Posts by Androsynth

  • 1.3.2 Nuclear power changes?

    I'm torn between accepting that final sentiment, "I'm playing the wrong game," and sticking to the notion that everyone plays Minecraft differently, so how is my style any less right than someone else's? NOT gates won't work because the whole safety system was predicated on having three separate inputs from three separate comm lines tied to three separate control systems. Three inputs to the reactor, post-update, will have the effect of turning the reactor on if any one of the three conditions is met (assuming I use NOT gates), which is not the desired behavior. I'd need the three control systems to all hit an AND gate, and feed the output from that gate to a single point on each reactor. The AND gate is a single point of failure, since a single piece of redstone on it could break, resulting in the output torch lighting, and the whole system would go kaboom. It's far less elegant & notably less safe, and it'd be an ordeal to switch over to that kind of setup. Anyway, you folks have all convinced me to give up the fight. Not that it ever realyl was a fight. I'd already quit really. I'm sorry for wasting everyone's time and energy here.

  • 1.3.2 Nuclear power changes?

    I guess my friends and I just play this game differently than most people. We're trying to build a living, breathing community and invest in public works projects that will endure for the long term. The mods have been balanced so that there is no "end game" for us. We've built a massive rail network with switching stations, and a mail system based off buildcraft pipes with a serialized communication system for dialing addresses, a high energy corridor for power sharing, huge artistic works, and so on. There's only a handful of us and we just don't have the time to go back and re-do major projects any time there's a minor change to something fundamental. Mojang and the IC2 guys are building a canvas upon which to create remarkable works, but it's like they periodically change the cloth in a way that we lose a whole color. I don't really get it.


    I don't mind the nuclear update overall, since the internal mechanics of the reactor don't really affect anything. Sure, it renders certain design elements (falling water, ice pumps) unnecessary, but what really gets me is that the fundamental means of control was totally reversed without any option to keep it the same. If I'd built my reactor control system on a different server, the operator would've probably updated, started the server, and two minutes later I'd be living in a massive crater because my four Mark 5 reactors would all have turned on. What can the justification possibly be for doing that to people?


    I still want someone to accept my deal, I make a $10 donation and they make reactor redstone input a configurable choice going forward. It's worth it to me to continue playing this game without feeling like an idiot for wasting 40 hours of my life on a design that was rendered obsolete the very same week.

  • 1.3.2 Nuclear power changes?

    Magus, thank you for acknowledging that it's such an exasperating situation.


    I had an idea a few moments ago. How about I donate $10 to the IC2 team, and in exchange, someone adds an option to nuclear reactors to make their redstone behavior configurable, similar to a batbox or an MFS?

  • 1.3.2 Nuclear power changes?

    My server won't be upgrading MC versions specifically because of the new IC2 nuclear power changes. It seems like the response to renewable energy being overpowered (zero maintenance, huge return) is always to buff the hell out of nuclear. But meanwhile coal, biofuel, lava, etc. get more and more useless especially in consideration of how labor intensive they are. Meanwhile nuclear goes from being complicated to more complicated, and in an unnecessary single-line code change, every reactor MK3 or above is set to self destruct, with no support for backwards compatibility. That last part is so unnecessary. Don't get me wrong, I love this mod, and I'm grateful to the developers, but for feedback purposes I'm just throwing it out there: I quit the day it was announced that redstone behavior for nuclear reactors changed for no reason.


    I had just spent 40 hours engineering and building a number of redstone systems to allow safe operation of a series of otherwise highly unstable Mark 5 reactors. In order for the reactors to come online, three conditions have to each be met, and each condition has a separate line of redstone current to disable one of three torches that's safely positioned behind multiple layers of reinforced stone and glass, which if all else fails, would light up to keep the reactor safely disabled by default. The operator has to enter an appropriate combination into a redstone combination lock in order to disable the first torch. He has to stand on a pressure plate (so if he dies or walks away, reactors will shutdown safely) to disable the second torch. And the operator can run the reactors for increments of at most 10 seconds at a time, by using a button to trigger a redstone timer, to disable the third torch. All three systems tie into all four reactors, and the output is substantial on a server that's been balanced by the removal of renewable power and the halving of nuclear power output, to its original level of 5 EU/t per uranium. Even if I had the energy and will to re-engineer and re-build everything, conceptually it can never possibly work the same, because there will always be a single point of failure in the new system - since all it takes is a single redstone wire being lit to keep the reactor going.


    I guess the reason I'm posting about this at all is because I want someone to recognize how exasperating it all is. Spending tons of time on a design that's elegant, and inspired by the kinds of redundant systems that would be used for a real nuclear plant, and having it all get messed up by a single line of code that someone took 5 seconds to change, because they just felt like it. I used to think it was just Notch and Jeb who did this to their players, but now I think it's everyone. Sorry if this seemed like a rant. Respond to it if you want, but I won't be back to read any of it.

  • Mass fabricator uses power when turned off

    It's happening on my Tekkit server with the latest stable build. I found the number of mods in Tekkit to be a real mess, so I actually pared it back to just IndustrialCraft and Buildcraft. I can't imagine it's a compatibility issue, since it's not related to any kind of interaction between IC2 blocks and any other mod, but I suppose I can't rule it out yet. I'll try on a vanilla IC2 server, it's just hard finding the time. The workaround we use it to simply break the cable instead of using redstone to power down the mass fab.


    I do however want to stress that this is not a singleplayer issue. And it's not an issue of just being unable to turn off a mass fab in multiplayer. It happens exclusively when you have a mass fab turned off, AND people are all logged out. I look at the battery while i'm logged in and there's no drain whatsoever, because the mass fab has successfully been turned off by redstone. However if I log out, and log back in, I can see that in my absence the battery has lost EU at a rate of 512 EU/t. I unplug the mass fab from the glass fiber cable, and this behavior stops. I haven't seen anybody else explicitly describe themselves testing under these conditions; there appear to be a few misunderstandings.

  • Mass fabricator uses power when turned off

    I run an IC2 server, and we're encountering a bug where the mass fab consumes power when everyone is logged off. I've tried using a splitter wire to cut power to it, as well as applying a redstone signal directly to the mass fabricator. In both cases, a solution that successfully shuts off the mass fab while we're logged in, winds up sapping power constantly the moment we log out - and we don't get any mass for our trouble, either! This is a huge issue for my server, because I've rebalanced power generation, and eliminated renewables. All energy is based on fuel, and so accumulating a lot requires a lot of work. So finding out your MFSU is totally drained, and having no idea why, is significant. Thankfully we have a workaround in that we can just cut the wire completely, which seems to stop the loss.


    My experience aside from this small blip has been that your mod is incredibly solid and I want to thank you so much for the hours of enjoyment. Great work!

  • [Suggestion] Solar Helmet Config

    If it were 1 EU/t in sunlight I'd think it was a clever device for
    trickle charging. But it doesn't make sense at 9 EU/t, with a surface
    area that's lower than that of a single ordinary solar cell. At 9 EU/t it's
    practically like having a coal generator going non-stop without the need
    for any fuel. This completely eliminates the need to budget power for tools. You haven't made anything resembling an argument for not
    including it in the config. It should be included along with the other power producing devices, so that balance can be appropriately tweaked.

  • [Suggestion] Solar Helmet Config

    We now have the ability to tweak power levels for renewable energy producers, which is great - I can run my world off coal, biofuel, and nuclear now. But the new solar helmet and static boots re-introduce the concept of worry-free limitless energy supplies. Can we get the production rate of the helmet and boots added into the config, too?