I certainly hope Jason does NOT remove BluePower. IMHO, pneumatic tubes provide a much-needed, relatively inexpensive item transport system for early-game sorting networks. They are less laggy than Buildcraft pipes, have never spilled items on the ground for me (like Buildcraft is prone to do), and they serve well until the player gets to more advanced item transport methods. I agree that there are some unfortunate bugs (like item duplication... but I don't cheat so this is not an issue for me), but I have never experienced blue/red wires disconnecting or any other bug that would convince me not to use the mod. I know the mod is still in active development and I am certain the bugs will be resolved in time. Just my $0.02.
Its development has been undergoing a 'rewrite' for a while, the existing code has had few if any changes. And comparing it to buildcraft pipes is not necessarily a good thing, both are laggy as hell (I can show the code to back this up, they spam the network something crazy, including doing *far* too many draw cache updates, which is what causes the major FPS hit). If you want pipes that work well and are *actually* quite lagless, look at GT's item tubes, significantly better for server work, honestly no clue why BP's pneumatictubes are in considering GT can already do, quite literally, everything it can, but actually server-friendly. I *constantly* see red/blue alloy wires disconnecting on both of the Infitech servers I run, and it seems once they detach inside a chunk they never seem to attach again, they stop updating entirely, will not pass signal, anything. And BluePower, at least the version in Infitech, still had not solved the items popping out of transposers and such that redpower had at its beginning but it fixed prior to its death, so why I tried BluePower on one of my servers I ended up with a machine room full of hundreds of stacks of wood lying in the corner. The setup was just a barrel getting filled with logs, a transposer with a BP timer on it set to 21 seconds, and the transposer went to a pipe that went to the few dozen coke ovens; it worked fine for weeks then suddenly started spewing. Replacing the transposer was required to fix it, but it did it again after a few days, replaced it with GT Item Tubes with a conveyer cover and never had an issue after that, plus it fixed the chunk from updating *twice* every time the timer ticked, which was noticable...
Back on the block cache updating, in BluePower it updates the world block cache anytime a transposer changes state, anytime logic gates change redstone state, and more, it is *hell* on client FPS when you get anything decently large and fast.
What I want back is GT4's Red Logic computer thing, whatever it was called (*hint*hint*
@Blood Asp ) ). It took a miniscule amount of EU (I think it was 1 EU at LV) for some functions like the clock functionality, but the pure logic gates ran without power. It had an interface inside it where you choose the function (AND, OR, NOR, RS, Various Latch's, Clock, etc...) in the normal black/greenish GT style and some other buttons to adjust variables for the input, it was a fantastic early game step before hitting OpenComputers and great for Logic Gates since it did not update world block cache and you turned the sides on/off (via screwdriver) to change whether it output or not (defaulting to no side outputting), so it was wonderfully friendly at not spamming redstone updates to anything you did not intend to unlike other systems. The inputs/outputs could be set by screwdrivering on any side/top/bottom. GregoriousT stated that he planned for a Fiber Optic wire for GT4 that would have been able to carry up to 16 'channels' of redstone at long distance by putting a special cover on it and coloring it to set the 'channel', then you could put the redstone cover elsewhere with the same color to connect them, and they acted all as one block. That combined with the old RedLogicGateThing would have been a fantastic to replace BluePower, in a significantly less laggy way. (*hint*hint*
@Blood Asp )
I also miss the GT4 block that displayed the a redstone level on its screen that could be screwdriver'd for 16 different screen 'types'. (*hint*hint*
@Blood Asp )
I'll chime in as well. We had a blue power setup that checked status of steel tank and turned on the boilers or off as needed. We had a pretty bad FPS hit in general, and occasionally FPS would be 1 because the circuit would be stuck in a clock like scenario, going back and forth and had to be reset.
Once we removed the blue power setup completely, fps returned to less sufferable values. Also, when we used a run of pneumatic tubes, they seemed to have a FPS hit as well. They also showed items flowing through them when there were no items. We've since removed them as well.
Overall, it's just a shame you have to rely on this as your only place for logic gates, etc. We're eyeballing opencomputers as a replacement, but contemplating adding project red or something as a drop in replacement, but keep blue power but not use it cause of all the world holes that removing it would cause.
OpenComputers is also a great replacement if you need really advanced logic, but the old GT4 Logic thing was a wonderful low-end version (it only handled 1 'gate' per block, though the gates could be fairly complex, up to counters and timers and latches of many forms, but no programming). But yeah, BluePower 'logic' by itself I've not seen issues with yet (other than FPS hit), but the wiring needs to be gone...
I do miss the old MFR redstone upgradable logic thing, would be a fantastic if that had a GT5'ish version made inside GT5u. (*hint*hint*
@Blood Asp ).
And sorry for the multiple *hint*hint*s
@Blood Asp , I would do the coding myself as I know the GT4/5 code base's extremely well, but I am really hating minecraft's source code right now still, it is just... just horrible, the entire monolithic OOP'ness structure of it just reeks of a bad high-school project, which contributes to its horror to mod in and utterly horror of efficiency (not Java's fault, as much as I would like to claim it was, Minecrafts code just sucks...). Although I may help if these changes are wanted by many others and no one is able to currently.
EDIT:
@Blood Asp What is the official repo being used for GT5u in Infitech, is it
https://github.com/Blood-Asp/GT5-Unofficial and if so which branch? Not a lot of commits on it as well?
