Posts by Tallinu

Quote from huldu

Can you discharge the internal EU storage from the charging bench to other machines connected to it?

Not directly, the charging bench is designed for transferring energy into items rather than other machines. What you can do though is to charge batteries or energy crystals in a bench and then place them into a battery station, which will emit the power to your machines as needed. You can build an automated system to do this with relative ease, or you can move items by hand.

If you want to drain all of the energy out of a charging bench (perhaps to relocate it), I'd suggest attaching a lever and activating it to stop the bench from accepting energy before charging the batteries/crystals.

Or if you just want to limit how much energy it accepts to some value lower than its normal maximum, attach a storage monitor with a card monitoring the bench, and invert its output with a redstone torch. The torch can be right next to the bench. Set the upper threshold to the maximum energy you want the bench to store, and the lower to some level at which you want it to begin recharging.

If you happen to have a very high rate of energy being transferred over the cables connected to the bench (from multiple storage units or several transformers converting down from higher voltages), you could even limit the bench's storage to 10% or less using that method, so that it keeps only a small buffer and accepts that incoming energy at the same time as it spends it to recharge items!

Quote from M87

Oh. My. God. Thanks so much for the storage monitors! Creating my self-managing electricity grid just got easier. Now i can detect a low storage device whilst having the storage device itself set to stop emitting on redstone signal.

Thanks a bunch!

Glad to hear you're finding it useful! Shutting off a normal storage unit's output with that signal isn't a use we'd considered, so thanks for the idea.

Quote from Watchful11

a large number of MFSU's. 30-40 if possible.

That many, eh? And here we are only building more than one if we set up power plants in multiple locations...

Personally, I'm leaning toward the "several card slots" approach with the monitor summing the energy values. Even if they only had six slots or so, you'd be able to place just a handful of monitors instead of one per storage unit. Either way you'd just run a line of redstone next to all of them to get your 'something needs power' signal, but it would be much smaller that way.

It might very well end up being an "improved" or "Multi-storage" monitor with a costlier crafting recipe, though. But once again, no promises. Pantheis and I will have to discuss this some more to decide where we want to go with the mod.

Quote from Watchful11

Make it possible to create a single link card that sums up multiple storage units. So you can have the one block output redstone based on an entire system of MFSU's.

Interesting suggestion. Let me see if I understand it correctly. You want to be able to tag any number of storage blocks with one card, put it in the monitor, and have the monitor display (and act on) the sum of the current energy levels and the sum of the maximum storage of all the blocks?

We had originally been considering a feature which would allow the monitor to handle multiple blocks by simply giving it more slots in which to place link cards. I'm not sure what to think of the idea of using a single card for all the blocks, though. It would at the very least require a redesign of the card systems, unlike our original concept.

We may still do something like this eventually, but I'm not going to make any promises on what form it will take, when it will be added, or if it will actually be added at all.

If IC2's beta works for you on that version of forge, then I suspect that this mod will work as well. We're compiling it using forge build 353, but we are not aware of anything that would prevent it from working on later versions. Give it a shot, and let us know what your results are either way!

Yusunoha, the batpack's location hasn't changed. Compare the position of the armor slots on the Charging Bench's GUI to the location of the armor slots on your player inventory. The bench GUI simply displays your player's armor slots in addition to your main inventory space.

To charge your batpack, move it from that column on the left into the charging area to the right of the energy meter. You can shift-click or drag and drop. When it's done charging, shift-clicking the output or dragging it back to those armor slots will equip it right back onto your character.

We are going to TRY to get the 1.4.2 version posted tonight. We'd like to have proper screenshots and all that ready to go, and last he checked Pantheis couldn't fit all of the info text into the OP of this thread anymore! So we're going to have to figure out what to do about that. Cross your fingers that Murphy, life, and time constraints don't interfere too badly!

Worst case is that it gets posted tomorrow sometime, but I'm really eager to get these new features out there for people to play with in their 1.4.2 worlds!

Here's a little preview...

You're familar with the three on the left. The next three are Battery Stations, and the last is the Storage Monitor.

Oh, but before you start thinking we haven't improved the Charging Bench itself...

Okay, it's purely cosmetic, but see that faint glow effect around the digits on the "LED display panel" there? Is that nifty or what? And you can expect to see more of that kind of thing on some of the new additions.

Oh, and before I forget, yes, you'll be able to upgrade charging benches. Or downgrade them, should you desire. Without losing the previous bench's components.

Quote from Oneoutway

I can't tell what all the recipes are by just looking at them and hovering my mouse over them doesn't' help.

Good point. I'll poke Pantheis to update the OP to include the recipe components, which are as follows. Not sure why this wasn't in the readme all along.

LV Charging Bench:

1 Batbox
3 Insulated Copper Cable
1 Electronic Circuit
4 Wooden Planks

MV Charging Bench:

1 MFE
3 2x Insulated Gold Cable
1 Electronic Circuit
4 Wooden Planks

HV Charging Bench:

1 MFSU
3 4x Insulated HV (Iron) Cable
1 Electronic Circuit
4 Wooden Planks

Prerelease 9 works properly.

