Posts by X-Heiko

What's the problem with it being easy? Minecraft isn't the place for over-zealous balancing: If it's fun, it's fun. When I feel tech-styled Minecraft is too easy, I play TerraFirmaCraft for a while. Or I take a look in the config files as to what I can make harder.

Minecraft, and IC2, too, have a playful approach to a realistic scenario. We fly around in body armor made of materials we gained from pure energy, powered by nuclear reactors.

Maybe I should say this again. We fly around in body armor made of materials we gained from pure energy, powered by nuclear reactors.

Let it be a game, a game with configurable difficulty. Tediousness is not difficulty, it's lazy difficulty. Recipe output tweaking, difficulty setting-dependent Generator efficiency, more use for player experience, that'd be ideas to make the game harder and thus more fun. That's what we want, isn't it? Make it harder and thus more fun.

IC2 is complicated enough. Being all stuck-up about people using automation whereas IC2 hardliners are against that is childish. If IC2 were designed as an opposition to automation, why is my geothermal generator BC compatible? Why do we have cells?

If you want to hear my idea on how to make the game harder: I first must admit that there's loads of config file features I don't know about. Still, if they were to expand, we should just release a set of, let's call it, "Tournament rules". Want a suggestion?

• 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 2% of its current energy every tick.
• 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.

Or things like that, I don't know, these are just spontaneous ideas. I'd prefer we challenge ourselves in a Minecraft-ish way instead of artificially making the game hard tedious and annoying.

Well, I'd be careful to mention IC2 is about automation on this particular forum...

A basic gripe I have with a machine weardown mechanic is: I don't see it being fun.

After all, everything you implement in a game has the ultimate goal of being fun in some way. Of course, sometimes you decide to make it harder for the player so that they feel a sense of accomplishment when they beat your challenge. But something like "Oh man, I have to craft a new macerator soon" is artificial hassle. Such things work best if you make them benefits. I liked how the engine tuning in Hot Rod and Hot Rod 2 was handled.

You'd basically just re-adjust a little line to touch the red line in the center, nothing big. Whenever you drive, the line moves away a bit. If you drive a lot without re-adjusting, you won't achieve max speed. So why not adjust turn momentum and frequency of a macerator? Say, the difference between an unattended machine and a machine that's maintained after each operation is 50% (As in: the worst part is 100, the best one is 150). It could be about operation EU cost alone, doesn't need to improve speed.

What's wrong with "right-click to enter inventory"-type backpacks? We actually have teleporters, so what about the following idea:

• The recipe for this backpack includes a teleporter, and possibly iridium plates.
• Right-clicking a chest with this backpack registers the coordinates of the exact block that was right-clicked with the item (or, for performance, the player).
• Right-clicking a non-chest with this backpack when a valid inventory resides in the last registered location accesses that inventory (chest).
• You can remotely put items into the chest for a certain amount of EU.
• You can remotely get items from the chest for a certain amount of EU that can differ from putting. After all, not every chest is equipped with a teleporter, eh?
• Special chests could be linked to an energy net and provide with the energy you need to get items, minimizing/lowering the energy needed for that.
• What happens if you try and teleport nuclear materials or Lapotron crystals? I suppose it depends on the char-
• If you put the teleporter backpack in itself, it lands in the remote chest.

EU should be drawn from an internal source or a Lappack. One Lappack should store enough energy to be able to deposit, say, the load of two or three mining trips while also powering your tools during them. Discussion: Should you be able to keep a RP2 system in place that lets you pull an energy crystal when needed so that you can recharge the teleporter backpack and put empty crystals in there? My take on this would be: Sure, that's fine because what's it to IC2 how people combine other mods? At some point, the distance will grow so much that energy crystals and the internal storage will not be enough for the teleport!
Also, for hardcore players: Maybe there's a slight chance that a transfer doesn't succeed? Or will teleport failures result in the creation of different things? Will dirt accidentally turn into glass?

Not anymore, apparently. I remember the Wiki saying that before, but it seems to have been taken out. In that case, I wonder if the idea is accepted for a different crafting recipe.

Wow, I think saying "thank you" is in order! Thanks, man!

Quote from RockJB

It's kinda hard to get Nuclear Reactors, UU Matter and Quantum armor going on "normal" IC2.
[...]
I think Quantum is OP because it only takes 1 million EU per piece. That's easy to get, I know.

Err... I must be overlooking something, because this sounds like a contradiction to me, no?

The ominous refrigerating cooling... er, HAYO?

