Posts by Chocohead

  • Bored? Random IC2/Forum chat

    Advanced Machines/Solars and Gravisuite are still coming, I've not forgotten, just a tad distracted...

    So in the mean time, here's Iechya Da, your favourite all Chinese mod that adds a maze minigame and some foreign instruction books for it:

    Picture
    8mjXiT7.png

    The Chinese isn't really the point at all, it was just a comment from a few days ago that xbony didn't know of any mods that only used Chinese.

  • Non official thread that I don't use and this is for Suggestions if you are out of ideas

    People normally just post straight in the suggestions section if they've got an idea, and then thoughts about it can be contained in the thread. Not that this one isn't a good idea, as clearly people have been looking at it over the month to see if there are any new suggestions, but it is competing with a system which works a similar way and was already in use so hasn't apparently managed to attract any more new ideas yet.

  • Industrial Clean-up

    Quote from Speiger

    Remember how you guys often said that you don't have much time to work on things (that was back in 1.7.10 times) and then out of nowhere later the 1.8.9-1.10.2 update came out?

    Remember that? My point being you guys can't oftenly sit together to get shit done but as soon it has to be about being in the latest version everyone has time now to work on this massive update or even core rewrite (which was done in 1.8.9-1.10.2 version) but not to get the mod even very good designed.

    As I said to you earlier, there is a huge difference between maintaining code to get it back to how it worked before and improving it. These ports do not take that much time in the grand scheme of things, especially if they fall in practical points in the year for having time to do them (which those did). Porting also has a clear goal, you have x amount of errors, once all of them are gone the hardest part normally is done. Contrast that to when you're trying to rework something, there is no fixed goal, the tech tree is not something as simple as it compiles/it doesn't. That is where the time is really sunk, which you said yourself you know full well, hence sure time can be found for the odd port every half a year (at least), but deeper changes don't come about every week.

    Quote from Speiger

    I know IRL isn't always giving time but you guys lack priority, and open to many new projects without closing many old ones

    Priority is how we even still have IC2, if you try and fix everything you will burn out and never want to do anything. The new projects bring new interest back to a code base that has had many an hour given to it - if an old one doesn't work quite right but you're not sure why, yet it has still taken ages to not progress any further, it's not a surprise that they get left. Even Alblaka left partly from burnout, there are practical limits that have to be taken, especially when you could be spending the free time doing something else.

    Quote from Speiger

    This is getting soon to levels of Techreborn just more stable

    IC2 has been getting more stable yet you claim it's getting worse, more works than in 1.7! The key difference is Tech Reborn would ditch all but the newest version of Minecraft to try and focus on getting that better, which to an extent worked. But then they eventually gave up from a project with quite colossal scope which was never entirely realistic given the nature of how things worked out. It's now getting rewritten again ready for the changes 1.13 bring, with the whole paradigm shifting to be slightly less true a clone to allow simpler implementations (especially for things like cables). IC2 stuck to the original goal with a waiting period until it got there, eventually the E-net problem was solved (at least in part) and nothing else has lost out as a result. Not to say everything works still, but at least we're moving forward compared to Tech Reborn that only ever seems to move sideways.

    Quote from GregoriusT

    Aroma, it is not okay to just delete a Post without a good reason. Just removing the Post wont fix the Issues IC2exp is for sure still having. It is not a wrong thing to point out that there is stuff broken, and that there is fixes for that broken stuff, even if that incorporates usage of examples that are tied very closely to another "product".


    Your reason for deletion was "removal of propaganda", but I am very sure that most of the said things in that post are actually true, even if they have a small opinion attached to them.


    Just try to disprove the wrong things instead of flat out silencing people next time.

    To be fair Speiger's post really wouldn't fix the issues it's having either. It doesn't point out anything else that the original didn't, nor provide any other solutions than adding in Classic's OP upgrades (if you want cheap and fast production, scale more machines not upgrades) or extending the Magnetizer (remembering you can stack them to boost range). There are many ways to skin a cat, but that doesn't mean you're improving the discussion by criticising one then providing some impractical solutions, not even for all the criticisms.

    Take the changelogs, if they're being automatically put on Curse, when do the "better" changelogs magically appear? Editing each and every build on Curse to describe it? Because people are really concerned when the thing that uploades them is updated (build 44)? Or for "Fix potential cme when saving chunks" (build 45) they don't know what a CME is? Sometimes yes, the changes are a tad obscure, but when it is build by build it is simply not a logical solution to just do every one as if it's a summary for a product updated once a month. If people are really that worried, they are completely free to ask, but given no one ever has probably means they don't care quite as much as you do. Heck, for years people coped with FTB releasing pack updates with no information at all (often they still don't), yet that is a once a month update product. Many more people have asked about why their configs don't work across very different versions (pre 1.8 and post 1.8) which I'm surprised you haven't suggested plastering the solution on the background of the forum.

