Posts by X-Heiko

EDIT: Didn't quote, so sorry. This refers to chaos_legion's post.

You must have misunderstood me. There is a difference between saying "I would want environmental pollution with the following system, consequences, benefits, demerits, this feeling and atmosphere" and "Something with bedrock plz".

Besides, I find it insulting to call me "people like you" and giving a lesson about discussion like you're entitled to it. I don't think it's justified, you know? You're pretty stuck-up for getting a sentence that starts with "I'm deeply sorry to say this, but" and interpreting it as aggressive. The way I see it, there's tons of really bad suggestions with little to no concept behind them and the developers of IC and the add-ons don't have the time to go through everything that's already been suggested, is suggested badly, or denied. If you come up with an idea, you should put some effort behind it, present a concept that's at least a bit elaborate and not just a thought.

We're not here to discuss every single possibility of implementation that some vague idea could imply. While, in my book, it's perfectly legit to say "50k EU, 100k EU, I don't know but those are just numbers", there's a border to the open-ness of an idea.

Now, to your almost philosophical question about why Minecraft should be played at all: You are right about games being a set of rules which players have to obey, but Minecraft is the one game that lets the player choose how and what to do. Minecraft is not the game that tells you to "level up first, then go rescue the princess, then get unobtainium gear, then slay the dragon, then play newgame+" or to "return to the combat zone". A player has to find something that makes his experience worth playing, just like in real life.

It's so easy, isn't it? Getting told exactly what to do and just doing as told. But that is not what Minecraft is about. Ironically enough, Minecraft is about what the player makes of it, and as a consequence of that, many players play like this! Get wood and stone first, then go build a base, then get diamond gear, then slay the enderdragon, then install mods. If they have fun doing this map after map, it's legitimate because they chose to do so.

Looking for flat formations of bedrock? I haven't done it before but I imagine it to be extremely tedious. It's artificial stretching of play time. If you want to enforce multi-dimensional structures, I'm pretty sure IC alone isn't the mod for it. It's not like you need to find a uranium deposit of three adjacent blocks to make nuclear reactors. Challenges are nice, but they need a concept.

Which leads us to my original point: Your idea, in the form that you presented, has no concept. Feel free to elaborate on it, develop it a bit further and make something that, when I read it, makes me say "Damn, I want to play that!". Right now, it's telling me to drill or nuke huge portions of the underground layers in hope of finding a possibility to get more than the infinite iron or lava that I already have.

I don't know if you guys think the same, but I am not too fond of mentioning an estimate of quality in the thread title. So your idea is "crazy" or a "good idea"? I think that's for the forums to judge.

Furthermore, the next best thing I could imagine a bedrock-dependent machine to do is be an infinite lava or iron source that needs EU. We have that already, though... Your idea is a mechanism, not a real idea per se as it has no design behind it. It's like saying "make a machine that interacts with air" and expecting the wind mill to come out of it. Rather, you'd come up with wind mills being an energy source in the first place.

I am deeply sorry to say this, but I believe this thread should be closed. Neither is it an actual idea, nor does it have any feel to it. Exploration is one thing, but is it really that interesting to find flat bedrock surfaces? Stop telling the player what to do! If they want to explore, they will!

Disclaimer: I might sound so, but I don't intend to be arrogant. If you dislike my tone, I apologize beforehand.

Quote from amasone

guys thanks for the response. This actually gives me good discussion material that works with my existing treatment protocols.

1. difference between collaboration vs competition - ie how to build in a system and avoid redundancy. why is redundancy bad/good/nuetral? (i have my answer I want to hear theirs).
2. How does this effect interpersonal relationships? (counseling stuff). can you foster relationships an emphasis on collaboration...or competition...or both?
3. taking the constructive criticism offered how could they use this to build their idea and not abandon it.

as long as its ok, I am gonna update this weekly with the kids responses to any constructive criticism and see were this takes them.

Gonna check out modular power suits as well!

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Redundancy is not good or bad per se, it depends strongly on the application, always. Ask a database guru whether he likes redundancies in his academically clean relational database, he will probably smack you with the nearest reachable kind of raw fish. Ask an avionics engineer whether he wants the electronics of a fighter jet to be redundantly implemented in different ways, he won't be able to agree more.

