Hmmm interesting thought for the liquid electrolyzer block, kind of like thermal expansion. Though maybe it could have a button in the gui to determine which liquids to accept and output. Atleast in my usage it would require this since more than likely I and possibly others will use teleport pipes with railcraft tanks to provide storage. Having railcraft tanks next to each other would be quite a limitation.
I may be missing something, but it seems to me that using external tanks just gives you more block faces to attach input or output pipes to. If you want to only have it electrolyze, keep the water tank full at all times; if you want to only have it do the opposite, keep it empty at all times. This should just externalize the internal tanks that blocks like the aqueous accumulator have, and if I do it right, I can even give you the tank state in the machine's GUI, scaled to whatever size tank happens to be adjacent. Certainly, you *could* have those be Railcraft tanks, but you wouldn't need to -- just use Buildcraft tanks and teleport your water in and electrolyzed water out of each of them, or the opposite, while still using the Railcraft tanks as long-term storage.
Also I would think having it accept power like a machine would be easier since it is implemented in the ic2 api, though id have to see if it has adjacent energy blocks as an option. But if implemented as a standard machine it can be connected via cable or have energy sources placed next to it and just wrench the sides.
I can see several interesting options, and I agree I don't think I'd *want* to mess with an adjacent energy block, even though the option does exist. My preferred choice would be a Thermal Expansion style side selection, where a side can be water tank, electrolyzed water tank, EU in or EU out, which also gives us the option of having an instance of the machine act in one direction only, e.g. if it only has faces for EU in and none for EU out, it may as well work only to turn water into electrolyzed and never do the opposite action. Having fixed sides is a compromise that would involve a lot of possible rotation options, and the IC2 wrench is not a screwdriver that would let us have different kinds of rotations on click vs. shift-click (referencing screwdriver on frame motors, if that's not obvious).
Not to mention it would be really cool if it could take machine upgrades like the overclocker. Though testing would have to be done to get it all just right. Might make this lower tier of power more useful if it can be coaxed in to outputting higher amounts of energy.
Mhm, overclocker to make it process more water at a time at the cost of reduced efficiency, transformer to make it accept/produce higher-voltage current (which would also make it process more water at a time, but at fixed steps and without the efficiency loss). Storage upgrades just to increase its internal buffer seem less useful, but they might help -- and it's not like we *have to* have special behaviour for it.
I would be more than happy to run the numbers and balance out all your fluids, just give me some time to write it all up and make it look nice and readable and show the math involved so you can double check it. [...] Feel free to post my explanation as well if people request it, or if you think people would be interested in it.
Mhm, I'd greatly appreciate that, as I don't actually play enough Minecraft to really be concerned about it. Balancing was on my "to do" list only if it ever got enough on my nerves to make it worthwhile.
Also, Forestry Crushed Ice would be a good idea to implement.[...]
Yeah, I'd actually forgotten about it (and IC2 coolant, and Railcraft's creosote oil) until after that Forestry integration release, and when I realized that, I ended up deciding it wasn't worth another version bump just to add another liquid or two. After that, I suppose it never really came up again.
Here's an interesting problem: if we have electrolyzed water as a liquid, we could potentially make electrolyzed liquid UU -- either as a combination of the two, or by passing regular UU through the liquid electrolyzer. I'm not sure, however, what that would accomplish. One aspect suggests itself immediately: electrolyzed UU is more (twice as?) powerful in the accelerator, letting you do more with less UU, by supercharging it after the fact. Another aspect pokes into BeamMeUp, where we were kicking around the idea of using liquid UU to reduce rematerialization costs -- perhaps electrolyzed UU would reduce them further, or perhaps it should be the only variant that actually does the EU cost reduction, I'm not sure which would make the most sense. However, this seems like limited (and boring!) utility for something that should be exceptionally awesome, so if you have any ideas what electrolyzed UU should do that regular UU can't, I'd welcome the thoughts.
Also, if it's not obvious from the last two posts, I am quite eager to make this liquid electrolyzer now, particularly as I have a fair idea of how it would work, internally. Might take me a while to work out the parts I'm not sure about, though (like the configurable sides, and the textureFX for electrolyzed water). Expect some kind of progress report in the next 24 hours.
It's a very elegant piece of reflection, though, and makes integration so much cleaner, doesn't it?