    On a more real note, many things in propaganda are also true, it is how you place the things that are not that makes it effective. Such as the fact Classic is approaching abandonment and thus not updating past 1.10. It makes Classic seem like an alternative way of doing the same thing, rather than another mod that happens to have shared a common heritage. You could just as easily say GT fulfils most of the issues, but that doesn't mean that is a useful answer either. This is about how IC2 can (and needs) to change, not let's pick a model to aim for that is sort of similar but not really at all. I don't think Speiger was quite aiming for this however, he is always wanting attention for Classic for people to critique it in the same way, thus it is really him just beating his own 1.10.2 drum.


    On a slightly connected note, it would be nice if these didn't always end up being side tracked about how one IC2 does something whilst the other doesn't, rather than finding what works best for the one in question based on what it already has. Isolated suggestions are often much better that way, as there is no other baggage from the particulars of an implementation and it's not just clone the feature. For example, "why not add these upgrades *list* *reasons*" is better than "Classic added these *list* upgrades, you should too". It's little differences, but if the suggestion itself is neutral, even if you have to put an example mod that does it to explain the point better afterwards, it homes in on what makes the implementation better (or why the suggestion is an improvement over the current situation) rather than what makes the mod that does it better. The original post does this well for the most part, there are examples of similar mechanics but it is like Railcraft's boiler or TE's Fluid Transposer and an explanation of the features they have that is better than now rather than the fact they've done something similar that you think is better justifies copying it.

  • Industrial Clean-up

    Some of the complaints and solutions seem to feed into each other, a poorly documented system replaced with another equally obscure but just as poorly documented system:

    Take the Solid Canning Machine vs the Fluid/Solid one, you can't possibly rather want the one that does 4 things at once over the solid one, given that the biggest complaint for years is that people can't comprehend a machine doing 4 different things. The solid machine is conceptually so much easier, and isn't really any more limiting in capability than the solid filling mode of the fluid/solid one. I was always of the opinion the fluid/solid one needs to change to only do enrichment, the boiling plant can do both filling and empting, whilst the solid one can fill uranium and food cans. Only then is it really worthy of the old Canning Machine name.

    Or having to deal with machines throwing out heat, suddenly heat has moved from a separate energy form to tied into anything using power, despite having being designed for the exact opposite. People are quite unlikely to be using their machines 24/7 just for the sake of trying to power something that really isn't designed for it, remembering that boilers are typically going to be used for EU power generation resulting in creating a loss making cycle (or free energy). The whole boiler concept (which we'll be getting into further below) was for fluid reactors, not as some side recycling and great care was taken so trying to power it using EU would always result in a net power loss. The Electric Heater is there as a convenience if you want to power a Blast Furnace or Fermenter off EU, rather than something that should be used for any heat consuming application.

    As a separator, heat is quite useful so that everything isn't just electrically powered no matter the nature of machine. There are some more that should still be integrated in like the Thermal Centrifuge, but it's a tricky thing to balance given the inherent limitations of something as analogue as heat being forced into a digital system. Making it substantially more dangerous with little to no benefit however is not helping anyone though. Boilers explode when given too much heat because they are likely to, running dry at 500C. Creating a system in which everything heat consuming can explode/melt will result in having to make simple ways to balance it out (otherwise we're back to making complicated things to be complicated), yet the code behind it will be anything but. Heat webs of dynamic dissipation and balancing is effectively pushing towards another E-net but for heat, which we could do without another one to worry about. I quite like the idea of it though, even if it is not especially achievable today.


    Looping back to some more rational problems:

    The Electrolyzer is simply not finished, simple as that. It doesn't actually add anything to the game load time given it's using parts that at least one other machine is also using, but that is very much besides the point. The goal from what I managed to get out of Estebes at the time was for producing deuterium or heavy water so it could be a start for fusion. Fun fact that fusion was the whole reason experimental started, yet 5 years later it is only barely closer. Gas Turbines was another suggestion I had at the time for hydrogen, but we never settled on numbers so it was never done, another issue of free energy vs energy loss given it is just EU used to extract water which is of course free. I disagree that fusion would never get used, it is much safer as a concept than the Nuclear Reactor, and provides and interesting alternative that appeared to be designed to occupy space rather than condensed danger like the Nuclear Reactor. None of this is fixed in stone, but that also means there is nothing stopping it being heavily influenced by the community, they are the ones using it in the end. hint hint

