Recently, it has come to light that I will need a custom addon for a custom map that I am making. At its heart, it will add the NTS-01 and NTS-02 engines to the game, permitting large amounts of energy to be produced in a reasonably small space. There is few major hindrances though. First, I am not that familiar with the semantics of Java. Second, I am a stickler for reality.
The first is an "easy" fix that I am doing right now in some of my spare time. The second is the pain in the @$$, as that means I must code a means of testing whether or not the engines can get enough air and have a clear exhaust path. That also means I must add all on the materials, machines (except for the breeders needed, for obvious reasons), and mechanics needed to build and maintain one.
I have some idea as to which functions will be involved where and decided on the "generic" methods for some parts already. Namely, the airway test. It will likely be a cellular automaton based off block 36 that only tests when one of its blocks is updated, which means on long paths, changing something next to the path will cause a massive lag spike as the system tests again. I could limit it to update only the updated blocks and send to a public variable, but then if I want multiple engines, I will have to some how define a new pair variables, one for intake and one for exhaust, for each engine have have it test it frequently and react accordingly, but that would become cumbersome, so having it retest and update the engine that created the block by updating its neighbors and then have the neighbors update their neighbors and so on until the whole system. Adding conditions to the system to remove extraneous updates, such as a door off the main path opening, will likely help a lot. The main challenge will be getting it to work as intended with dynamic subblocks such as those in RedPower, as some configurations will allow flow, but others won't. A technical mobile with guided path finding may be called for here.