So there is a bit of miscommunication and faulty assumptions floating around. I feel I owe the community a bit of an explanation. I'm going to provide that as a list of points:
- SpaceToad replaced the API that Railcraft and Forestry were using (PowerHandler API|Second Gen) with an ubercomplex new API (MJBattery API|Third Gen). It uses Annotations extensively and adds dozens of new classes to the API. It also manages to abandon everything that enforced and standardized MJ's mechanics. Nor am I convinced that any effort has even been made to understand those mechanics fully. Buildcraft 4-5 is a very different beast from Buildcraft 2. And Buildcraft 6 (I've not touched 6 at all) is even more removed from what has gone before.
- Legacy support for the old API is utterly broken and non-functional at the moment. Railcraft and Forestry can neither create nor use MJ correctly. This was brought to my attention Thursday and ultimately led to the announcement that sparked this thread. However, this decision has been expected for some time by those people closely tied to these mods.
- I am no longer an active dev for Buildcraft and have no desire to debug it every time it breaks anymore. This is mainly due to creative differences with SpaceToad, including disagreements about the future of MJ and other Buildcraft APIs and features.
- Migrating to the new MJ API would require a significant expenditure of effort. It would also require every machine to reimplement all the functionality removed from the API for each and every machine.
- I now believe that both Railcraft and Forestry should be power system agnostic and not tied to or dependent on any specific mod. Nor should they become what I want to call a "Public Utility" mod, those mods that provide fully fleshed out power transfer systems. RF and EU are the APIs most widely supported, and hence the best ones to achieve this.
- I'd like to see complex systems built on top of these APIs (or other promising ones). Modpacks could then build packs around these Public Utility mods. But this is not something I personally wish to pursue at this time. I encourage others to do so though.
- This decision has been brewing in the back of my mind for a while now due to the previously mentioned factors. I was content to do nothing for as long as possible. But the status quo is no longer viable without damaging both Railcraft and Forestry. This decision was not initially very palatable to me because of long standing differences with KL and Co as well as a personal dislike for many of the core mods using RF and the super simplified implementations of RF they provide (even mod devs can have personal opinions).
- Redstone Flux IS NOT ELECTRICITY! Even KL says it's not. Railcraft Electric Locomotives will not be powered by Redstone Flux! Though, there may be a machine that could convert it to electricity. RF is the leading "Magic Kinetics" API as I like to call it, but EU is the leading Electric API. Railcraft will support other Electric APIs though as well, eventaully. The Rolling Machine and Rock Crusher will likely support both. Still working on the details.
- Mods should never allow themselves to treat different categories of power APIs as equivalent without some kind of penalty (ie a generator converter block) for the transfer or a good reason (ie the machine doesn't need electricity explicitly, just a force to do work). Getting careless with this could be a force that reduces diversity in the modspace.
- Perdition (loss) in machines existed for one reason and one reason only. To drive gameplay elements built exclusively into Kinesis Pipes.
- Without those gameplay elements to add depth to the system; the perdition is 100% pointless. Conduits have no gameplay elements driven by perdition.
- Most users never experienced any of this depth because TE and RF stepped in specifically to supplant it. I won't blame them for disliking what we were trying to do with MJ, but the fact that they maintained compatibility with MJ after creating a replacement for it was a low blow that never even really gave us a chance see if our way worked. In fact, it worked to make perdition appear completely arbitrary and pointless. Better had they broke cleanly and let MJ succeed or fail on its own merits. This was a major contributing factor to the tension between our two camps, though our tensions began long before that.
- Perdition is a feature of MJ power systems, I cannot stress this enough (I'm talking to you KL, since you keep bringing it up). It has no place in a machine implementing RF and WILL NOT BE RETAINED. If a Public Utility mod wishes to add it, I can think of at least one way for it to work without requiring machines to manage it. But this has nothing to do with Railcraft or Forestry. If anyone is interested in creating a Public Utility mod with this feature contact me and I will explain how it could be done in a way that would apply to every RF sink universally.
- In hindsight, it would have been better to build the perdition into the pipes feeding the machines, not the machines themselves. I take full responsibility for not recognizing this until just recently, and had I taken this route, history may very well have played out very differently (RF would have had no reason to exist).
- MJ as we know it will likely not survive this. That's up to SpaceToad technically, but the rumblings are not favorable atm. I knew this when I made the decision, but it was in my opinion already being driven down that path and dragging Railcraft and Forestry along with it. This is essentially the rats abandoning a sinking ship.
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