Posts by Hekatombaion

I'm having some trouble with the foam still expanding in -x direction when I'm facing x. Sometimes it's flat but other times I get locked into it just making spheres on whatever I spray. I've tried varying my distance from the wall and so forth but I can't get it to go back to the flat behavior that I want.

I had myself convinced that angling the camera a certain way would do it for awhile but now I've had to toss out that idea as well. Since I'm not just working up high but near lava this is quite the pain.

*I do still get flat behavior out of spraying at the floor. Also flat when spraying up. It's the horizontal directions that won't behave properly.

Actually it doesn't seem like it would be that unfeasible (to me) to have some pipes that sent "water blocks" through them with each one recording the heat before it flashed into steam to shoot back up to the generator. Actually you could maybe make a turbine machine that was all generators and just have the different energy methods be ways of making it go- aside from wind, all power plants just use water to spin turbines right?

The coal generators could conceivably have this all built into the one block so it wouldn't hinder the earliest development but after that you could reasonably demand people build systems to make the turbines go, and maybe even cooling towers for cases where the water reaches extreme temperatures.

In addition to green lava melting it's way out the bottom of the reactor you could give the blocks in a larger area a green snow coating that also did damage to most entities near it (probably at more of a mild annoyance rate than with green goo.)

I'd like to work in radioactive smoke and water as well- though I don't have any ideas for those besides making some purifier machines to slowly siphon the radioactive materials. Could allow for some interesting stuff further down the line with new mining hazards though.

< has a biology degree and thus feels like an authority on this matter


Generally any trait that we would recognize comes from a huge number of genes- punnet squares rapidly lose their usefulness as you have less purebred organisms. Even so if you use a fairly small range of values (height of the plant is 1 to 5) you might be able to get a fair number of genes into the simulation- just kind of try and have enough that you could have a standard bell curve of outcomes after you multiply them all together for the final outcome.

I should mention that the 3:1 ratio is if you've got recessive/dominant traits. You can have codominance and even run into a stranger effects- but that kind of stuff should probably not be anything players could spot just doing a few crosses. What you might want to do though, are some dominant traits that are lethal in homozygous individuals. I think a common example of that in humans is a form of dwarfism: with dd as a normal person and Dd / dD being a dwarf all the DD individuals just die before birth so you never see them.




Now as for plants I'd like to see some pH and salt brought into the equation. Plants actually have a lot of funky conditional growth for trying to struggle through those things (the plant is much smaller of course but this kind of thing would just outright kill a mammalian sort of developmental plan.) You could do all kinds of fun stuff with the genetics for handling those things- give the players all kinds of opportunities to select for some really fragile genes as they tried to make the plants grow tall and fast yet croak if the salinity went a little bit ooky.

Quote from Vandalite

I'm trying to do something similar, but instead of one light to indicate "charging" or not, I wanted to have a *series* of lights indicating the charge status of a series of batteries. When charging only, or under load only, it's able to detect an empty (or full) battery and switch to the next one in the line, but detectors do not have the ability to tell if a battery is actually full, just if current is flowing, so if you are in a situation where your power generation is higher than your load, it will never think the battery is 'full' and switch to the next one, or if your load is higher than your charge, it will never think the battery is empty and will not switch to the next full battery.

What I'd love to see is a module you can stick on the side of the batbox/mfe/mfsu that triggers a redstone signal when battery is within %5 of full or empty... It would easily be able to tell what role it's playing by looking at the side of the box it's attached to: If it's on the output of a battery, trigger redstone on depletion (within a small margin of error - twice the output rating of the battery would be enough, to account for charging operations being done at the same time), if on one of the box's inputs, signal on completed charge (again, within a margin to account for the system being under load).

Just make sure not to let the battery itself see the redstone signal. I've seen some interesting side effects of putting cable detectors right next to battery boxes.

Such a module would allow me to make a system that would let me serial-charge an array of batteries, and would also allow me to build a power station capable of bringing backup generators online if all but the last battery are permitted to deplete themselves.

Unless someone can think of a way to do that using the current cable detectors and cable splitters...

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Yeah, that module is very much unlike the data you can get from any of the tools available.

With redstone and the detector wires it wouldn't be too difficult to set up wiring that just cut off the output from a battery until the battery ahead of it ceases to output any power. So long as there is a constant drain this would never go off without them bottoming out.
(detector wire -> redstone memory circuit -> redstone to battery as well as redstone memory for next battery.)

While it is tempting to set this up in reverse for charging the batteries I think that going for the sloppier solution of just wiring them all up to the same power generation line in parallel will be more useful for detecting when you should turn the auxiliary power generation on- as the input is split between more boxes they will replenish slower and more quickly cycle to the final battery, meaning that the emergency signal will go off earlier.

As for deciding when to shut the auxiliary off we would want detectors on all of the input wires. You could send the auxiliary generation through the top faces of the batteries to allow the simple wiring from constant power generation to remain simple. You would now have a way of detecting that a battery is full- as soon as there is no current going into three of the batteries you could reset their redstone memory to have them start discharging from the first box again and wait to see no current going into the final box and then shut down your auxiliary.

I don't think there is anything about this setup (aside from my inconsistent naming of objects,) that wouldn't give the desired functionality. Might be ways to do it smaller but I was always more of a "get it working in the first place" kind of guy.