Posts by Two

Pre-charged batteries. Which also act as cables.

I am not sure if I get your point. First you reduce everything to Frames, then you say reducing it to just a few blocks is wrong.

And if you'd seen my final crawler, you'd agree that the 5 blocks were enough. Ok add chests for storage and I think I forgot about the deployer, but that's it. No redwire, a timer + delay was the total "tons of circuits", no cables, no enderchest, no Thermopiles, no chunkloader. But to be honest: this wasn't the first one I build, more like the 20th one, and the previous did include a lot of stuff that turned out to be not required in the end. It is all about researching the most efficient setup like someone in this thread said before.

And with that perfect transition, back to the initial topic.

Quote from Chocohead

She added a furnace, and an alloy furnace. IC2 adds an entire processing line, flight and a sensible way of hiding your cables. The sorting machines were nice, but never really seemed to be fully expanded to what they could be.

I meant the block-breaker, Filter, Tubes, Motor and Frame combination that allowed you to create countless of machines including but not limited to: flying fortress, underground ore crawler, automatic tree farming, gravel to flint converter, spawner-tractor, automated doors, draw-bridges, secret stairs, traps, an so much more.

And all that out of only 5 blocks.

The Blue-electric implementation was very unfinished and a good reason to install IC2 alongside.

I am not sure where you got that 'rushing through' idea after I clearly said that I like it if mods take it a little slower, but then you already gave the answer by just rewriting the "quote" as you want to support your argument. How about we take out the emotion of this discussion and stay with the facts instead?

I feel that some people here have the idea in mind that anything that is fun is as well OP, so to have something balanced, the player needs to feel pain and tediousness all over the place. This is the common concept of "It was painful for me, so it has to be painful for others too!", which is one way of designing/playing the game. I know that some people love the "torture" of a hard-mode and that is why I have nothing against Greg Tech as an addon for those who love it, but for the general game it is a bad idea to assume that the same concept holds true for everyone out there.

Reward without challenge is no reward but a gift. That's absolutely true and that is why every reward needs to have a proper challenge to feel good. The question that I am asking is: does a challenge need to be painful or can it be fun, too?

I took the nuclear reactor as an example earlier, because it is imo a very good concept for fun gameplay. You can just throw in a single cell and get EU out of it, which is the easy entrance part. You can assemble some basic stuff to get more EU out of it, which is the learning phase. And you can spend hours of testing, modifying and researching to create the one perfect setup for your situation, which is the hard-to-master part, including explosion and total destruction of your setup + home if you screw up, which is the challenge part. Now if you like that kind of challenge, you can enjoy it fully, if you don't, you can just look up a recipe that works on the wiki and ignore the entire mini-game. You won't probably get as much out of it as you could, but it works and doesn't annoy you. In the end you still need to pay the resources to get your EU like everyone else, so no gain beside time from looking it up on the wiki AND you don't need to redo the same again once you "played through" the mini-game, because then it becomes boring at some point.

Now players can theoretically look up everything on the wiki, build something according to a tutorial without spending a single thought on the details and then complain that there is nothing to do anymore, like many do in current theme-park MMOs. But then it is not your job to cure laziness and you just have to accept that those players are not the target audience instead of trying to force them to "enjoy" the game. Because if you try to force them, all you archive is to frustrate them, which then turns into more complaining.

Now IC2 is a tech mod, and the core fun comes out of fiddling around with the components to get the perfect setup. The nuclear reactor is one example, and so is the ENet and the crop system. And all I ask is to follow that path further and design the components and additions to be as well fun to fiddle around as they are balanced in terms of resources/time. Putting every ingot into the crafting grid twice with a Forge Hammer is neither complicated, nor requires it any thinking, nor does it add anything to the game beside a time-sink, effectively turning into an annoyance very soon, aka "grinding" or "tediousness". So this is not following the initial IC2 concept of having fun with the toys you get, and that is why I think it should be removed and/or replaced with something else.

The prime example of a fun Minecraft mod is (even though I don't like her personally) Eloraams machines. Beside all balance issues: what you get is a set of easy to make tools that everyone understands withing a few minutes of gameplay, but the possibilities are close to unlimited. With like 5 (each on it's own easy to grasp) blocks, people have assembled millions of creations happily for days and month.

Just remembered: http://www.minecraftforum.net/…ds-options-profiles-news/

Here you got your launcher.

Quote from Chocohead

The only tedious things in IC2 result in getting things to be less tedious.

And now to loop back to my initial post: you can design the mod in a way that the player is pushed by annoying things and tedious tasks to advance and automate this using the mod's tools, which will result in players being initially frustrated, then happy. Or you can design the mod that it is fun right from the start and then gets even better the further you proceed, causing the player to be happy then even more happy while playing.

The later however is much more difficult but also much more desireable.

Quote from Nonotan

Seriously, minecraft is about the challenge of building and designing fun/effective things, not "crafting one of every machine until I get the highest tier machine, then quit and make a new world".

Exactly. That is why building things should be fun, not tedious.

Quote from SpwnX

You dislike mining for stuff, while the game is called Minecraft?

In no part of my post I said that nor hinted it.

Quote

The same time you spend fiddling with stuff, you can spend to think ways to quickly reach your resource goal.

