[1.7.10] Survival industry [rotarycraft based tech]

[keybounce]

More to the point, since Harder Wildlife basically has stats that change every day, "Summer" isn't that useful -- early summer is very different from late summer.

I've never bothered with a calendar. Still ... "Colder than normal in X days", "Warmer than normal in X days", "Wetter than normal in X days", "Drier than normal in X days". That would be useful.

 

[Jetsetlemming]

Trip report: I dropped Chromaticraft into my Survival Industry install. It actually fit really well: The advance mechanic, despite it being a "magic" mod, feels very inspired by scientific investigation. I can definitely see how this came from the same guy as Rotarycraft, and I feel like it fits really well together with it. Biggest problem would actually be the lack of dungeons: Chromaticraft requires finding lots of loot chests to get info fragments, and is clearly made to go along with mods like Thaumcraft and Witchery that add more opportunities to find them. Still, it feels well integrated, very interesting, and certainly more inside the scope of the intended pack tone than dinosaurs (imo).

 

[reteo]

Integrated with his other mods, yes. Encouraging exploration, yes. More inside the scope of this pack than dinosaurs... You're going to have to explain that one... dinosaurs are a genetics mod, which fit the category of mad science.

To be fair, I've considered CC multiple times during the life of this modpack, even before I published the recipe on minecraftforum.net. Its interaction with RotaryCraft is extensive. However, there are three problems with this mod.

First, like you yourself said, it's a magic mod. Granted, I'm now using magic to replace Tinker's Construct (enchantment+), so I can't really say that this modpack can have no magic... and I was considering this if the poll went in the direction of magic mods, just to appease the players.

However, the second problem is much more serious: the mod's balance is still pretty much a mystery to me. I've tried playing it, but never got far at all. And I can't really make good decisions on what to do with mods, when I don't have any idea of the extents of its capabilities. I don't play magic mods much; they just aren't something I found much interest in. I was thinking of making a pack surrounding CC (and possibly including R*C as well), but to be honest, what mods would work best with it, without a duplication of features? I'd have to delve into all the different magic mods to find out, and I just don't have the level of interest to do that.

And finally, issue number three, the biggest problem I have with the mod: performance. The custom oregen already takes a significant amount of time to populate ores in the world. I've tried hard to limit the pack to mods that do not provide worldgen, in order to minimize worldgen latency. I've even gone through all the oregen mods, disabled their oregens from their configurations, and then went through the COG configurations to disable the "original oregen cleanup" step, in order to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the modpack. CC has extensive worldgen features, including rainbow forests, those pylons, ocean temples, and burrows, as well as special flowers, dye trees, and potion crystals. There's probably even more worldgen that I'm not aware of. By itself, this may not be a problem, but COG presents me with a limit. This is the same reason I don't have any dungeon, ruins, or village expansion mods.

If you can play CC with your instance of Survival Industry, more power to you. But the default version will, for now, remain without the mod.

 

[Jetsetlemming]

It's dead simple to add stuff to a modpack with FTB, so I'm not at all bothered by its lack of inclusion. I'm not sure the balance of the full chromaticraft package even matters for SI's progress, btw: Even if you cheat in the fully researched book, it has an "achievements" esque system of discovering info by accomplishing goals that are required before some of its materials appear. Some of those include killing the Wither, and the Ender Dragon.

 

[Jetsetlemming]

How do you transfer RF? I tried the Extra Utilities energy pipes but they didn't seem to be able to pull it from the Rotational Dynamo or Hobbyist Engine. Also, any way of storing it? I'd guess no, but just checking.

e: oh duh, Thermal Expansion ducts, forgot that was in the pack

 

[Rewyn]

Yea, CC has a pretty intense progression system. You can't even use a shortcut to access it's dimension, if it's already unlocked by another player. You need to unlock it yourself. About in-mod balance is much of a problem, Reika showed with Rotarycraft he can balance his own mods pretty well. (In my opinion)
Aside from that, I don't think reteo meant the in-mod balance, but it's balance in combination with other mods. And I can just agree with him there, even RotaryCraft (rather, ReactorCraft) seriously messes with the balance of most mods, if it's there as an addition, not the focus of the pack. Like how a single turbine from a HTGR reactor outperforms anything else I've seen regarding RF production. I mean, On an Infinity Server I added RotaryCraft to for me and a friend, I had to run the turbine for a few minutes a day. With his BigReactor, he had to run had to run that thing way, way longer to produce the same amount.

