Mod Feedback [By Request] RotaryCraft Suggestions

[namae]

Electricraft is pointless.
I hardly see any use in it beyond fancy cables. It feels like you tried to copy ic2/TE energy transportation without realizing basic things. Main problem is that its not really useful as energy storage, because you can't charge and use batteries in same time unlike every other mod battery, and this kinda ruins the purpose as we already have industrial coils (and bedrock coil can store 240 TJ, while auroral battery 281 TJ). Yes, best battery can emit 32k torque, but guess what? It's barely can be used to its full potential as it's speed which matters and for that rotarycraft has turbines with 65-131k speed.
Worst part is energy transfer though. What do you need to transfer energy from your storage to some simple machine in any other mode to make 100% efficiency out of it? Just plug a cable. What do you need to do in case of electricraft? Use a cable, plus resistor, plus motor. And after that you'll likely have to use the gearbox for proper speed, because battery limited to 8k speed. And the most frustating part? That effing resistor block with the most unintuitive control I've ever seen in my life which also only accepts (and consumes) vanilla dye. All that while you keep in mind conversion ratios. For every single machine. I'm really not surprised you use thermal expansion conversions for everything in your videos. And I wouldn't even complain if you didn't nerf the hell out of magnetostatic engines making them only partly configurable (therefore usually consuming more energy than you really need) and upgradeable via very annoying side processes (yes, i hate magnetizing unit with passion).
My humble suggestion: allow batteries to be charged and used in same time, and make induction motors configurably output like industrial coils. It would also be really nice if batteries could be upgradeable and you did not have to save all your wage for the best.

 

[Demosthenex]

Electricraft is pointless.
I hardly see any use in it beyond fancy cables. It feels like you tried to copy ic2/TE energy transportation without realizing basic things. Main problem is that its not really useful as energy storage, because you can't charge and use batteries in same time unlike every other mod battery, and this kinda ruins the purpose as we already have industrial coils (and bedrock coil can store 240 TJ, while auroral battery 281 TJ). Yes, best battery can emit 32k torque, but guess what? It's barely can be used to its full potential as it's speed which matters and for that rotarycraft has turbines with 65-131k speed.
Worst part is energy transfer though. What do you need to transfer energy from your storage to some simple machine in any other mode to make 100% efficiency out of it? Just plug a cable. What do you need to do in case of electricraft? Use a cable, plus resistor, plus motor. And after that you'll likely have to use the gearbox for proper speed, because battery limited to 8k speed. And the most frustating part? That effing resistor block with the most unintuitive control I've ever seen in my life which also only accepts (and consumes) vanilla dye. All that while you keep in mind conversion ratios. For every single machine. I'm really not surprised you use thermal expansion conversions for everything in your videos. And I wouldn't even complain if you didn't nerf the hell out of magnetostatic engines making them only partly configurable (therefore usually consuming more energy than you really need) and upgradeable via very annoying side processes (yes, i hate magnetizing unit with passion).
My humble suggestion: allow batteries to be charged and used in same time, and make induction motors configurably output like industrial coils. It would also be really nice if batteries could be upgradeable and you did not have to save all your wage for the best.

You might try to be a bit more polite when posting a negative review. That said, have you ever used resistors? I got the color coding instantly... You said it's pointless, then you said it's more complex. I think that the lossless conversion from ElC to RoC power unlike RF at the cost of complexity fully justifies it.

 

[namae]

I got the color coding instantly... You said it's pointless, then you said it's more complex.

Its pointless because it's more complex. Electricraft would make sense if it provided reliable and easy way to supply with power all your small machines but it just does the opposite, you have to manually configure every resistor with dye and keep in mind power conversions, plus motors, plus gearboxes/other stuff you would normally use. Its just way easier to directly supply everything with shaft power via nearby engines or even distant shaft assemblies.

I think that the lossless conversion from ElC to RoC power unlike RF at the cost of complexity fully justifies it.

1. You pay for it with resources and space near your machines. 2. You can't send ElC energy via tesseracts, so no easy interdimensional transfers. 3. You can't store ElC energy in same convient way you store RF since you have to manually turn batteries on and off.