If you can't run that release because of the forge version required for Mystcraft, any commit after the pull Pantheis mentioned but before the chunk loading changes were added should work if you know how to compile it yourself.

Quote from Ook

Is there an uncharging bench or a way for the charging bench to act as one?
Trying to come up with another way of transferring power (currently using lava cans) from the nether that doesn't involve using up a ton of tin on cans. (no mystcraft. need forge > 247 for other mods)
charging up a crystal works great but I can't think of a way to drain a lapotron reliably. (mucking about in a test world)

Any mod that can filter items based on damage value should be able to selectively extract a drained crystal from the battery slot on the bench, or the appropriate slot on a MFSU. Logistics Pipes, RedPower (when it finally comes out), etc should work. All sides of a bench have access to the battery slot, so the advanced wooden pipe (I forget what mod adds that) should work as well, and it might work for the MFSU if you can come up with a way to send items in through the wooden pipe as well as accept them from it. Does that help?

So what we're considering right now is an item that you craft with a bench to get an item. The item, when used on an existing bench, will change the existing bench into the bench that was used to craft the item, and the already-placed bench will be returned to your inventory. The energy stored would be retained in the 'upgraded' bench, as would any items contained in it, including upgrades. This would allow you to 'upgrade' a bench without losing the existing one.

Additionally, we want to add recipes for disassembling the benches so that you can recover your batbox, MFE, or MFSU (and possibly some of the other components). This way, after upgrading a bench, you'll be able to recover the batbox or MFE that was used to make it so that you can reuse it to expand your power network if you wish, rather than having old unused benches sitting around gathering dust - and if you made more than one HV charging bench for multiple locations, but don't end up using one, you can just take it apart.

We haven't started work on this just yet, and other ideas are welcome, but we both want to add a feature like this. I think it would help make the charging bench even more convenient to use - or disuse.

Quote from heatheriac

So I'm using pretty much all the latest:
MC 1.3.2
FML: 3.1.35.394
Forge 4.2.5.303
IC2 1.107.35
Charge Bench 1.0.9-IC2_1.106

And built a HV bench wired into an MV power grid with fiber cable. A cable coming into the bottom of the bench wouldn't charge (gui stuck at 0 and no items charging) and a cable coming from underneath, one block over (so that it right angle's directly into the side of the bench) had the same problem. I'm having to have a completely straight cable for one block coming into the side of the table for it to take a charge. Has anyone else seen this?

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This is a really strange one. I just tested a number of configurations with an MFE power source and glass fiber cable, trying to duplicate this problem, and couldn't. Can you give us any more information, and/or screenshots including the power source(s) and location of the bench? What's the cable length? What's supplying power to it? Are there other blocks drawing power from the same cable? Etc.
Also, if you place some other IC2 machine such as a MFE in the bench's location, does it suffer from the same problem or work normally?

Just wanted to let people know that there's a minor new feature and a minor bugfix on the way soon(TM), along with a change to the amount of energy storage granted by upgrades in LV and HV benches.

What would you like to hear about first? The bad news or the good?

Let's start with the bug. It's just a display sync issue between client and server. If the bench's internal storage was reduced to zero (by charging items) since the last time you had the GUI open, the next time you opened the GUI it would still show whatever value it was showing last time you looked, both numerically and on the energy bar. The upcoming version will now sync the energy level correctly even if it's at zero.

Now for the new feature: The charging light. While the bench is transferring power into items (or out of a battery, too) a new indicator light on the block will be lit. You'll be able to toss in a bunch of power hungry items, walk away, and know with just a glance across the room whether they're ready to be picked up. And if you're trying to power up a bench that isn't hooked up to an energy source, you can see if it's time to swap out or retrieve an empty battery, energy crystal, or lapotron yet.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly (if you have a lot of energy storage upgrades in an HV Charging Bench, that is)... Energy storage upgrades will no longer grant a flat 10% bonus to all three tiers of charging bench. The bonus per upgrade will vary between the three tiers of bench. The values are as follows.

LV Charging Bench:
+10,000 EU storage per upgrade (UP from 4,000 EU; the new value is 25% of base storage)

MV Charging Bench:
+60,000 EU storage per upgrade (No change; this is the same as the original 10% of base storage)

HV Charging Bench:
+500,000 EU storage per upgrade (DOWN from 1 million EU; the new value is 5% of base storage)

After looking at the bonus for each tier we decided they needed a little bit of re-balancing. The upgrade uses a RE Battery in the recipe, so adding only 4000 energy to the LV bench made no sense. The batbox it's built on gets 40,000 storage out of 3 batteries. Each upgrade should be able to add at least as much as one battery can store, so we bumped it up to match. We considered reducing the bonus amount for the MV bench from 60k to 50k but decided such a slight change wasn't worth the trouble. For the HV bench, though, having a single battery and a circuit grant as much energy storage as a lapotron crystal was beginning to look decidedly overpowered. On the other hand, decreasing it any more than this would result in storage upgrades either being practically useless in the HV bench or requiring downright crazy quantities of them to have a useful effect. In the end we decided that cutting the bonus in half was the best middle ground.