 

[Rewyn]

Electricraft has a RF battery. It's pretty expensive, though.
And I think the point is that you cant store it early. That's to prevent you of just putting a couple of steam engines charging a battery together, which then draws power as soon as it's full.
Kinda what people did with the Industrial Coil to power the Extractor.

 

[reteo]

Thermal Dynamics is going away. However, for RF, you can use the ExU pipes, or the ElectriCraft cables. I'll check the issue with the dynamo and the energy node.

As for CC, remember, it's not just the balance, its the worldgen. I want SI to be playable using reasonable system specs; I have a quad-core 3GHz processor, & I dedicate 3GB to the game; it starts to get slow in SSP (the game sort of stops while chunks load, drops take time to appear) if I have more worldgen, at least on my system.

Sent from my SM-T217S using Tapatalk

 

[reteo]

And, by "balance", I'm referring to the "one block per feature" rule I use to keep this pack from going kitchen sink. What are CC's features? Do they duplicate other mods I already have installed? Without progressing to the end myself, I have absolutely no idea.

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[Rewyn]

I never really played with it before myself, but that's one thing I know about.
I'm fairly sure it duplicates some things, even from RotaryCraft. Like, it has it's own version of automated mining, if I'm right. There's a way of transportation for power (including RC's shaft power), iirc. But how exactly it works? No clue, just read that it exists.
Since it's not a techmod, I don't think there's much to worry about it duplicating what some machines do. Even if it does, it probably still does it in quite a different way.
I'd worry more about the pack becoming too much magicy. I personally wouldn't mind at all, but it's kinda going against the theme. Like, you got a bunch of pendants that give potion effects and that stuff.

 

[reteo]

True enough. So we'll just say no to CC. Expanding a vanilla magic mechanic is one thing; adding a whole system of magic is something completely different.

Sent from my SPH-L720T using Tapatalk

 

[Jetsetlemming]

Thermal Dynamics is going away. However, for RF, you can use the ExU pipes, or the ElectriCraft cables. I'll check the issue with the dynamo and the energy node.

As for CC, remember, it's not just the balance, its the worldgen. I want SI to be playable using reasonable system specs; I have a quad-core 3GHz processor, & I dedicate 3GB to the game; it starts to get slow in SSP (the game sort of stops while chunks load, drops take time to appear) if I have more worldgen, at least on my system.

Sent from my SM-T217S using Tapatalk

Is there anything special you have to do to get ExU energy pipes to work? I made an "energy extraction" pipe, put it on the output side of the steam generator, and routed it to the carpenter, and nothing happened. It doesn't have a tip screen like most ExU things, sadly.

Electricraft cables will directly connect with RF consumers?

 

[keybounce]

I want SI to be playable using reasonable system specs; I have a quad-core 3GHz processor, & I dedicate 3GB to the game; it starts to get slow in SSP (the game sort of stops while chunks load, drops take time to appear) if I have more worldgen, at least on my system.

Memory / garbage collection issues, perhaps?

Try this startup string, and see if it makes a difference.
-Xms1080m -Xmx3300m -XX:MaxPermSize=250m
-XX:NewSize=800m -XX:MaxNewSize=800m
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrentAndUnloadsClasses -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=25 -XX:MinHeapFreeRatio=22 -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=80 -XX:-CMSPrecleaningEnabled
-XX:SurvivorRatio=3 -XX:TargetSurvivorRatio=80 -XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=5
-XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=1
-XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution -XX:+PrintCommandLineFlags -XX:+PrintHeapAtGC -XX:+PrintGCDetails -Xloggc:GC.log -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps

(Join the newlines together if it does not paste properly)

