Not just talking about crashes. Mods that are poorly optimized, or that have persistent bugs that rob processing bandwidth, when used alongside other mods that are poorly optimized or have persistent bugs that rob processing bandwidth, coupled with fringe-case fatal bugs, optimized elements used in excess, and all the other things that come together to undermine stability only become harder to track down and address when you increase the pool of mods to choose from. The Ultimate pack is already subject to issues causing < 5fps performance on robust machines, crashes, and generally irritating things that require a substantial investment of time to identify before the issues can be corrected.
The thing is, man. Most of the most egregious performance hogs I can find
are in ultimate. So if anything, this points out that Ultmate could go further. If your machine can run Ultimate, tossing Mekanism on the pile will probably
improve performance because you clear out all those crufty IC2 cables. Likewise giving you options for armor other than the crazy-huge packet sizes of MPS actually gives aggregate increases to performance. A similar property happens with Gregtech, which for all its social faults generally is a very efficient mod and replacing IC2 stuff with GT stuff generally improves stability and speed dramatically.
I am not speculating about the above. We can actually tweak the our server's performance by removing IC2 cables, ICBM turrets, and having people remove MPS armor and relog. I use TickProfiler daily.
Nothing else comes close except for some
outstanding bugs in the way Mekanism and new Buildcraft interact pathologically.
If Factorization machines had an issue that caused memory leaks if placed adjacent to a dirt block, does my experience with pocket crafting tables mean I'm in a credible position to say that Factorization doesn't have any issues? Of course not.
Let's stop speaking in hypotheticals here. Because we actually use a fair sum of Factorization on our server (it's the best gravel generator, and easy to power with steam) and it's never come up. Don't name names randomly, it makes mod authors uncomfortable.
Besides, that's an unworkable definition of "using a mod". Not every part of every mod is useful or meaningful in mixed modpack play. It is expected some content will be difficult to use, or useless because other radically superior options exist. That doesn't mean the mod is not in use.
While you're playing your mod pack, I've been playing Ultimate. I don't care what your spreadsheets say. I don't care about what your anecdotal assumptions say. The Ultimate pack...which is what we're talking about now, notRR...is in rough shape right now, and until they can sort out what they've got, there's no point adding more.
With all respect due to our gracious hosts: the Ultimate pack has issues. These are not issues all modpacks suffer. I cannot tell you how good a job the FTB modpack team does because I've not been using their beta, do not know their process, and only have a vague notion that they're happy waiting for 1.6 for a real release. But I look at their configs for reference and I see longstanding issues.
But there are well-managed 1.5.2 packs out there and many of them have >100 mods and do a good job. ForgeCraft1's modpack is a dev modpack and they still do a pretty good job of it, from all indications. I do not include RR in this because we're not public, by the way.
[DOUBLEPOST=1372804346][/DOUBLEPOST]
Does that spreadsheet measure severity of issue? I remember Saice having critical problems for a day or so at his ship, which didn't involve any of those four listed mods (I think BC pipes and MFR?).
It was the issue I linked above, involving Mekanism generators spamming >5 lighting updates a second up near the skybox. It happens most with Buildcraft pipes, but can happen with any wire.
You bring up Shneeky's pack, and that's a fairly good and robust option, but it's also running only a handful of mods, and even bringing Mekanism has been a rather complicated question.
Shneeky and I talk pretty often about modpack balance, issues and integration. I know he's been playing with Mekanism and had some issues with the post 100 builds on this rev (we have too, actually, our 0.9.0 release was nearly release quality and I'm going to freeze mekanism as we approach public launch to a build in the 80's).
I dunno if I'd play Shneeky's pack on my own, but I like what he's doing. I think his pack would be better off with Mekanism; but people know I carry a lot of water for the UE ecosystem in this forum because they're very much underdogs and weirdly reviled by the mainstream forgecraft fanbase.
Aside: Calclavia is killing it with MFFS3. He has inchoworm drives working with MFFS, and can now move multiblocks with force fields. He's successfully moved a variety of tanks. It's totally awesome. I am glad I bet on his branch, even though I (and others in RR) are unhappy with his license decisions.[/quote]
