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

Quote from Pantheis

Charging Bench updated!

VERSION NUMBER REVAMP-New versioning is Major.Minor.Build-IC2_Version instead of Minecraft version.Build-IC2_Version. This should not change again.
Latest version as of 10/11/2012 is 1.0.9-IC2_1.106.

Changes:
An active redstone signal will now disable the charging bench from accepting energy from the energy network. You can still charge items inside the bench and use the power slot to provide power to the bench, but it will not draw any energy from the network. Thanks for the idea, shadoskill!

Fixed a bug causing the charging bench to not notify blocks nearby properly when it's removing itself. This caused things like attached levers to not pop off.

Revamped versioning to be based on Jenkins ANT building of mod. New versioning is Major.Minor.Build-IC2_Version and it is now packaged inside a JAR file leading to a smaller release size.

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Haha nice, you have no idea how much this helps! Especially since my servers generator output is 70% less then default.

Just wanted to let people know that there's a minor new feature and a minor bugfix on the way soon(TM), along with a change to the amount of energy storage granted by upgrades in LV and HV benches.

What would you like to hear about first? The bad news or the good?

Let's start with the bug. It's just a display sync issue between client and server. If the bench's internal storage was reduced to zero (by charging items) since the last time you had the GUI open, the next time you opened the GUI it would still show whatever value it was showing last time you looked, both numerically and on the energy bar. The upcoming version will now sync the energy level correctly even if it's at zero.

Now for the new feature: The charging light. While the bench is transferring power into items (or out of a battery, too) a new indicator light on the block will be lit. You'll be able to toss in a bunch of power hungry items, walk away, and know with just a glance across the room whether they're ready to be picked up. And if you're trying to power up a bench that isn't hooked up to an energy source, you can see if it's time to swap out or retrieve an empty battery, energy crystal, or lapotron yet.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly (if you have a lot of energy storage upgrades in an HV Charging Bench, that is)... Energy storage upgrades will no longer grant a flat 10% bonus to all three tiers of charging bench. The bonus per upgrade will vary between the three tiers of bench. The values are as follows.

LV Charging Bench:
+10,000 EU storage per upgrade (UP from 4,000 EU; the new value is 25% of base storage)

MV Charging Bench:
+60,000 EU storage per upgrade (No change; this is the same as the original 10% of base storage)

HV Charging Bench:
+500,000 EU storage per upgrade (DOWN from 1 million EU; the new value is 5% of base storage)

After looking at the bonus for each tier we decided they needed a little bit of re-balancing. The upgrade uses a RE Battery in the recipe, so adding only 4000 energy to the LV bench made no sense. The batbox it's built on gets 40,000 storage out of 3 batteries. Each upgrade should be able to add at least as much as one battery can store, so we bumped it up to match. We considered reducing the bonus amount for the MV bench from 60k to 50k but decided such a slight change wasn't worth the trouble. For the HV bench, though, having a single battery and a circuit grant as much energy storage as a lapotron crystal was beginning to look decidedly overpowered. On the other hand, decreasing it any more than this would result in storage upgrades either being practically useless in the HV bench or requiring downright crazy quantities of them to have a useful effect. In the end we decided that cutting the bonus in half was the best middle ground.

What does this change mean for you?

If you aren't using an HV bench, or you aren't using energy storage upgrades in your HV bench(es), you have absolutely nothing to worry about! But if you are, the maximum storage of your bench will decrease when you install this update. If you want to avoid losing any energy when that happens, there are several things you can do.

First, place a redstone torch or a lever (and turn it on) so that the bench won't accept more energy, assuming you have it hooked up to a power source.

Next, you have a couple options. You can craft enough energy storage upgrades to double the quantity in the bench and add them in before installing the next update, assuming this wouldn't put your total number of storage upgrades over the maximum of 64. If you do this, your total storage after the update will be the same as it is now.

The other option is to drain energy from the bench into items, such as lapotron crystals or quantum armor, until you've reduced the energy stored in the bench below the new cap. (I'd recommend taking out any overclockers while doing this, though, if you're trying to preserve the energy - otherwise the cost of charging the items will be greater.)

You can also combine these two approaches. And if you don't care about losing the excess energy, you don't really have to do anything at all - if that energy came from solar or water power, or other renewable sources, who cares if some of it disappears, right?

So that's your heads-up for the first "nerf" to this mod, coming soon(TM), once we're ready to post an update. We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause, and hope that you will continue to enjoy the use of this mod.

I've got a Charging Bench setup, but it has no power coming through it whatsoever. It's ~3-4 blocks away from a BatBox, and as I said, is not connected at all to any powersource, as far as I know. Yet for some reason it will start to drain power from the BatBox. This happened with both LV and MV charging tables. The table has no items in it whatsoever, and if I move it a block or two away, then it stops charging.

There was no crash, no errors, so sadly no log to help.

EDIT: Note that as soon as I connect the BatBox to the Charging Bench, then disconnect shortly after, it keeps on charging still.

I'd love if you added text somewhere on the gui that said the charge rate (based off the overclockers used).

Also from what i understand in the highest tier bench a transformer upgrade doesn't do anything?

Quote from Pantheis

Alright, since I've had a number of PM requests on this, let me address it here. This is the answer I've given everyone.

I don't personally have any issues with the mod being included in a modpack, as long as proper credit to myself and Tallinu (the other author) is given, but I believe it is against the IC2 terms to post mods for IC2 anywhere other than the IC2 forums. You may want to clear inclusion of this mod in your modpack with the IC2 team. If you can obtain their permission, you have mine as well.

Actually the IC2 redistribution terms were recently changed.
[NEW] IC² Policy regarding ModPacks / Redistribution

Would be an idea to update the readme files included in this mod to reflect that.

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The discharging ability from the old table didn't make much sense to me so it was removed.

It proved to be extremely useful when dealing with charging and discharging large groups of crystals for storage and energy transfer from one location to another.

It's a lot less tedious to deal with 12 crystals at a time instead of 1 while discharging.

I liked that ability because it was a cheap way to power machines that can't handle higher voltages and can't have voltage transformers (like miner) using crystals. But now its much more expensive so it does not matter if you use MFE or charging bench.

Quote from heatheriac

So I'm using pretty much all the latest:
MC 1.3.2
FML: 3.1.35.394
Forge 4.2.5.303
IC2 1.107.35
Charge Bench 1.0.9-IC2_1.106

And built a HV bench wired into an MV power grid with fiber cable. A cable coming into the bottom of the bench wouldn't charge (gui stuck at 0 and no items charging) and a cable coming from underneath, one block over (so that it right angle's directly into the side of the bench) had the same problem. I'm having to have a completely straight cable for one block coming into the side of the table for it to take a charge. Has anyone else seen this?

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This is a really strange one. I just tested a number of configurations with an MFE power source and glass fiber cable, trying to duplicate this problem, and couldn't. Can you give us any more information, and/or screenshots including the power source(s) and location of the bench? What's the cable length? What's supplying power to it? Are there other blocks drawing power from the same cable? Etc.
Also, if you place some other IC2 machine such as a MFE in the bench's location, does it suffer from the same problem or work normally?