecting power from your solars, generators, etc, and sending that on to your machines and your charging bench, then between that and whatever internal storage the bench has (I'm not certain how cost effective energy storage upgrades are in the LV bench), it would probably have enough capacity to charge an empty batpack. It will be drawing energy in at the same time as it transfers it into the batpack or tools, so if the bench's internal storage does run dry before it's done, it should at least be able to finish in a reasonable time, although I haven't tested this specifically. And you should indeed be able to power a bench from multiple sources to make that situation work better. If it's not full it should accept as many packets as your energy network will offer it, much like a batbox / etc.



    One of the other factors that went into the decision to require a batbox, MFE, or MFSU in the crafting recipe and take on the internal storage capacity of the parent device, in addition to the main goal of having sufficient power available locally to allow the rapid charging of multiple items, was that we didn't want the mod to be seen as a way to bypass the normal IC2 requirements for charging and making use of nano or quantum armor or other devices relying on tier 2 or 3 energy storage. Normally you have to make a MFSU to charge up your quantum suit, but with the previous mod, if you were patient and/or had a few MFEs you could easily do it without that expense and effort. In my experience, when you have the resources to make and power quantum armor, you can generally afford a MFSU without too much trouble, and probably want to have at least one for its storage capacity anyway. Consider what it requires to make a mass fab and enough UU matter to build a full quantum suit, not just in terms of material resources but also in the form of raw EU poured into that fabber to get the iridium. If anyone is concerned about "tying up" 10 million EU solely to be ready to charge items, remember that 10 million is nothing compared to all that went into the items themselves.



    Somewhat tangential to a point mentioned earlier, that each item charges at a certain rate: It would be nice to add a way to see the base charge rate of an item, so you know how quickly it will drain power from the bench - and how quickly you'd have to supply power to keep it from becoming empty and stalling or slowing down. I'll have to investigate ways to display that information. If it would be possible to list it on the tooltip without messing up NEI's great tooltips, for example, that could be worth working on.



    I appreciate all the feedback, as I'm very proud of what we've created (I am paying attention, even if Pantheis is usually the one replying). Even the constructive criticism can be thought provoking and bring up useful ideas, like that one. :)

  • Has anyone given this a try with the beta IC2 1.107 release? Any issues?

    Every thing seems to work fine with 1.107.30 and 1.107.35!


    Have you thought about a feature like if powered by redstone don't drain energy from the system? Iv had time were I drain my mfe and it all likes to go to the bench when I want to use my machines.

  • Thanks for the report on 1.107.30 and .35!


    We haven't thought about a feature like that but I can certainly see how it would be useful! Let me talk it over with Tallinu and see if we want to do a simple implementation such as that, or something more complex like a button in the UI, or maybe both?


    Having it not drain energy from the energy net when powered by redstone will be a very simple change, but I want to make sure it's not going to cause other issues.