    Little side note about fluid compatibility, the Steam Repressurizer allows turning IC2 steam into Railcraft Steam, and Advanced Generators can use our coolant. It's not much but it is the price you pay for maintaining the ratios you want. This is quite matched by the tank which isn't power creeped at all given the capacity of 24 glass in 3 blocks is hardly comparable to the use of iron in one. It needs a way to empty non-Universal Fluid Cell containers in it, but it always did. It was as much a fluid buffer for fluid reactors than a tank for easy use. Gauges are overrated anyway, there is something quaint about a fluid slot :P

    The weighted things were a request a couple of months back from people using a bug based on facing ordering to having priority based filtering. The tiles were obvious enough that you were picking a direction in priority order, it was very simple logic to avoid some irritating system designed on you having to click 6 times to swap from most to least important using what was already there code wise. Sure it could have some more elaborate system, but it was a quick fix for a niche use-case to start with. That's probably why there is nothing about them online, not that is it anything new since no one has written heavy documentation in years nor has shown any willingness to. To the people whole occasionally edit the wiki to fix a page I salute you, it is better than nothing like BuildCraft's overhauling. The others are perfectly willing to complain about the lack however.

    The magnetizer is very rarely called great, the metal poles really don't lend themselves to nice design being right in the centre of a block, forcing a 2x1 hole instead of potentially a 1x1 for going between floors. Perhaps there is something to be said that no one has ever copied them yet nearly everything else has been. The lack of UU clones always stuck me as odd too, maybe they are both too unique to be stolen.

    JEI support brings back fun memories of everyone complaining the recycler would show up for nearly everything, it's all fun and games until you didn't want that machine to show up ahead of the one you were going to use anyway. Some would certainly still benefit from it that have obscure sets of recipes that people wouldn't remember, but for things like the Bottling Machine? Another recycler problem right there.


    Steam and KU have always gone hand in hand as the final project Thunderdark started that he spent months on but never got the chance to get working. For years it was plagued with rounding and loading problems that would make even model setups not be 100% reliable from the loss they'd acquire from the very situational code that backed them. Player and I have poked about to get them a lot more predictable, the Steam Boiler will no longer spew out water into turbines whilst below 100C and normal steam when the pressure is aiming for superheated. It won't immediately explode from having a small fraction of steam stuck from the world loading in at different rates, and won't flash between outputs when the heat coming in is different to the target it needs. It even behaves when new water is thrown in rather than ending the operating temperature plummeting, even if strictly neither are less realistic than the other.

    The GUI has gone through many iterations, and perhaps is confusing people even beyond what I could predict when I first played about through the iterations in 1.6. For a start, there isn't any graph, it is the water wiggling it's way through the heating elements. It is actually one of the prettier GUIs in that sense, apparently pretty is also too confusing. Modern sure is hard to perfect.

    The pressure options and the fact the water output could be ramped up so high were never explained, a Thunderdarkism of what might have been to come but never got anywhere close. The pressure options never even made sense using the internal maths, they were targetted at 0 being 100C and 220-1 being 375C, resulting in a weird scale that made most pressures impossible to achieve. This of course compounded by the fact the boiler would over draw then draw nothing next tick, causing flicking rather than buffering heat like an actual body of water and metal would. The heat draw was also designed upon a base 100 system from a fully maxed out Fluid Heat Exchanger being able to turn Hot Coolant back into Coolant, as that was the only use case for the Boiler, no other heat generator was capable of supplying at least 100 HU. The whole Boiler was only really slanted towards Fluid Reactors despite also being possible to drive lava through it as another 100 HU source (that produces masses of Pahoehoe lava in the process).

    The churning of the mechanics didn't help documentation, I did it twice, it changed again, I did it a final time and called it a day. Fortunately it didn't change again in 1.7 after that, but the sheer learning curve meant few tried to use it and even fewer even mentioned what they did to get it working. It certainly didn't take a 60 manual because there was literally a finite number of options that would make it work, everything else would reliably fail. Even "working" was a little stretch because it would lose distilled water (or water if you were that way inclined to let it calcify) as it ran from rounding errors.