Summary:
1. Memory size. Start with enough to get running, resize as needed.
2. "NewSize": On the Mac, it will not auto-adjust, despite the manual's claim. I don't know if it auto-adjusts on windows/linux or not. The goal here is about 30 seconds of life before promotion to tenured on longer-lived objects. (NB: I have not tested a goal of 45 seconds, which is the save-game frequency. There is a huge advantage of targeting 30 seconds over the typical 5 or so seconds.)
3. CMS collection. For a quad-core (or even a 2+2 dual core), this lets the extra cores do GC without slowing down the game.
4. SoftRef: Work around a language bug that won't flush caches properly.
5. Logging (feel free to remove if desired).

Memory is just one of the two issues. Minecraft is a worst-fit for the default garbage collector assumptions.

The other issue would be forcing optimized re-compiles of the often-used routines. Ask Eyamaz about that -- he's been working on those flags.

"-XX:SurvivorRatio=3" is a good compromise. Client, dedicated server, and single-player, all want different levels here! (Heck, they want different almost-everything). For dedicated server, 4 or 5 may be better.

(I have not tested G1GC on J8; on J7, it became a "gobble all the memory you can", plus "no real limit on CPU consumption". I could not keep it tamed. Throughput collector causes too many significant game freezes.)

EDIT: Also, make sure your server view or render distance is 10. At 10, you need load load/save 21 chunks every time you cross a chunk border, at 16 you load/save 33 chunks each time. If you are having slow worldgen, going from 33 chunks generated down to 21 chunks generated is a huge improvement.

 

[reteo]

Is there anything special you have to do to get ExU energy pipes to work? I made an "energy extraction" pipe, put it on the output side of the steam generator, and routed it to the carpenter, and nothing happened. It doesn't have a tip screen like most ExU things, sadly.

Electricraft cables will directly connect with RF consumers?

No, ExU Energy nodes do not connect with rotational power directly, you need a rotational dynamo to convert the power to redstone flux, first. Theoretically, connecting an ExU energy node to the the business end of the dynamo will allow it to collect RF to distribute using the cables that connect to the node. If it's not working this way for you, then it's something I will need to fix.

Memory / garbage collection issues, perhaps?

Try this startup string, and see if it makes a difference.
-Xms1080m -Xmx3300m -XX:MaxPermSize=250m
-XX:NewSize=800m -XX:MaxNewSize=800m
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrentAndUnloadsClasses -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=25 -XX:MinHeapFreeRatio=22 -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=80 -XX:-CMSPrecleaningEnabled
-XX:SurvivorRatio=3 -XX:TargetSurvivorRatio=80 -XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=5
-XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=1
-XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution -XX:+PrintCommandLineFlags -XX:+PrintHeapAtGC -XX:+PrintGCDetails -Xloggc:GC.log -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps

(Join the newlines together if it does not paste properly)

Summary:
1. Memory size. Start with enough to get running, resize as needed.
2. "NewSize": On the Mac, it will not auto-adjust, despite the manual's claim. I don't know if it auto-adjusts on windows/linux or not. The goal here is about 30 seconds of life before promotion to tenured on longer-lived objects. (NB: I have not tested a goal of 45 seconds, which is the save-game frequency. There is a huge advantage of targeting 30 seconds over the typical 5 or so seconds.)
3. CMS collection. For a quad-core (or even a 2+2 dual core), this lets the extra cores do GC without slowing down the game.
4. SoftRef: Work around a language bug that won't flush caches properly.
5. Logging (feel free to remove if desired).

Memory is just one of the two issues. Minecraft is a worst-fit for the default garbage collector assumptions.

The other issue would be forcing optimized re-compiles of the often-used routines. Ask Eyamaz about that -- he's been working on those flags.

"-XX:SurvivorRatio=3" is a good compromise. Client, dedicated server, and single-player, all want different levels here! (Heck, they want different almost-everything). For dedicated server, 4 or 5 may be better.

(I have not tested G1GC on J8; on J7, it became a "gobble all the memory you can", plus "no real limit on CPU consumption". I could not keep it tamed. Throughput collector causes too many significant game freezes.)

