Posts by BrickedKeyboard

I've hosted a small, elite server and I'm looking for a small number of additional players. Map was started 10 days ago.

Theme of the server : build the most complex and ingenious contraptions you can. We have the very latest updates, with Redpower frames and computers, and the Tubestuff mod allows for the most compact and elegant auto-crafting factories possible.

Rules : No griefing other's stuff, try not to do anything that causes extreme lag. Chunk-loaders are allowed, there are not arbitrary rules on what you are allowed to build.

Host is on a private AMD quad core with 8 gigs of RAM. Modpack available at link.

removed

I'm always looking for more mods, but the other thing is that in order for frames to be useful, buildcraft is not installed and will not be in the future. (so you can't build magic blocks that do the same thing a frames machine does)

Here's what this server is about. Note, all of this stuff was built in survival, with no cheating whatsoever. I'm looking for a few folks to help me expand this stuff

Here's the first machine I built after getting a base set up : it processes everything I put into it and sorts the output.

The actual mechanism for this machine :
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/166566…z/2012-05-08_22.41.01.png

The breeder reactor bank :
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/166566…z/2012-05-08_22.40.41.png

The ice plant :
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/166566…z/2012-05-08_22.41.13.png

The scrap generator :

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/166566…z/2012-05-08_22.39.56.png

Quote from Player

Frames are just a dirty hack which violates the normal behavior of tile entites. There's nothing we can do about it without TE relocation support from Minecraft.

Well, oddly enough, all of your tile entities continue to function once the frame moves them. All your machines, generators, etc. The energy nets apparently depend on the location of the cable segments or something, and the code is not refreshing the network correctly once moved by a frame. Presumably, if your e-net code occasionally checked the position of some of the pieces of wire in a particular net for a movement, it could trigger a refresh and it would all work fine.

Same with the reactor : before the code that causes the crash, stick in a location integrity check and update the pointer instead of getting those NPEs.

This doesn't seem really all that difficult to fix. The trouble is that e-net is nasty, dense code that doesn't decompile very well, or I'd take a crack at it myself.

Here are the bugs that I have found :

1. The entire energy net quits when a frame moves. This means that all machine and all wire must be removed and replaced, or the game must be restarted. This is impossible to do automatically because a wrench will not work inside a deployer.

2. Nuclear Reactors Cause a crash when moved.

Not a bug : Teleporters continue to work, however, the teleporter aboard the frame can only teleport TO the fixed teleporter elsewhere. You cannot teleport from the fixed teleporter back to the mobile one. The secret to making it work is to carry a frequency linker. When you're aboard the frames vehicle, use it on the teleporter after moving the vehicle, but before you teleport back to base. Beam back to base. Once you want to return to the vehicle, use the frequency linker on the teleporter at base and it'll know the new coordinates of the mobile teleporter. Piece of cake.

The first 2 bugs I am sure the IC2 team knows about : what other bugs are there?

You can place machines, but they cannot be wrenched up. According to my testing, in order to make energy-net work, you have to replace every machine and wire in the network, OR relaunch/relog.

So perhaps I spoke too harshly. As long as you relaunch/relog every time the frame moves to a new position where IC2 machines must work from (like the solar spammer probably can accumulate a bunch of panels inside chests and then move a bunch of times all at once until it reaches a new position where it can massfab for more panels. When it comes to a stop, relaunch/relog and the massfab and the wiring system will be working correctly).

Lame. Due to the bugs, I don't think this challenge is any fun. Can't use nuclear, can't wire up your machines to wires, can't place wire with deployers or assemblers...it massively limits the possibilities to make a machine that will work at all.

I think this contest should be postponed until the bugs are fixed. Or, if I fix the bugs myself, may I enter the contest and require the judges to download the patched files? Alas, fixing the e-net part would be very difficult without the real source code and comments. I'd have to implement an integrity check of the wires or something.

Ice.

The reason is safety. On my server, the maximum explosion magnitude for a blown nuclear reactor is set to 999. It essentially erases everything you ever built if you have a reasonably close together base and the reactor blows. My server has the reactor control mod installed, but the extra safety margin from ice is still essential (since if a reactor overheats and receives a redstone signal to shut down, due to a bug it will run for a second or two every time the chunk reloads or the server restarts)

Quote from XFmax-o-l

Is the top windmill at 178?

Since I read a height of 178 when standing on them, then maybe not, maybe they are down by 1. I didn't want to risk it, since this is on a legit SMP map.

Quote from jppk1

Afaik tin cable melts at over 5EU packages.

Nope. Limit is 6 or 7 (I need to check the code)

Here's the layout I came up with, thanks to the help from Snyke and others who decompiled the code and did the math.

Standing on top of the top generator, I read a height of 178. Since the generators can never exceed 6 EU/tick, they cannot melt the tin wire. The blades can thus never break, and I'm getting almost the best possible efficiency for a breakage-free height.

That's an MV transformer in the base there, raising the voltage to 512 EU/tick to send it to the MFSU on the ground.

Quote from hellvoter

BrickedKeyboard, Read this thread page 2-3, and turn back.