In our particular case, we're discussing additions to already-existing software, but we're not equal peers to the developers, who actually decide what is implemented and what's not. Collaboration would be if we were a team of developers and creatives who discussed with which gameplay mechanics we could achieve certain effects in the best way possible. There is basically no competition to existing ideas, I'd even consider calling it a taboo - questioning design decisions on this forum, that is. It's "take it or leave it", not really competition.

Interpersonal relationships... You know, from tutoring courses at university, I think I can answer this one. Collaboration will make "the sheep think their opinion is worth shit". Competition will make "the sheep not listen to you because you don't listen to them because you're right". Collaboration will create a comfortable climate, and a comfortable climate generates creativity which will sometimes lead to re-inventing the concept at hand fully. Competition will create either a solid, healthy rivalry where equal peers incite eath other to reach their maximum, or a hostile climate where bad decisions will be taken if it's for the lower good: "my own personal gain" or being right. The/One possible German word for "competition" is "Wettkampf", which, translated word-by-word, means something like "betting fight". It can be mean!

In short, collaboration can generate creativity, whereas competition generates effort. It also depends on the people, collaboration can generate slackers, competition might generate selfishness. Generally, personal glory has no place in this kind of discussion.

Redundancy is bad for Minecraft mods, I think that's for sure. There are small examples like the need for Ore Dictionary. Copper and Tin are added by many different mods, so if you play with multiple mods, you end up having too much of it and not being able to use the ingots from one mod for recipes of the other mod. Thankfully, that's not true, but it took effort to counter it. There are also big examples: If you play with many mods that add item pipes, the amount of knowledge you need to set up a system that uses them all will make your experience turn from "game" to "work".

Minecraft is already a game with a lot to know. Now imagine we had additional alloys besides Bronze, let's say brass, aluminum bronze, lead bronze, gun metal and the like. Say their tools wouldn't be different from bronze tools, give or take minute changes to their durability. We would add additional ores (which forces people to generate new chunks of land in one way or the other), crafting recipies that are not intuitive, would eat up additional block and item IDs or at least make it non-trivial to handle, and for what? Tools that do nothing new.

About your last question... I don't know about your kids, but I suppose there's two sides to constructive criticism: The sender being modest and the receiver trusting the sender to have good intentions. As a first step, I'd try not to read into criticism, under no circumstances. Criticism is not the place for irony, cynicism or sarcasm. Once I allow myself to look for them, every piece of criticism becomes a slight insult. Secondly, be a utilitarist. It's about what makes the final product, the greater good, the best, and not how much pseudo-fame the individual gains. That way, my readiness to change my idea increases.

Lastly, I think it's better to abandon ideas than to forcingly keep them alive. The best of game designers throw thousands of ideas overboard for each good idea they implement.

Being a supporter of "moar config file power" anyway, I'd almost suggest a new thread title prefix for config-file-based suggestions. They will probably make for a lot of small updates?

This is hover mode with better walking speed and no EU consumption, isn't it? We have hover mode!

How come every discussion about balance derails into an "Anarchy Vs. Hard Game" debate...

In competitive play, balancing is needed so that the best player wins: Skill is what you want to measure, and unless you utilize symmetric rules (like in chess, for example), you need to balance different aspects of the game so that no choice of elements gives you an advantage over the other players' skill.

Sandboxes are different, especially survival mode. There are a lot of opinions on this matter, including "If you're not playing survival for die-hard PvP battles, go play creative, you wuss!" If I may state mine: While creative is there to make it easy for you to build things, survival primarily is what you make of it. I personally play it for an additional sense of accomplishment: How did I go about even building my structures? Without free flight, I have to think about scaffolding. On an SMP server, I have to think about how to distribute resources among my friends. And if I build something out of iron blocks, I must have amassed a lot of fortune beforehand. Having had to make all the materials first gives me, personally, a sense of "built this with my own hands".

That's for me. Others think differently. What I'm not getting is this: Why do groups of people tell other groups what survival mode is "supposed to be"? I don't really think it's any different from life - you have to give it a sense for yourself.

Balancing, in survival mode, is everything that distinguishes it from Creative, I'd say. It makes for that sense of accomplishment I described above, but that doesn't mean competitive balancing is necessary for everyone. For example: 64 coal will make a diamond, yes? I think that's fine. It gives coal a use, it gives charcoal a use, and it costs enough to make me consider if I even should make diamonds that way. It will also help me in the case of not finding diamonds for a long time.