    Greg had stopped playing with IC2 at this point and switched solely to GT, so there was no chance of saviour from him despite having his own boilers. The fact Greg wasn't using IC2 things is hardly much of a revelation or statement to the things themselves, he'd abandoned IC2 alone long ago for Thunderdark and Player to tinker with. Not before breaking recipes in one of the last 1.6 builds though, that was a nice touch. :|

    The story hasn't even ended here, it remains overly sensitive to the configuration it still offers, and a lot of the internal state changing is still totally hidden from the user for the simple reason the GUI is full. Notice the lack of upgrade slots too, it auto-ejects because there's no room for an ejector upgrade to go. Not that it needing one would be an improvement.

    It is not a bad concept, but it doesn't have a sane system for the concept to be using, sure letting the pressure change the heat needed is nice, but it's still steam until 220 and everyone knows that now. If the design accounted for the lack of granular heat and the realities of the system it was connecting to there wouldn't be nearly the same level of problems. It is very easy to reject the whole approach and copy another system, but there is no fun in that from developer or player stand point. The player could just use the original and the developer is doing the boring part of getting a system working with none of the fun associated with designing it. It's not been forgotten as something that needs correcting, just the correction itself is much harder than people give credit, especially since worlds can't be broken for the people that are using it. Don't want to be exploding people's Fluid Reactors after all.

    The Steam Turbine is well matched to the mechanics the Steam Boiler proposed, whether that is a good thing is a whole other matter. The fact the steam condenses at some point is quite blatantly obvious, it's not a closed system if the steam vanishes which would defeat the whole system. The bigger problem is the need for a Condenser touching it (and I suppose the fact it will move the steam out to an adjacent one on it's own). That is never mentioned anywhere in game, and the Condenser itself doesn't appear to do much until you put 2 and 2 together. Even then, it magically works from them touching rather than anything you have to do beyond that.

    An internal tank size of 4 buckets for both steam and distilled water is probably intrinsic of no one understanding the numbers, right now it has a steam tank of 21 buckets and a distilled water one of 1. The steam expands the water by 100x and the steam tank can only drain whilst there is KU being drawn out (so you aren't losing out from explosions strictly), 4 buckets would last a single second at 2mb/t water input before completely filling. Of course, the way it is now it will take just over 5 seconds, but at least the ratios are a little better matched. The produced KU is scaled by how empty the Distilled Water tank is too, if it was 4x bigger, there is 4x less reason to ensure it's kept empty

    Explosions from nowhere to go are a reasonable result given it's pressurised steam, the fact the machines don't explode too is the reasonable aspect, at one point they could do. The same way people don't make Nuclear Reactors expecting to fill them with uranium and everything be fine. Something that makes the Steam Boiler easier to understand would probably also help with the Steam Turbine, as soon as it's clear the explosions are from it being unable to vent something, it is clearer what needs to be fixed (rather than just potentially knowing something is stuck in at best). Perhaps a Steam Leak Detector or something of that nature could give the full status of a machine without having to make the machine's GUI full of information scattered everywhere. Putting animated things in just for the sake of it isn't cool though, it's cheesy and a step closer to being MFR merely for downloads. Not that I expect many people download mods based on the animation in a single GUI ;)

    On an attached note, the Fluid Reactor lacks designs because it's really hard to make them. The simulation is more complicated from the pulsing of heat into coolant, and if you use overclocked vents it's quite easy to just burn them straight out compared to normal reactors. MOX is even worse, the straight doubling of heat produced at 50% is such a strange balancing mechanic. You could also point out the lack of any new designs for reactors since 2012, people designed ones approaching the best you're going to get and no one else bothered since. It's an art form that has just died out because there was nothing new that justified new designs for so long. Can't expect to hang onto people forever under the notion things might change in the future though.


    KU goes hand in hand with HU as a way of putting in new machines that don't have to rely on being sane electrical consuming principles, like a Steam Turbine isn't going to automatically produce power, neither should a Windmill. They are the true systems with more generators than consumers (EU has gained many machines yet only a single generator), purely because to fully overhaul it to allow early game HU power before EU is a step too far for people. That is the real reason they were added and things like the Watermill and Windmill replaced with big KU producing ones. Instead the mechanics are looped back into EU to keep everything integrated, they can't all exist under a single uniform system, and it is easier to have 3 that match what they do well than fewer than sort of work but not amazingly well. The scope problems properly simulating EU produces limits them to an extent too, heat especially would benefit from it, but it would be unbelievably more complicated than the way it works now. A proper method of transferring KU and HU would make them fit a little better, but this again is related to how to do so in a way that is logical and not processing heavy. Heck, even pipes are gated behind this, for years it's been on the TODO list yet it is just such a complicated thing to perfect it was never done. We still need pipes however, somehow.