I did. Someone did the mathematics incorrectly. And then no one else but me has called them on it. Actually, this mod is CONSIDERABLY more powerful than the solars in the Compact Solar mod. They are MUCH cheaper to make.

Quote from Snyke

Windmill mechanics:

Optimum height is thus 165.

How come wind generators would break before the height limit was raised? Is the code different than it was before? (for breakage chances)

I'm not sure what the people complaining about the cost are smoking in their crack pipes.

The ultimate hybrid solar panel costs 230 UU-matter for the iridium and sunnarium. This means it needs 230 million EU without scrap.

The ultimate hybrid produces 288 EU/tick on average, factoring in day and night. This means that to make 230 million EU, it will take it 798k ticks, or 40k seconds, or 665 minutes, or a mere 11 real life hours for one ultimate hybrid to make enough EU for a second one.

That is WITHOUT, I repeat, WITHOUT the help of scrap. With scrap, these things are a joke to make.

I actually think these things are massively overpowered. For my server, I slashed the outputs down to these values :

Advanced Gen Day 5, Night 1.
Hybrid Gen Day 20, Night 2.
Ultimate Hybrid day 150, night 10.

This still means that it would only take about 48 real life hours for an ultimate hybrid to make the uu-matter inside itself, without the scrap. That's not very long if you leave your character afk sometimes. With scrap, a mere 8 hours. These things also only need a tiny fraction of the other material costs like ore.

With the values, it still does make sense to make these panels, they are not merely compact solars, they are more efficient for the material costs than the basic ones. Just not an equivalent exhange wanna-be.

This is 1.95b, unless you guys borked the download link.

Never mind, never mind. It turns out, the download link for 1.95b was broken for a day or two after it was released, and 1.95 was being distributed. I had assumed that "1.95" had been silently updated to 1.95b or something silly. (like Eloraam does, she sometimes silently hotfixes her mod without changing the version number)

java.lang.NegativeArraySizeException
at ic2.platform.NetworkManager.onPacketData(NetworkManager.java:205)
at forge.MessageManager.dispatchIncomingMessage(MessageManager.java:432)
at adl.a(NetClientHandler.java:1246)
at ee.a(SourceFile:46)
at lg.b(NetworkManager.java:343)
at adl.b(NetClientHandler.java:68)
at je.c(SourceFile:50)
at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.k(Minecraft.java:1867)
at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.x(Minecraft.java:819)
at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.run(Minecraft.java:747)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Unfortunately, I can't tell which IC2 machine is sending the packet. I know it depends on rapid movement near the affected area. By rapid I mean sprinting.

So, I set up my new server with the Anvil map format and IC2 1.95 (plus the full set of other mods). The new height limit is 256.

Great, I thought. Double the power output!. So I built a tower to 256, plopped down 24 wind generators in 3 small groups of 8 each, and checked the output.

The IC2 team did NOT nerf the wind generator for this release (which I was expecting). Double the world height, double the output. I was getting 4-7 EU/tick per generator, easily. That's 24/7 power, so it roflstomps solar panels (since solars make 0.5 EU/tick if you factor in night) by a factor of 10 to 14 times.

EXCEPT...I find some iron ingots on the ground. Hmm. After a few hours of operation, 4 of my 24 generators had broken their blades! In about 24 hours of total run time, now, I've had to change the blades at least 15 times!

Apparently, at this height limit, the chance of losing a blade is far too high. Technically I make far fewer EUs than the UU-matter cost of all the iron in the replacement blades, so basically my wind farm converts iron ingots to EUs.

So I need some help with the math. From the decompiled code, we need to figure out what the probability of a blade breakage per real life hour is relative to the height over the world. Then, I'll stick my generators somewhere where they make at least 3 times as many EUs as the UU-matter cost of new blades, without scrap, before losing their blades.

Redpower 2 has introduced a new block : the relay. Basically it's a chest that automatically empties itself into attached redpower 2 pneumatic tubes when stuff enters the chest. The IC2 miner apparently does not consider it a valid inventory, and will not put mined or or mining pipe into it.

http://nemesis.evalq.net/RedPower2/recipes.html

It is possible to work around this bug. Just never stop cooling you reactor, and it will not blow up. You do need an active cooling system for this to work, of course....

Quote from RichardG

Sadly we don't have enough time to get that fix in the 1.2.5 version.

You save variables to NBT hundreds of places in the code. What's a cntrl-C and a cntrl-v, and changing the name of the variable going to cost you in terms of time?

In fact, if you want to be clever, save the value in the upper bits of the heat variable. Thus no file format changes at all, just a bit shift operation.

I can confirm this bug 100%. I even hacked in some debug statements into the reactor code to hunt this bug down.

Unfortunately, I could not figure out for certain why the call to check if a block is getting redstone was failing. (bukkit, the vanilla server, and the vanilla client all have a very similar call to base code)

Eventually I just gave up and made my reactors have automatic shutdown when they overheat.

Quote from Rick

I wanna see someone who gets quantum suit on day 2. That is without cheating. I guess its impossible even if you are lucky enough to find 10 diamonds under your spawn location.

I meant on day 2 of real life play. As in, after about 16 hours of playing the game. This is with the help of cobblestone generators from redpower, as well.