Posts by BrickedKeyboard

    New Upgrade component for machines : "energy throttler".


    This reduces energy consumption by a factor of 4...and slows the machine down by a factor of 2.5.


    Example : Apply an overclocker to a machine. 4x more energy consumption, 2x more speed. You notice the machine is consuming too much power. So you put an energy throttler on the machine. Now it runs at 80% of the speed it originally ran at before you voided the warranty on the machine, and it has the same power consumption.


    You apply an overclocker again when you have more power. 4x more energy consumption, 1.6 times more speed. But then someone in your base wires a gregtech machine to high voltage, and blows some generators. So you apply another throttler. Now the machine runs at 64% of the original speed when new. Maybe it's time to sell the machine to other players....

    I tried to run a multiplayer server that had several large force fields throughout the map. The entire server would freeze when loading a field. The algorithm seemed to scale very poorly with the total number of fields server_wide. That is, if there was just 1 medium sized field, the server ran ok. 2 or 3, little hitches when loading the areas with the field. By the time there were 5 total fields, including 3 large ones, performance was abysmal - 10 second server freeze when loading a field, including severe networking consequences.


    By the way, the actual server hardware is the best money can buy. 2600k overclocked to 4.6 ghz, 7 gigs of ram allocated to this particular server, gigabit upstream, etc. Normally, tick times were about 3-7 milliseconds per tick unless someone tried to load chunks that had a force field.


    I'm uncertain if the freeze was of the thread handling networking or the main thread, but I can provide you the files if you need them.


    Fact is, it's not your code, and it may be too difficult to fix code you didn't write. I've been hoping the rewrite for version 3 fixes this issue. However, Calclavia does not have a track record of a developer who creates polished finished products.

    Bug Report :
    Force Field Filter is broken. Instead of causing the Tesla coil to target all entities inside of the force field, it causes it to target all entities if the field is turned on, and nothing if the field is turned off. The ~ token inverts this behavior.


    Please test it on your end, and if somehow I'm wrong, upload a screenshot of a working configuration. I've been messing with it for about an hour, and it does this even in the simplest possible case (force field filter pointed at an industrial tesla coil)


    Even in this simplest case, the tesla just attacks the nearest entity if the field is turned on. It does not care if the entity is inside or outside of the field, it attacks both.

    5 chamber high power reactor for a mining ship : http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…w05vj81frrxfat1h9giagg0sg


    Not suitable for exclusive use because it requires too much plutonium per thorium.


    5 chamber, 406 EU/tick, 4 quad thorium and 3 plutonium. Thorium : plutonium ratio of only 2.13, so only good if you have 1 of these and a whole bunch of reactors that burn a lot more thorium.


    Oh, and 4.79 "efficiency". (a number that turns out to mean exactly nothing)

    Ok, now that I've gotten (partially) the hang of the "minigame" for reactor planning, here's the latest creation :


    http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…ymxri6yeufxrqgy53n15hzq4g


    420 EU/tick. 6 chambers. 4.38 efficiency (as if that mattered)


    And most importantly, 4.8 thorium for every plutonium! As long as you're running any modpack that has MFFS (bonus thorium) or some other source of extra thorium, this is perfect. You burn up almost all your fuel evenly.


    MFFS gives 1 whole thorium for every single monazite ore found. That ore seems to be more common than uranium, but assuming it has the same rarity, then the math works perfectly.


    Now, it does burn copper every cycle. The efficient place to get more copper is from lava - either from the nether or by melting it using a magma crucible. If you get it from the nether, the energy cost is negligible. Assuming you got it from a magma crucible, currently, that will eat up 54 million of the 420 million EU the reactor generates. You can "rate down" the EU/tick to 366 EU/tick.


    However, Greg also recently changed the recipe for double/quad thorium cells. They now only require copper ingots, not plates. So 1/9 the copper, eliminating this as an issue.


