Posts by Misone

I'm new to this forum so i was not aware it had been suggested before, though when you say that it has, do you mean to imply that its already been considered and rejected?

After reading this thread i felt the burning need to register an account, just so i can toss out here an idea for a compromise that would add a little lasting inconvenience WITHOUT having to make solar units break, or permanently nerfing their EU output into irrelevance.

now on one side of this coin there is the fact that solar panels in real life typically last a very long time, as long as they are not damaged or defective, on the other side of this coin people arguing to have them nerfed seem primarily annoyed with "solar spammers" riding the easy train with massive solar farms that lag SMP servers to hell, and require no further effort after being built.

what i have not heard in any of this is anyone considering a very real downside to Photovoltaic Arrays in real life, they accumulate dirt and dust, depending on the local environment they can get very dirty, this saps their output, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, when this happens there is only two things that can help, rainstorms, or manual cleaning.

now before anyone argues against this idea with something like: "but the spammers will simply take advantage of the rainstorms in Minecraft." that wouldn't guarantee them anything, besides being random, rain rarely cleans all the dirt off of solar panels in real life (why should it be any more effective in Minecraft), and it doesn't help them in deserts where their no rain at all, or worse in the cold biomes where they get to add snowfall to their headaches.

so then spammers using 100+ unit solar arrays would have a huge headache of cleaning all those solar panels, otherwise the bottom will fall out on the arrays efficiency, thus they get left with a choice of periodically cleaning a massive number of arrays, or they have to settle for greatly diminished returns on their laziness, even a loss as little as 10-20% would add up quickly on large arrays, visually it could be as simple as having the actual cells on the top of the block become darker as dirt builds up.

as an added bonus, certain tradeoffs can be worked in, such as say having solar panels produce 50% more power in desert biomes, with the tradeoff being both they get dirty 50% faster, and lack of rainfall would necessitate manual cleaning.

plus having certain other biomes such as swamps make them get dirty quicker without any upside, making them a less desirable option there.

I'll admit i don't know a whole lot about coding, but in theory the changes could work something like this:
so you have a single solar block in the desert at high noon, by being in a desert its EU output has increased 50% to 1.5EUT, but its built up enough dirt/dust to drop its effeciency 60%, so instead its putting out 0.6 EUT.

that loss in efficiency will only get worse until it gets cleaned, at which point its output will shoot back up to 1.5EUT, until inevitably it gets dirty again.

the dirt/dust variable doesn't even need to be all that complicated, this example assumes it can range from 0-4, with every level above 0 incurring a 20% loss, with each cell building up dirt at a rate of say 1-3 levels a day.

the basic cleaning tool could be a rag made from a cotton block and a bucket of water, with say each block yielding a couple of rags, and its electric counterpart could be some sort of power washer.

i know it would take a fair bit more coding to pull off (and i figure it would require two or three more data variables that each solar cell block has to keep track of), but this seems to me a fairly effective way to cut down on "solar spammers", by making solar power a little more involved.