Now it's basically IC2's community's publically agreed-on opinion that enchantments are not meant to be used with IC2 equipment. Some people even go as far as to call anything magic-related in Minecraft bollocks. A good example is Fortune. With Fortune, I get more coal. The cost to synthesize diamonds is lowered considerably. Is this "cheating"?

I won't judge whether something like that can even be said, but I'm going to say one thing: Just because IC2 developers think it's cheating doesn't invalidate me having fun. If I think I earned my diamond drill with Fortune III, even though I used Better Enchantmens in the process, what's anyone's opinion to me? Minecraft is a game, games' ultimate sense is fun. Also, why should I care if someone else thinks trading dirt for diamond blocks in a 1:1 ratio is fun? It'd feel un-earned to me, but if they like it, that's fine!

Minecraft leaves you with so many different approaches and situations that balancing per se isn't easy. But the motivation to spend a lot of time and resources must come from the inside! I won't build a huge wheat farm because my modded wheat-bio-diamond needs 4096 wheat for balancing reasons. I will build anything that's huge to lean back and look at my creation.

I've learnt a lot of things about myself, the world and people through Minecraft, but I had fun doing so. I surely wasn't farming stuff because I had to.

With that being said, let me briefly tackle another topic: Automation. IC2 does not provide means of automation, and that's fine. However, I feel that quite a part of IC2's community is a strong opponent of automation and wants IC2 to be deliberately incompatible with it, but I might be wrong with that impression. I wouldn't know why this should be done. Minecraft is full of stuff I don't use, so why cut it out for others?

tl;dr: There are more levels than "anarchic zero balance" and "cobblestone is OP".

This kinda reminds me of Guild Wars back then... "OMG LOOK WHAT SUPER EQUIPMENT I FOUND!!!!!!" refers to "Hyper-Super-Unique Axe of Extreme Undeath (Extra Hyper-rare): 2% chance to leech 1% life (not more than 5) on a hit during full moon in the first half of the chinese year unless wearing green armor or blue wyvern helmets", as if they were afraid to even give the player equipment that did anything.

I don't even know why "balancing" is so important in Minecraft. If it's fun, it's okay!

Quarry as in "Buildcraft quarry"? I don't think that kind of mod interaction is desirable/possible.

Hehe, well, I suggested this already but worded myself so poorly it was generally received as a different suggestion. Welcome to the Forums!

I definitely think the config file could use many more options!

I always wonder what you guys do that makes you need more storage. An 8x8 wall of MFSUs stores amounts of energy I lack the words to dramatically describe how much it is. What's the deal with storage? Lapotron Crystals carry loads of energy, fill a chest with full laps and bam! Over a quarter of a billion EU.

What contraption would unreliably (!!!) use up that much EU that you'd need ridiculous storage for it? Even the weirdest "20 UUM per second" fabricator would still need only infrastructural storage. It eats everything it gets, so why store?

Fully upgraded processing machines work fine with only a few MFSUs I think. Besides, it's much more of a realistic and fun challenge to lay out your infrastructure so the energy gets eaten on demand, not just store gajillions of it. Which the MFSU does imho.

Quote from Barumann

Hehe, I like the idea a lot

sadly, I think the chance of actually seeing this happen is slim. you'd need a few new items which serve only one use (the collider) plus Block ID's AND it'd be a multiblock machine.
If I recall correctly Al the dragon dislikes everything that has but one use. Unless these "coils" would be used in other recipes *cough* tesla * cough* I don't think it to become real.

Also, I remember a discussion where Alblaka explained why he is not a big fan of multiblock machines (something about them being slightly laggier than normal one-block machines I believe). Long story short, other than the nuclear reactor I don't think we'll see anything like that

TL;DR

Fun idea, but don't fix what is not broken

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This. Only one tiny extra: People will want to build the biggest accelerator ever, only to see that the outer chunks of it are not loaded. Else, what you said. Great post, we can now close this thread.

So it needs some sort of table saying what recipe can be "manufactorum'd" how well. That's a lot of work and it's been done in the Mass Fabricator already. Call us trolls as much as you like, but this suggestion does not add anything new, it just makes the mod more complicated by adding features that are already in there.