I could as well spent the time to learn a new language or watching a movie, but I decided to spent it on having fun with Minecraft. However gathering resources is only one part of the game, using them is the second. Let me put it this way: assume you have a full double-chest of every resource available and 10 of the biggest EU storage units available full of EU. What do you do with it?

Quote from Nonotan

GT has AWESOME machines though, IC2 doesn't have even one-tenth the amount of features present in GregTech.

That's great, and I love a little challenge, but then I am playing Minecraft for fun and do the work during the other hours of the day and not vice versa. And the main difference between those is tediousness. Features do not add fun just because they exist, they need to be designed properly to be fun.

Example: let's say a recipe takes 20 diamonds to build. Mining diamonds is not a challenge, it just takes time. Give me a few pick-axes and enough time and I mine 100reds of diamonds without dieing once. Effectively the 20-diamond recipe is not adding fun but tediousness, even though it is "hard" to build.
A good example for fun is the IC2 nuclear reactor: it in the end only produces EU/tick for a given amount of resources, but you can spend lots of time fiddling around with the content, trying to squeeze out the most EU for the least resource without blowing it up. You can have a lot of fun with this "minigame", even though it takes time and in the end only converts resources to EU technically similar to a coal generator.

But then it is a lot easier to just write a 20 diamonds into a recipe then to come up with something as fun as a nuclear reactor, and that's sadly why most developers do the first.

Edit: For the pipe network have a look at ProjectRed. Very well done imo, even though it is not yet polished and slightly complicated.

Quote from Nonotan

Two: How can you hate GT and love IC2? There's way more fun things in GT!

Basically what SegFaulter said: GT for me is not fun but tedious. It basically stretches the IC2 experience by adding intermediate steps that are neither entertaining nor fun, and in the end you - again - sit there with now millions of EU and nothing to spend them on.

The Forge Hammer is an excellent example for this: it adds nothing to the game, it doesn't even have a purpose resource-wise, it is just a time-sink, but at the same time makes building tedious for no other reason but to sink time. Game-dev-wise this is about the easiest way to stretch a game, but as well the worst, and I would love to see IC2 go a different path here.

Realism isn't entertainment, it's just realism. I got plenty of that outside my front door.

Quote from Eliav24

I love how everyone old in this forum is certain that the changes to IC2 to be more Gregtech-like are great, and that everything is too easy, while EVERYONE here is a two years ic2 player and a Gregtech user himself.

I am a >2 year IC2 player and I hate Greg-Tech and don't want IC2 to become Greg-Tech 2.

As far as I can tell, Ender-IO is a mod that basically consists of various ways to create power, which can then be used to double ingot output from ore. That's very mature.

However I agree that IC2 has somewhat lost it's direction. Rewriting the entire concept is maybe a good thing, however I don't really see the big picture behind this. Either because there is none, or I can't see it, I cannot tell. But if there is one I am not seeing, it would be great if those who see it could explain it to me and the rest of the community.

I personally don't see that there is not enough gain for the materials invested. I actually switched some mod settings recently to cut the ingot production in half (I just hate this double-ingot stuff), because I was swimming in resources so fast after deploying the miner, without anything to use them for.

The big problem would be that hardly 2 people have the same mod-set. So either everyone would be pissed because their personal must-have mod is not included or the launcher really does just copy the IC2 mod file to the correct directory, which would be such a minor task, that writing a launcher for that would be total overkill.

I don't think this is reasonable with only a hand-full of people (compared to everyone who plays MC) actually playing IC2.

2 Billion items in one chest... I like my shelf. It only has 20 slots, but it looks good on the wall.

But back to topic: what is the purpose of that Research-book? I am not sure if I get it, because if you can just easily copy it, where is the research?

Quote from NDospark320

Why? I think it's best, or perhaps only solution.

If you think that in an imaginary world, your idea is the only possible solution, you are wrong by definition.

I wonder what those people do if they have like a gazillion Diamond-blocks. Put them in a chest?

Quote from Chocohead

the metal former takes time but will last forever.

Technically the metal former is the same as the forge hammer, it just uses a different resource to form the metal (namely EU instead of iron) and is less tedious once set up.

There are people who like to research stuff their own way, and there are people who like to just look everything up on the wiki. Now forcing the later to do the first, would just annoy these people. I always have the option to not look up things on a Wiki, but with an enforced research system I would no longer have the option to skip that part.

And regarding the Wiki: I realized that I am an IC2-Hipster: I wrote (parts of) the nuclear article before it was cool... get it?

You just need to be careful to not make the whole thing too Terrafirma-craft. Or as a friend of mine once said: "I am playing Minecraft to build things, and not to figure out how I could potentially build something in a few days for countless, tedious hours!"

This is something where RedPower went down the perfect path game-dev-wise: you got a hand full of block which were easy to make, but you could assemble them in so many different ways, that even after days of playing "Lego" with these simple blocks, you still had that one new idea the next day and never had the feeling that the game plays against you.

Quote from SirusKing

@Above It isn't research if you know it all completely all ready ;P

It isn't anymore. It was when I played IC2 for the first time and my friends and I blew up countless bat-boxes and other machines while trying to figure out how all the stuff works. Our first nuclear reactor was probably the safest construction I ever made, but we were sure it would explode any second... and it did.

Now that I have researched about everything IC2 related and know the recipes out of my head, I absolutely don't want to go through all that again... and again... and again... and again... and again...