EDIT: Also, make sure your server view or render distance is 10. At 10, you need load load/save 21 chunks every time you cross a chunk border, at 16 you load/save 33 chunks each time. If you are having slow worldgen, going from 33 chunks generated down to 21 chunks generated is a huge improvement.

I will have to check this out, for sure. However, the key question: can these settings be passed onto the launcher by the modpack directly (during modpack download)? If not, then while the pack will work for systems optimized in the way you'd explained, it will become unusable for those systems that are not optimized. I'd rather optimize the pack in a way that will work for those who are not inclined to enter the advanced options of the FTB launcher. I want this pack to be accessible to everyone who's curious, not those who are comfortable with advanced tweaking.

Besides, If something goes wrong, I'd have to try and troubleshoot the flags as well as mods and configs, and that will probably result in a very bad day when such a problem arises... especially if I expect players to enter those switches in correctly.

Remember, I'm optimizing for the default game; the one that launches when a new player uses the 'survivalindustry' code and then clicks the button to launch the game. They just want to play. They expect the game to perform reasonably well, and probably don't want to spend their time in the options window on the launcher. And since I would really like this pack to become listed, I want to make sure it remains accessible to anyone.

 

[Jetsetlemming]

I never had gotten into the Tinker's Construct ranged options before, but I finally decided to get into it today in preparing for an End Dragon run, and holy crap. This will, of course, be far far less powerful without TE, but with it I built a Signalum crossbow with regenerating Enderium-tipped Manyullyn bolts that does 80 hearts of damage per shot and shots 4 times a second with 91% accuracy, and that's without any additional modification besides the regen moss ball. This should kill the dragon, MAYBE.

 

[reteo]

Keep in mind that battlegear includes several types of arrows, including armor piercing and explosive... And if enchantment works with them, or the bow, you might just have some significant firepower without TiC.

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[Rewyn]

I highly doubt you'd get to numbers that ridiculously. Especially ExtraTic stuff was/is pretty much retardedly strong. (namely Signalum and Enderium for crossbows/bolts).
I actually 1shotted the enderdragon with that. Not sure if they nerfed it by now, but according to these numbers, even if they did, it's not nowhere enough.

 

[reteo]

Perhaps not. But you can get some ridiculous levels of enchantment with e+.

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[Jetsetlemming]

Considering Signalum and Enderium are both nonexistent without TE, it's kinda a non-issue for balance. And no, it did not one-shot the dragon: It took five shots.

Related, the damage boost seems to boost XP gains with it. Each shot against each zombie results in huge gains, for both the crossbow and bolts.

 

[keybounce]

However, the key question: can these settings be passed onto the launcher by the modpack directly (during modpack download)?

I don't know if any launcher can pass arguments.

But I will say this: I really hope that the new FTB launcher can. Seriously. It's a major oversight if not. None of the others can, and by now the need for this should be obvious.
===

There are two different sets of numbers. There's the "This is what the modpack recommends", and there's the "This is what my computer can handle". If your computer can only spare 1.5 GB for minecraft (a 2 GB system), then you'll need different numbers; if you only have 2 cores (or 1+1), you need something else changed. The whole "Just give a memory size to java and let it figure stuff out" is a failure, even in vanilla -- which now lets you specify launch arguments to Java. Equally, the "This launcher forces you to enter some numbers here, and different from the rest of the argument strings" is bad. The whole "A single number for memory size, and we'll force both minimum and maximum to that number" -- and other, similar issues -- is broken, and I've stopped trying to use launchers like that. It was a complete show stopper when my computer had 4 GB (and a modpack that would normally run just fine with about 800 KB total, but would shoot up to 3 GB in the occasional worst-case), and it's still a pain now with 16 GB.

What do you do when different modpacks recommend different strings? How do you specify "My computer can only do X"? It's definitely not trivial.

A way to say "Here's the minimum recommended by this modpack", along with "here's the maximum my computer can handle", should be a nice compromise. But as I said, none of the other launchers can handle this. I don't know if the FTB launcher can; I hope it can.