Quote from FenixR

So manufawatchmacallit = Mass Fabricator?

This. It has no function except replacing crafting materials with energy, and that's what an MF does. If we had a cost of 50kEU "per item needed", very expensive items would be laughably cheap (i.e. MFSU for <0.5MEU?!)

This is almost the same as a replicator. It doesn't add anything new, if you ask me.

I don't know if I'm getting this right... What operation exactly will this machine do? Crafting is already free... Is that a crafting table with a chance to consume less resources but energy instead? This sounds like something we could achieve already by making UUM resources.

I don't see the need for such a recipe. If you have leaves, well, you'll have enough saplings! If anything, maybe a UUM recipe, but wood with leaves? I don't think that makes sense or is needed, sorry.

Quote from MatLaPatate

That's just stupid. Bronze is already a bit useless, thinking you've only 2 hours more to get the Nano Suit. (And about tools ... just use Diamond Drill + Lappack!)
Bronze is already useless after 4 hours playing. Before that, it's long to make, and the time you spend to create Bronze would bring you Ore if you were mining instead of. So just use Iron Tools for the begining.

Well, that's given, yes. Still, why is a metal that's easier to procure than iron better than iron? The only problem right now is that you need a macerator (unless you've got Forestry installed), so before bronze equipment really has a use, you probably already are good enough energy-wise to go with energy consuming tools.

Again, while bronze is already useless, if it were useful, it'd make sense to me to have it be weaker in "hard mode". If "hard mode" meant energy using equipment isn't as easy to keep up (infrastructure-wise), maybe people would choose bronze over energy...

Also, I dearly apologize for wording the suggestion so poorly. I should probably not even have put up that list, as it's really more about better config file customization options than a set of rules. I've made a lot of mistakes in this thread, seeing as we mostly discuss these 3-second ideas I had, rather than file options that should us be able to configure these aspects.

Interesting response. It seems like there's two groups of belief: "There's no need for competitive difficulty in Minecraft" and "Cobblestone is OP". However, I believe I worded myself badly when I suggested this: The core of the suggestion is to give more power to the config file, I admit I shouldn't have titled it "tournament rules" then.

Quote from narc

X-Heiko, I think this idea of "tournament rules" could do well in its own thread -- would you be kind enough to start that?

Done and done.

Hi!

As you might've read in the thread about Machine breakdown mechanics, this idea is off-topic enough and stands as a suggestion alone, hence the new thread.

Rationale:
IC2 is perceived as too easy by experienced players.The breakdown mechanic, from my point of view, doesn't make the game harder but more tedious.

Idea:
Find ways to make the game harder without making it annoying. In order to do that, increase the power of the config file and release a set of "tournament rules". Advanced users can play with these on, leaving easy ways to quick success out of the game and requiring more planning, caution and introducing new dangers to seemingly everyday operation.

Suggestion:
(Note: The list can be expanded greatly in the course of this discussion. These are only my initial thoughts.)

• Wind mills have a high chance to break. Its average lifespan is two in-game weeks before turning into a regular machine block.
• Geothermal generators don't accept pipes and output only 10 EU/t while not consuming lava slower than now.
• Geothermal
  generators have a chance to leak if over-filled. A Generator that's
  filled over 25% is expected to turn into a lava source block within the
  week.
• Solar panels have greatly fluctuating output. A single
  packet can be as large as 33 EU, so regular setups are expected to
  explode within three weeks.
• If not repaired early enough, Nano armor is destroyed when its energy depletes.
• Extracting resin gives 2 rubber.
• Every energy storage loses a percentage of its current energy every tick. (Easier if it's a percentage of the maximum amount.)
• Bronze tools and armor are weaker and less durable than their iron counterparts.
• Macerating an ore only has a chance of doubling the output, but it's not a guarantee.
• Equipment left in a charging station can overheat and be destroyed.
• An active nuclear reactor will damage you unless you wear full nano or quantum armor.
• No rubber saplings.
• Lappack storage is halved.

While these ideas are arguably "lazy difficulty", it illustrates how much of the discussion about "what should be how easy or how hard" can be fixed if there was more awareness about and more power in the config file. An official set of "tournament rules" would imply that anyone who beats certain challenges with these rules would have to publically agreed-on recognition of these forums.

Of course, nobody said we can't have "Super Tournament Rules", too...

Then change the number...