 

[Omicron]

I also have a "negative review" to make, in this case about Rotarycraft's air compressor. The fact that it tore a hole into my base is tolerable (it was my own fault and it's recoverable), but no matter how I try to use that block, it just strikes me as not thought through in so many ways. It desperately needs a complete rework, and here's why:

For starters, it's supposed to be a Buildcraft engine. But it doesn't actually work like a Buildcraft engine at all, and therefore fails to be able to power various Buildcraft machinery in various cases. The air compressor simply outputs an amount of MJ per tick (based on the shaft power received). However, actual Buildcraft engines don't do that. They generate a set amount of MJ per tick, and store it in an internal buffer. Output happens periodically in singular, large bursts with each "piston stroke". Most Buildcraft engines also scale their piston stroke speed with the amount of MJ in their internal buffer, making sure that as the buffer gets fuller and fuller, the engine strokes faster and faster until an equilibrium is reached between the filling rate of the buffer and the ability of the piston to shunt away the energy.

Buildcraft engines are "bursty" like that because it is used as an abstract stand-in for pressure without actually introducing a physics simulation. Buildcraft machines all have certain minimum input values, representing the concept of "you need at least this much pressure to run this". It works similar to torque in Rotarycraft. An example: the Buildcraft pump consumes a maximum of 0.5 MJ/t, uses 10 MJ per operation (for a maximum speed of 1 bucket of liquid per second), has an internal buffer of 100 MJ, and input thresholds of 1 MJ minimum, 10 MJ maximum. A redstone engine generates 0.05 MJ/t into its internal buffer, with the piston being able to output bursts of 1 MJ per stroke. Therefore, even though the actual power generation of the redstone engine is miniscule, it is able to drive the pump (slowly) because the piston strokes output enough "pressure", that is, bursts large enough to pass the minimum threshold of the pump. It is however not able to output power into a wooden kinesis pipe, because those have a minimum input threshold of 2 MJ (intentionally set this way because players were building redstone engine power plants with 500+ engines that absolutely killed servers). It also cannot power a refinery, because that has a minimum input threshold of 25 MJ. Meanwhile a combustion engine, able to output bursts of several hundred MJ at once, will be perfectly able to do so.

Rotarycraft's air compressor however outputs per tick, and as a result, it has extreme troubles with beating the minimum values on Buildcraft machines. For example, to power a pump, you need to connect a gasoline engine and run it at its full 65,536W of power. This produces 1.1 MJ/t, enough to beat the pump's minimum threshold. However, as shown above, the pump can only work so fast, and it will not consume more than 0.5 MJ/t. If you throttle the gasoline engine to 50%, which would be more suited to the pump's power profile, the air compressor can no longer beat the minimum threshold and the pump will simply stall and do nothing... even though the compressor still outputs more power than the pump can ostensibly use! Well, you might think, maybe I'll just hook up two or three pumps via kinesis pipes then, three pumps sharing 1.1 MJ/t should pump quite a lot of liquid without wasting any power. But nope! With 1.1 MJ/t, the air compressor can't beat the threshold of the kinesis pipe either, and no energy will be output at all. You run into the same issue with trying to give the refinery the 12 MJ/t it can use at maximum speed - you'd need to drive the air compressor at 25 MJ/t to get the refinery to even react at all, and then it suddenly jumps to 100% speed and still wastes more than half of the input power. And those 25 MJ/t also pose an entirely different problem, as we'll see later. But hey, at least in this case you can use kinesis pipes to circumvent the issue (unless you want/need your setups to be compact).

I know the Buildcraft API is pretty much a mess right now because SpaceToad first overhauled everything half-complete and now they're switching to a RF wrapper, but once there is a stable new implementation of MJ under that system, could you try and make the air compressor work like an actual Buildcraft engine? The picture book implementation would be dropping your own pressure metric entirely, choosing a fixed burst output value ("pressure") per stroke, adding an internal buffer, and scaling stroke speed based on the internal buffer's fill status. This way, the air compressor will be able to easily deal with the large variety of different shaft power sources Rotarycraft can offer it, up to whatever limit results out of the combination of maximum stroke speed and burst output value.

A more unconventional implementation would allow you to keep your own pressure metric: instead of fixing burst output, you fix the stroke speed and scale the burst output size with the fill status of the internal buffer. In this way, burst output would be 1:1 identical with your pressure rating in kPa; for example the engine strokes at a constant 30 ticks, while it outputs 300 MJ per stroke when its pressure rating says 300 kPa, or 600 MJ per stroke when the rating says 600 kPa and so on. No other Buildcraft compatible engine works this way, and I'm not sure if the APi will even allow it, but it would still produce a compatible result. Of course there's other issues to keep in mind then, such as the fact that a wooden kinesis pipe can buffer no more than 1,500 MJ at any given time, and I'm not actually sure what its maximum input threshold is. Therefore the highest pressure (burst output) should not be too high, and the static stroke speed should be relatively brisk. Anything else just has you running head-first into maximum input thresholds all over the place.