    How do you refuel the plutonium? Simple : use an electric advanced regulator. You just count : build the reactor, and figure out which slot number has which fuel component. For instance, the top quad thorium cell is slot 1 (slot 0 is the upper left). So stick a quad thorium cell in the middle holoslot of the regulator, and right click until the number for that slot is set to "1". Do the same for each additional component. For instance, the next quad thorium cell is in slot 10.

    I'm still not a master at the minigame. Can someone take this reactor design and, leaving the fuel configuration alone, optimize the cooling components to minimize cost and/or complexity.
    I added a couple of component heat vents after I built the reactor in creative mode and noticed a couple hot spots.



    Another thing to factor in is the efficiency per uranium. Every uranium you find, you can create 8 nearly depleted cells. Breed them, and you get 8 re-enriched cells. (that go in the centrifuge) You get, ultimately, 5.5 thorium and 1.375 plutonium from this uranium. You also get more lots of thorium from monazit ore, assuming the modpack you are playing has MFFS (virtually all of them do).


    This means it costs 3.64 uranium ore to fuel this reactor, so you end up netting 115 million EU per uranium ore.


    By contrast, if you do uranium breeding : with top notch breeding, you net about 9 uranium cells per uranium ore. (since you have a 25% chance of getting a nearly depleted every time you burn one, and you get 8 for every ore when you craft near depleted). Assuming a tip top efficient reactor, from the "designs" page, with an efficiency of 4, and you get 36 million EU per uranium ore.


    Played the minigame some more. Did my best to "regularize" the layout inside the reactor to make it easier to build. Still not ideal, however. http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…cokn57z7w5n041a0dk5edyo74

    Ok, something I'll probably actually build. This is not nearly as efficient as BrickedKeyboard's designs in terms of uranium ore (takes twice as much plutonium), but uses 1/5th the copper and still manages 324 EU/t.


    http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…9xuakrk51ozo6mugza2jj22gw


    I can probably throw the excess thorium into an LV reactor for an extra boost.


    Here's the problem : for 1 every unit of thorium you burn, you end up with THREE excess unburned units of thorium. This is terrible for efficiency : you'd need to create a whole bunch of thorium reactors for every one of these in order to burn up all of that thorium. (since you started you wanted to avoid consuming copper)


    Or, more realistically, you won't bother and that thorium will pile up in chests.


    Point is, unburned fuel is inefficient, even if you get great numbers for the fuel you did burn.


    And having to create tons of extra reactors and reactor parts is also inefficient, since that's usually the limiting factor, not fuel availability.


    My unoptimized design is better, because instead of making 2 reactors with two different designs : one to burn the excess thorium and one to burn the plutonium + thorium, you build 2 reactors of that same design that each give 367 EU/tick. (versus getting 416 for one and maybe 100 for the other)


    I'm not sure where you're getting 5:1 from though Bricked. Thorium and plutonium come out at 4:1 in the centrifuge (re-enriched as the source), you can get craplaods of thorium and a little bit of plutonium from mining by hand of course, but rock cutting a stack of coal is not worth my time by the point this is relevant. After you figure in the difference between how long they last you want 10 thorium in the reactor for every plutonium, which is *exactly* what you have.


    Monozit ore also gives thorium if ground in the industrial grinder. In the most good modpacks (such as Mindcrack) the ore is present.


    In any case, I found it difficult to get above a 4:1 ratio.

    Something I slapped together :
    http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…lrdxp4zl17ocmraynp4ampn9c


    4 chamber, 314 EU/tick, efficiency 4.44. No iridium reflectors. Also, the thorium : plutonium ratio is 16:6 per cycle, which is much closer to the ratio you can produce plutonium and thorium in. (a better ratio would be about 5 : 1, since you can get a lot more thorium than plutonium)


    And another n00b design : 5 chamber, 367 EU/tick, 4.41 efficiency. No iridium reflectors, and the thorium : plutonium ratio is 4:1. Better, but still not ideal.


    http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…modvr1ufr46oztj82l9yeew3k


    I could use some help from the reactor engineers : the perfect reactor would be 5:1 thorium : plutonium, would provide lots of power per reactor (someone has to insert all these components by hand, and so fewer reactors that give more power is better), and would have decent efficiency. (not as big of a factor : a reactor with a higher efficiency number that doesn't provide the right ratio is junk)


    Oh, and no iridium plates.