What does this change mean for you?

If you aren't using an HV bench, or you aren't using energy storage upgrades in your HV bench(es), you have absolutely nothing to worry about! But if you are, the maximum storage of your bench will decrease when you install this update. If you want to avoid losing any energy when that happens, there are several things you can do.

First, place a redstone torch or a lever (and turn it on) so that the bench won't accept more energy, assuming you have it hooked up to a power source.

Next, you have a couple options. You can craft enough energy storage upgrades to double the quantity in the bench and add them in before installing the next update, assuming this wouldn't put your total number of storage upgrades over the maximum of 64. If you do this, your total storage after the update will be the same as it is now.

The other option is to drain energy from the bench into items, such as lapotron crystals or quantum armor, until you've reduced the energy stored in the bench below the new cap. (I'd recommend taking out any overclockers while doing this, though, if you're trying to preserve the energy - otherwise the cost of charging the items will be greater.)

You can also combine these two approaches. And if you don't care about losing the excess energy, you don't really have to do anything at all - if that energy came from solar or water power, or other renewable sources, who cares if some of it disappears, right?

So that's your heads-up for the first "nerf" to this mod, coming soon(TM), once we're ready to post an update. We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause, and hope that you will continue to enjoy the use of this mod.

Quote from Mort

Well you are right that if the storage isn't high enough, fast-charging would fail totally. I don't know if it's currently possible to drain energy from multiple sources at once, but if it was, setting the buffer to packetsize*16 (16x the maximum overclocker rate, or isn't it?), should work (it would result in 512,2048 and 8192 storage sizes, which still fine), while it would require the engineer to provide the energy in real-time (as other machine do when highly overclocked)

That depends on how much energy you operate with. If I ran a nuclear reactor, it's no problem to just fill it up and then recharge at will. Lately I tend to play with low-energy setups, running just several machines and basic tools, I would never use up 10 million energy on tools... not in the entire lifetime (we restart worlds relativelly often).

On the other hand, both LV and MV benches store relatively little energy, considering what one might want to charge (40k vs 60k batpack, 600k vs 200+300 laser+LP), the only problem is the HV bench. (Which I never use, so you can propably ignore my entire suggestion :))

However, it could still be useful if it was cheaper... That way, one could charge items, as fast as he can provide energy in real-time. That, of course, would be much weaker than the current charging bench, as it wouldn't be able to charge more than one item with no overclockers. However as this is quite a balance-changing feature, it would be up to you if you wanted to implement it.

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If all you use is batpack and tools, the LV bench is probably just fine, and you're most likely right that you won't ever need the HV bench. If you have a batbox collecting power from your solars, generators, etc, and sending that on to your machines and your charging bench, then between that and whatever internal storage the bench has (I'm not certain how cost effective energy storage upgrades are in the LV bench), it would probably have enough capacity to charge an empty batpack. It will be drawing energy in at the same time as it transfers it into the batpack or tools, so if the bench's internal storage does run dry before it's done, it should at least be able to finish in a reasonable time, although I haven't tested this specifically. And you should indeed be able to power a bench from multiple sources to make that situation work better. If it's not full it should accept as many packets as your energy network will offer it, much like a batbox / etc.

One of the other factors that went into the decision to require a batbox, MFE, or MFSU in the crafting recipe and take on the internal storage capacity of the parent device, in addition to the main goal of having sufficient power available locally to allow the rapid charging of multiple items, was that we didn't want the mod to be seen as a way to bypass the normal IC2 requirements for charging and making use of nano or quantum armor or other devices relying on tier 2 or 3 energy storage. Normally you have to make a MFSU to charge up your quantum suit, but with the previous mod, if you were patient and/or had a few MFEs you could easily do it without that expense and effort. In my experience, when you have the resources to make and power quantum armor, you can generally afford a MFSU without too much trouble, and probably want to have at least one for its storage capacity anyway. Consider what it requires to make a mass fab and enough UU matter to build a full quantum suit, not just in terms of material resources but also in the form of raw EU poured into that fabber to get the iridium. If anyone is concerned about "tying up" 10 million EU solely to be ready to charge items, remember that 10 million is nothing compared to all that went into the items themselves.

Somewhat tangential to a point mentioned earlier, that each item charges at a certain rate: It would be nice to add a way to see the base charge rate of an item, so you know how quickly it will drain power from the bench - and how quickly you'd have to supply power to keep it from becoming empty and stalling or slowing down. I'll have to investigate ways to display that information. If it would be possible to list it on the tooltip without messing up NEI's great tooltips, for example, that could be worth working on.

I appreciate all the feedback, as I'm very proud of what we've created (I am paying attention, even if Pantheis is usually the one replying). Even the constructive criticism can be thought provoking and bring up useful ideas, like that one.

Just to keep you posted, Pantheis and I are pretty close to having a beta-test-ready version!