Now this already got much longer than I thought it would be; I have more to say, but I'll put that into a new post.

 

[Tylor]

Suggestion: complete wiki.

 

[Omicron]

Air Compressor Part 2:

Rotarycraft provides a number of options for converting shaft power into power usable by other mods. The air compressor is one of them, and then there's the rotational dynamo and the electric generator. Since these other power systems are all distinct and different, it's no surprise that the converters would work and perform differently. However, it becomes a problem when there's a giant discrepancy that's not down to the properties of the power system but rather down to design decisions.

The ingame handbook says:
Electric Generator: will take anything you throw at it, your own fault if you fry your cables with too much current
Rotational Dynamo: converts up to 8192Nm * 8192rad/s of shaft power, safely ignores everything above that
Air Compressor: violently explodes when going above 1,000kPa pressure.

Examining this, immediately the first issue becomes apparent: a user looks at this and says "I know exactly how to safely use the electric generator. I know exactly how to safely use the rotational dynamo. I know absolutely nothing about the air compressor except that it explodes at some point that I won't know about until I build and run it."

The reason for this is that the pressure metric here is completely arbitrary. It's not used in Buildcraft at all, why is this on a Buildcraft engine in the first place? How is it calculated based on the amount of shaft power that you put in? Does it have any relation to the amount of MJ output? Can the air compressor even give me the amount of MJ that you need, or will it just wreck your base? Why is this the only one out of the three converters that cannot be operated safely? You just don't know.

Then you proceed to practical implementation, and it gets even worse: pressure buildup in the compressor is extremely delayed, taking up to a minute to stabilize at its maximum. So you have to babysit this thing until it stabilizes, because there exists no indication as to where it may stop; it's pure guesswork. In addition, pressure does not scale linearly with input shaft power, so you cannot calculate it based on test cases either. Again you have to guess how high you can push it before it ruins your day. And of course, at the same time you discover the relationship between the pressure rating and the MJ output... there is none. Nada. Nothing. It doesn't affect output at all. It serves no purpose other than making the compressor explode.

Moving on, assuming you can prevent an explosion, what can this air compressor do for you? I tested this carefully, and determined that its maximum lies at roughly 1.32 MW, yielding about 23.98 MJ/t. Any setting that produces 24.00 MJ/t or more, for example such as the setting necessary to beat the 25 MJ minimum threshold on a refinery, will explode.

...less than 24 MJ/t, really? The rotational dynamo can do 1,195 MJ/t without the risk of exploding, and the electric generator is apparently unlimited. And why 1.32 MW? There is no native engine in Rotarycraft that produces this output at any setting of an ECU. You need to make awkward combinations like a microturbine at 50% throttle junctioned together with a performance engine, or use industrial coils - which means you cannot operate the compressor continuously, while Buildcraft's power system is conceptually designed for continuous engine operation.

So to sum up, the air compressor is a power converter that manages barely 2% of the power throughput of a similar converter, cannot be properly supplied by any native engine, gives the player no indication as to its capabilities, is extremely awkward to use in practical application, cannot be pre-planned or calculated by the player, is the only converter in the mod with an active explosion hazard which is obfuscated behind an obscure metric that serves no practical purpose, and does not actually behave like a power source in the power network it is supposed to convert to.

Come on now, Reika, you can do better than this

 

[Demosthenex]

Its pointless because it's more complex. Electricraft would make sense if it provided reliable and easy way to supply with power all your small machines but it just does the opposite, you have to manually configure every resistor with dye and keep in mind power conversions, plus motors, plus gearboxes/other stuff you would normally use. Its just way easier to directly supply everything with shaft power via nearby engines or even distant shaft assemblies.

Sounds like the electric equivalent of gearing. Where's the problem?

1. You pay for it with resources and space near your machines. 2. You can't send ElC energy via tesseracts, so no easy interdimensional transfers. 3. You can't store ElC energy in same convient way you store RF since you have to manually turn batteries on and off.

You can put shaft power through Nether portals, but I haven't checked if you can use ElC with them. Any arguments that "it's not as easy as RF" will be met with derision. ;]

Shaft power isn't as easy as RF either.

 

[namae]

Sounds like the electric equivalent of gearing. Where's the problem?