    Best design so far : http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…c49kb8dppu63bvlromd9i28zk

    Two serious limitations found :


    1. Your link cards use absolute, not relative coordinates. This means that when you move a setup of extractors/capacitors/projectors using frames, they quite working after being moved. And, it's impossible to automatically re-establish the link. If the link cards stored the relative coordinates between blocks (when installed they update to reflect the relative position of one block to the other) they'd keep working.


    2. The extractor exposes only 1 slot via iSidedInventory - the slot forcium goes in. This means it is impossible to convert EU to force energy automatically.

    Mens : three things that would help you a lot :


    1. The latest version of ForgeBukkit does NOT require ported versions of the mods! That way you don't have to be restricted to ported mods, and you can use up to date versions of all of the mods.


    2. Already existing mod packs (I suggest FTB : Mindcrack because it is the best one right now) have most of the work in configuration, etc already done for you. You can just start with a pack like that, delete the mods from it you do not want to use, add the mods you want, and bam you are nearly to a working solution. I slapped together a "custom" pack in about an hour by starting with an already good pack.


    3. The Tekkit launcher allows for custom mod packs. So does the FTB launcher, but the FTB support is not as good. You can just distribute your pack as a zip file and tell people to launch it using the tekkit launcher. This is drastically more convenient, and does not require someone to do all of the work they currently have to do.


    4. There's a bukkit plugin that disables the Ender Pearl right click functionality. You don't have to lock the end out like you currently do, you could have an End Portal right next to the server's Nether Portal and just disable the right click.


    Anyways, I'd like to do a little Industrial Warring.


    Kane, I think you may be incredibly lucky, from my like 5+ trips to the end for mining, I have only found 4 Sheldonite (Cooperite in code, I see what Greg did there), I wasn't even certain it could appear as an asteroid until I went into Creative to look for it.


    Greg mentioned making that ore appear 3 times less often. It's possible that Kane was running an old version when the ore got generated.



    ON THIS SERVER...We Obey the Laws of Thermodynamics! LOL. (+1 cookie if you get the reference)


    Are you factoring in losses from some of these steps? Industrial Electrolyzer uses power.

    I just thought of a simple casuc method that sort of relies on an exploit.


    I just tested an electric wrench in a deployer from redpower. They work fine. So, here's the plan : put uranium cells into a reactor, run it until it overheats, then have the deployer wrench the reactor and suck up the reactor and uranium cells.


    Another deployer replaces the reactor and pneumatic tubes re-insert the uranium cells.


    You also have to automatically recharge the wrench, you have to use an electric wrench in lossless mode.

    Greg : she used to answer every forum post, 6 months or more ago. That was when I complained to her about duping iron via buckets, I think, and she both said it wasn't her problem and gleefully bragged that she had an iron machine in her own "legit" playthrough. I can dig up her reply, but it wasn't even a PM, it was a public message in her forum thread that she never reads.

    Greg : will you please do your recipe magic (and I guess piss a few more people off...) and block the iron duplication via railcraft?


    The bug is this : Eloraam's alloy furnaces melt down vanilla iron containing items and give you the iron back. There is no configuration option to change how much iron you get back, nor to disable melting certain items.


    Covert Jaguar's Railcraft allows you to make 2 minecarts using 5 steel, or up to 64 track using 6 iron. This means that when you melt down the minecarts or track, you get more iron than you started with.


    Boom, infinite iron : and this affects IC2/Gregtech greatly because iron is usually the "governing resource" for playing Industrialcraft.


    Both Covert Jaguar and Eloraam refuse to fix the problem or enable any sort of configuration option to fix it. (covert jag lets you disable the making of the minecarts, but it is off by defaut, but NOT the track recipes)


    I have messaged them both in the Minecraft forums and they both say it's the other's fault.


    Your crafty code could detect either or both and fix one of them. Virtually all hardcore players who enjoy your mod will be using railcraft and redpower.