    This is all overshadowed by the bigger issues IC2 has now, which Aroma touched on. IC2 is primarily being made by 3 people who do it as a hobby around other things. Some mods have full time devs who don't really do much else day to day that means they can get same day fixes. A lot only have a single one who might be fine with making things cheaper and adding things on a whim just to get used more. We've been passed being the only tech mod 6 years ago, ironically by being stagnant. If you look back between 1.3 and 1.6.4, the only new interesting things were boats and the obscurator. Neither get used outside of people already using IC2 stuff. Adding and changing things to modernise and refresh has got us here, being called stagnant again. Coupled with the loss of community keeping up with things like the wiki and reactor designs, both caused by the fact they stopped having new things to do and moved on, gives you sorely lacking documentation. This was an issue 5 years ago. Nothing has changed.

    The time periods people think back to were a different attitude, people put up with a lot worse design compared to now, and would often be happy to mess about with things for weeks to work them out because that's all there was. Now there is always an easier option that feels friendlier, there is nothing forcing you to use GT like in 1.4 or IC2 pre 1.3. We can't race to the bottom because of our size and past history, and have no desire to do so anyway. Neither can we cater to everyone, and have long since stopped trying to, there is no hope to compete to have the clearest GUIs, the cheapest ore doubling nor the biggest power generation. You could argue we never have, depends how much weighting you put on Alblaka actually listening to the suggestion and support forums. It is a goal for what we envisage IC2 to be that really drives you into working on it, not the thought of the beating how many things can get moved in a block like EnderIO or how many layers of crafting can you nest but get away with it like Thermal Expansion. Don't think I haven't noticed Lemming.

    For example, I added new things in Build 43 half a week ago, they are aiming to smooth the jump to UU and resolve some of the issues of the expense for naturally generated things. There is no parallel to any other mod either way, but UU now is simply too expensive at first. It's something I proposed at the start of June last year, but I only found the opportunity to get around to adding it now. Plenty of other things changed and a few new things came in the mean time, but that's the way it worked out. Leaving new things unfinished is what dented 1.7 so badly, things like the Turning Table and steam system were never liked because they didn't have a feel like they were ever ready to be used. Contrast to something like Crops that people were very happy to have come back, even those it took well over a year after the initial port just to get them in a good state to look finished.

    IC2 could certainly do with something like a book to help explain the new things (like BuildCraft is adding), but someone has to write the text for it; and taking BuildCraft's example, their book is still mostly empty. I'd rather add something that makes the tech tree a little nicer if you know how to use it then work out some way of explaining it to everyone, than trying to explain everything that's already here just for questions to still get asked and it change later anyway. There will be a time when the latter is appropriate, but that is when things are a little more settled and there's less chance of things being completely replaced for a better initial user experience without a guide. Maybe the 1.13 port when there is amble chance to break anything we want. It does mean things like this are good to get done now, big changes are much harder when there is backwards compat to worry about.

    So sure, the wall of text might well come off as overly defensive of things written many years ago, some merely months old, but the broadening of IC2 happened to allow new things to come without just being GT. Without just cloning things out of Thermal Expansion or Buildcraft or EnderIO. There is plenty of fire left to make IC2 better, just it seems not in enough people to inspire everyone else.

  • Query: Where is PIPES ???

    You can paint cables using painters that allows you to place them next to each other without touching. In fact, if you hold a painter in your off hand, then any cables you place will be automatically painted as they go down, so there is no fear of them touching whilst you switch to a painter like there used to be.

  • Immersive engineering hammer reqiured to make copper plate

    IC2 definitely doesn't force that either way, so it could be a couple of things:

    1. You're looking at a plate from Immersive Engineering rather than an IC2 one, thus it won't appear to be possible to make using a Forge Hammer
    2. One of the mods you have is trying to unify recipes but doesn't do a great job at it so removes the IC2 recipes but doesn't add replacement versions of IE plates using the Forge Hammer
    3. The recipes have been unified some other way, such as a modpack's custom Minetweaker scripts

    It's hard to say which one of those it is (or whether it's even something else), the best test is to try something like a lead ingot and a forge hammer and see if it makes a lead plate or not. If it does then the recipes are probably fine and it's just the mod's plate you're looking at the recipe for. If it's not then chances are the recipe has been tinkered by another source, which can't really be determined past looking at the modlist for any mods that sound like they might.

  • Query: Where is PIPES ???

    The work to design pipes that work in an interesting way but aren't very performance intensive is quite large, having pipes is something we've wanted for a long time now, yet getting something that is up to the needed quality has never materialised. Maybe one day they will get properly implemented beyond things like the fluid distributor and regulator.