You can put shaft power through Nether portals, but I haven't checked if you can use ElC with them. Any arguments that "it's not as easy as RF" will be met with derision. ;]

Shaft power isn't as easy as RF either.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying at all. What is the purpose of ElC? Since it has no new machines it's just power transfer and storage. What does it have to offer as storage? Ridiculously expensive batteries which just fail in comparison with bedrock coils because they are more expensive and not configurable. What does it have to offer as transfer? Wires with loss of energy which are somewhat cheaper than normal shaft, but once you get access to bedrock dust you get 32 shafts per 4 dust. Now tell me what is the reason to use ElC, if to use it you have to 1. convert RoC power into ElC power with engine, 2. (optionally) store it the same way you would store RoC power but more expensive, 3. convert ElC power back with resistor, and motor. There's literally no reason for whole process when it's much less time and resource consuming just to provide your machine with RoC engine or shaft.

 

[Demosthenex]

I don't think you understand what I'm saying at all. What is the purpose of ElC? Since it has no new machines it's just power transfer and storage. What does it have to offer as storage? Ridiculously expensive batteries which just fail in comparison with bedrock coils because they are more expensive and not configurable. What does it have to offer as transfer? Wires with loss of energy which are somewhat cheaper than normal shaft, but once you get access to bedrock dust you get 32 shafts per 4 dust. Now tell me what is the reason to use ElC, if to use it you have to 1. convert RoC power into ElC power with engine, 2. (optionally) store it the same way you would store RoC power but more expensive, 3. convert ElC power back with resistor, and motor. There's literally no reason for whole process when it's much less time and resource consuming just to provide your machine with RoC engine or shaft.

I've used ElC before to split large volumes of power across many machines, in my case I have 4 MW split across 16 grinders. They all received the same power where shaft junctions would have been hard pressed to do this as easily.

The difference between a bedrock coil and an aurora battery is output. The coil can't output more than 16 MW, so it'd run for a month to output it's power. The battery on the other hand can output significantly more power, but I don't have the numbers handy.

 

[namae]

I've used ElC before to split large volumes of power across many machines, in my case I have 4 MW split across 16 grinders. They all received the same power where shaft junctions would have been hard pressed to do this as easily.

Shaft power bus.

Plus I don't really see why would you need more than 2-3 grinders since you can just overclock them to operate at insane speed with gears.

 

[Wagon153]

Shaft power bus.

Plus I don't really see why would you need more than 2-3 grinders since you can just overclock them to operate at insane speed with gears.

You missed the part he mentioned about the massive amount of power the higher tier batteries can output. Also, unlike an coil, they don't explode.

 

[namae]

You missed the part he mentioned about the massive amount of power the higher tier batteries can output. Also, unlike an coil, they don't explode.

Still not justifying using it for me, plus I already mentioned it few times. The problem with rotarycraft machines is that they require insane SPEED, not TORQUE(save for few), so to use batteries effectively you'll also have to use speed gears everywhere. Since there's no real benefit in storing energy for high torque its easier to simply spam engines (or turbines) with gearboxes and supply it with liquid ethanol or jet fuel, which is also a lot more easily transportable anywhere (being a liquid).

 

[Demosthenex]

Still not justifying using it for me, plus I already mentioned it few times. The problem with rotarycraft machines is that they require insane SPEED, not TORQUE(save for few), so to use batteries effectively you'll also have to use speed gears everywhere. Since there's no real benefit in storing energy for high torque its easier to simply spam engines (or turbines) with gearboxes and supply it with liquid ethanol or jet fuel, which is also a lot more easily transportable anywhere (being a liquid).

To each their own. Perhaps your playstyle doesn't lend itself to using ElC.

You do realize that to drop the operation speed of most machines uses exponentially more power? So having multiple machines running at low power consumes much less total power than one machine at high speed? I had 16 grinders at minimal power grinding lube to provide enough to all my hydros and gear boxes. I also was caching a huge quantity in a 3000 bucket tank, which I drained dry at one point until I added more grinding capacity. Maybe you just haven't had to scale large enough yet.

 

[namae]

To each their own. Perhaps your playstyle doesn't lend itself to using ElC.

You do realize that to drop the operation speed of most machines uses exponentially more power? So having multiple machines running at low power consumes much less total power than one machine at high speed? I had 16 grinders at minimal power grinding lube to provide enough to all my hydros and gear boxes. I also was caching a huge quantity in a 3000 bucket tank, which I drained dry at one point until I added more grinding capacity. Maybe you just haven't had to scale large enough yet.

