Posts by Maeyanie

    Had some free time today, worked on the design docs for the next few versions. There are a few ways Rocket Science could go after the satellite update, and I'd like some feedback on what you'd like to see first:


    My thoughts:
    -I'm always pro-multiplayer. ;) Both cooperative and competitive aspects.
    -Research system would be a neat touch, and could make "tech level" upgrades a bit more involving than just building the right tool.
    -Nanotech has potential, but you'd have to be careful not to make it overpowered. Or useless. Will be tricky to find the right balance.
    -Automated harvesting has been done fairly well by Minefactory and Forestry, so probably no need to go there.
    -Genetic engineering of crops is something Alblaka is working on, so probably no need to go there either.
    -The animals stuff I haven't seen yet. But, it would be a fairly major thing and not really fitting with everything else. It might be worth splitting into a 2nd mod if you end up going that way.


    Since this is such a frequent problem I think I'm just going to add custom error-handling in the next release (I wish Mojang had made Minecraft's error reports more accessible to the user, but...) and automatically pick a free block or item ID if a conflict is detected.


    Please be careful doing this, as it will make it rather annoying to sync client and server IDs in multiplayer. RedPower 2 does something similar (it runs the auto-assign once and saves the values to the config file, then turns auto-assign off) and we get lots of people complaining about "unexplained" crashes because of it. They're hard to diagnose, too, because (as you very correctly mentioned) the Minecraft client error reporting is kinda useless.


    Obviously there's a point where you pretty much need to dumb down the physics a bit both to make it accessible to the layman as well as to fit it into a world of cubes. Even if it just was about making a donutish shape (or square donut) to make it work I'd be fine with it, I'm more about making it more difficult and design intensive then actually making it realistic.


    As far as the whole lag issue I kind of feel like if you where able to get enough energy out of this you could have one at the heart of a city on a server and have that be enough whereas without it you'd need fields and fields of solar and wind generators that could probably match if not exceed any potential lag of a multiblock system.


    The CPU usage of a multiblock system wouldn't be that bad. It doesn't have to run the whole check and full calculations every tick. It'd basically just have to run everything once when the thing starts up, then make sure to stop (or slightly explode) if any vital blocks get broken or moved.