I meant "enigneer" as in "think about how you can un-snowify as many panels as possible using as little resources as possible", spreading torches is one possibility.

That's kind of my point. The question was about the north pole. When people say "north pole", they mean "a super cold place", but it's also the place where the Earth's axis-to-sun angle changes most quickly within a year. It can be the point that's farthest away from the sun, it's extremely inaccessible, I don't know about its weather situation... I'm not one to say "Naw, photovoltaics is gonna work there fo' sure!"

In Minecraft, snow biomes are just cold, and if I'm not mistaken, there's no reason to say the distance to the sun would be affected. Didn't electronic circuits work best in cold, dry environments, too?

Also, I like Gregs idea a lot: if it snows on solar panels (or the glass/transparent block above them), they stop working but were very efficient before. That'd leave us with a solution that makes almost everyone happy: Those who think solar panels are too easy to use because they're "place and forget" play in a snow biome and witness their true power (or engineer something that automatically melts the snow... contradictory because we originally said the efficiency came from the cold...), while others keep playing the way they do.

Quote from GregoriusT

3. dont call us all Assholes, even when we (for example X-Heiko) try to follow your Idea constructivly.

Hey, thanks!

Yes, I agree. It shows rather juvenile/adolescent behaviour if you enter a society, barely try to adapt to it, get the usual repercussions anyone would get (besides the fact that people have been treated way more rudely on this forum before) and then insult it out of your disappointment.

When I post suggestions, I try very hard to work it out so the line between "It doesn't need to be 5%, it can be 7%, too, but that's just balancing" and "This is the principle I would like to see applied in the game." Even if you aren't suggesting something elaborate but just pointing out an idea, all you posted was a name. We genuinely don't know what you mean, besides the name "steam generator" or similar.

Besides, I feel this community is very forgiving. I think Greg and I had a harsh dispute over something some time ago, but I've forgotten it ever since because he, like many here, understands that it's not the personality of a poster that you can judge their ideas by. That doesn't mean you, in my opinion, shouldn't apologize.

I must say that I find the whole "it's possible in other mods" answers a bit confusing. The suggestions are about IC2, and everything is renewable in the mod that shall not be spoken of. Where's the line?

Ooh, but it's fun to play around on an nVidia Tesla

Anyways, I prefer "Minecraft logic", like in nuclear reactors. The irony, of course, is that... that is a cellular automaton. Also, IndustrialCraft doesn't seem to be about macroconstruction as much as, say, TerraFirmaCraft.

I don't think you should be able to smelt cobblestone/smoothstone into lava sources, because that'd mean one lava source can create infinite lava sources, "just add water".

Of course, that's not even what you said directly.

I think I understand what's meant... You'd have to code a cellular automaton that describes air movement and have the windmill re-coded. If you were to build a huge tower that has asymmetrical input/output areas and a drop in temperature, there'd be a wind, for instance.

Still, that automaton would have to be an algorithmic masterpiece to run smoothly on SMP servers. Imagine a simple set of rules applied to air blocks, represented as tuples of a (pressure, temperature) schema:

In a tick:
If the block is above lava: increase temperature by 5. (insert more values for fire, glowstone, torches etc.)
If the block is around ice: decrease temperature by 5. (again, more values for water, snow...)
The temperature of this block of air in the next tick is a weighted average of all adjacent blocks.
If the weighted average of temperature adjacencies of this block is higher than this block's temperature, decrease pressure by 1.
If it's lower, increase.

Or something like that. I really don't want to know how many air blocks would have to constantly recompute their shit, imagine a few random values thrown in. This could be parallelized very nicely, but would take loads of cores. A approximation model using bigger chunks of air or a simpler model (if something hot is below, there's a stream upwards) would be doable, but then, why not just stick to windmills?

However, I agree about the presentation of this suggestion. 50 EU/t.

That is a different question. If you were to ask "does a solar panel work better on a tundra or a desert, given they are both on the same latitude?"

"The north pole" is a difficult topic, polar nights and stuff. All I know is that even in central Europe, photovoltaic solar panels already overheat, so I guess it's not a viable solution in deserts, as pointed out by Greg.

Not a bad idea! This whole "solar panels tend to overheat" story seems like a plan...

Huh? He just said that, even if the rubber boots had infinite resistance, seeing as the lightning has already punched through very much air, it's probably able to bypass the air surrounding the shoes. If rubber had infinite resistance, going through it wouldn't be the "easiest way", right?

Seriously? Again?

Prepare for the phrases "search function" and "denied already".

Quote from GregoriusT

burning down your House.

Now, wouldn't that be fun...