Again, shaft power bus can do it just as easily, even easier since no conversion involved. There's still no point to use ElC for that when you can put many engines and combine their powers via junctions or otherwise. To charge your ElC you will need those engines anyway. It's just everything you can do with ElC you can also do without it, and it gonna cost you less, easier to setup and take less space.

 

[Demosthenex]

Again, shaft power bus can do it just as easily, even easier since no conversion involved. There's still no point to use ElC for that when you can put many engines and combine their powers via junctions or otherwise. To charge your ElC you will need those engines anyway. It's just everything you can do with ElC you can also do without it, and it gonna cost you less, easier to setup and take less space.

Like I said, your playstyle may be such where there's no value in using ElC. I've experienced the exact opposite, that I've found ElC to be very useful. To be fair, that's only in late game when I have multimegawatt power sources. I go straight to superconducting cables and high power values.

 

[namae]

Like I said, your playstyle may be such where there's no value in using ElC. I've experienced the exact opposite, that I've found ElC to be very useful. To be fair, that's only in late game when I have multimegawatt power sources. I go straight to superconducting cables and high power values.

There's nothing involving 'playstyle' as everything I say is 100% objective. If you used the harder way that is your right but please stop zealously defending it without any other arguments than "I used it and it was cool". Anyway I would like to hear what Reika has to say.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Something modified and damaged vanilla classes...

The hell? I suppose I could generate a new dev environment. I don't really have all that much in terms of actual code, so porting things over shouldn't require too much.

[ETA]

Nope, still not working. I saw a complaint in the log regarding a non-vanilla class being inside the net.minecraft package, but it was one of FML's rendering classes. Unless the setup is somehow borking the whole thing, I dunno what's gone wrong...

 

[Demosthenex]

There's nothing involving 'playstyle' as everything I say is 100% objective. If you used the harder way that is your right but please stop zealously defending it without any other arguments than "I used it and it was cool". Anyway I would like to hear what Reika has to say.

I suspect he made the mod because he thought it would be useful? What is there to justify? "How dare you code a mod I find useless!"? If you don't like it, don't use it. If you can provide some constructive criticism on ways to improve the mod (the title of the thread is "suggestions" after all) then please make those suggestions. A blanket statement of "it's useless" isn't very productive, and comments of "it's too hard" is generally ignored in the RoC context.

I am trying to listen and respond intelligently, but I'm having a hard time not being critical in response to your tone. If you are trying to be constructive, please explain and I'll keep an open mind. If you're whining it's too hard, then I'll respond with sarcasm and derision. =][DOUBLEPOST=1410276073][/DOUBLEPOST]

My humble suggestion: allow batteries to be charged and used in same time, and make induction motors configurably output like industrial coils. It would also be really nice if batteries could be upgradeable and you did not have to save all your wage for the best.

In response to your suggestion, is there a problem with creating a switching circuit to toggle between two batteries where one discharges while the other charges? They are redstone active so you could use a toggle latch and a timer.

 

[Reika]

@Omicron
Seeing as BC is shifting to RF anyways, there is little point in reworking the air compressor. Its fate is uncertain.

There's nothing involving 'playstyle' as everything I say is 100% objective. If you used the harder way that is your right but please stop zealously defending it without any other arguments than "I used it and it was cool". Anyway I would like to hear what Reika has to say.

I see nothing worth responding to (aside from this post, apparently).

The hell? I suppose I could generate a new dev environment. I don't really have all that much in terms of actual code, so porting things over shouldn't require too much.

[ETA]

Nope, still not working. I saw a complaint in the log regarding a non-vanilla class being inside the net.minecraft package, but it was one of FML's rendering classes. Unless the setup is somehow borking the whole thing, I dunno what's gone wrong...

I have no idea. This is RC v1c?

 

[Omicron]

Buildcraft is not "shifting to RF" in the sense that it will use the same energy system Thermal Expansion's baseline implementation currently uses. Instead it will use the RF API to re-implement MJ with all of its current behavior. The idea is to deprecate the Buildcraft power API which has been called bad names by a lot of people and instead replace it with a different API that has been lauded by a lot of people.

Mind you I'm no coder person, so I don't know if using the same API means that any forms of energy calling it will be intrinsically convertible into each other without dedicated conversion logic (perhaps this is what you mean). But from a content standpoint, MJ is not going away.