Of course it has value. Your playing style simply reduces the cost to an insignificant amount. Cost ≠ value.
An out of the box approach...
- Thread starter ShneekeyTheLost
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Ad Hominem attacks are not a valid debate tactic.
Also, if my methods are available at 'starter-cave' level, and are still as fully automated as your 'complex setups', doesn't that make it inherently superior? You know, the whole 'fewer resources for same effect' sort of thing. If you are going to be using one of the forestry machines, either it's going to be running constantly nonstop (squeezer or carpenter) or you will be using it manually. Either way, there is no need to start/stop it because either you are flooded with resources, or the output is marginally useful at best. Double with the (t)Rolling Machine. You just don't need many plates/rails unless you are running a big project like an iron tank, in which case AE is fully automating on-demand for you.
Your reliance on gates does not mean they are the only way to get these accomplished.
This has precisely what to do with the price of tea in China?
More or less true but gates have become the defacto standard for most automation since the loss of RP, now AE is taking over that mantel but its still got a couple of things to cover 100% to hold that crown for the foreseeable future, like bees & liquids.
Anything RP could do the MFR rednet can do better in a smaller space. AE has full bee support can can sort and filter per be species or per precise bee and all traits being identical. Liquids don't generally need to be sorted. Either you'll always want it 'on' to provide liquids or you'll only want it occasionally so it's easy to set up the flow to start as you also start up whatever process you need.
I cant see how you would build a bee cloner with out gates & Api pipes?, hmm maybe if you build a small AE network just for the bank of apiaries but you still need the random form of princes & the drone with full nbt data, thats a head scratcher, hmm that sounds like a challenge I will take up, some days I hate my self.
I had a quick look at DW's that seems to be a bee species puriferer only & one bee (or pair) at a time would be way too slow & you need to get hybrids to start from what I see, a cloner takes any princess & some pure drones to turn the princess into a pure version same as the drones, normally my cloners would be 5 at a time, I didnt even look at his code but to do what I would wish would be far more code that my skills possess, so for me that would not really work, if coding was an option then a couple of turtles could do it, but again for all species code would be huge, if just did a/b/c/d type code would be messy & hard to edit later, meh more head scratching required on this one.
I don't see anything ad-hominem.
It was a bit rude particularly the bit about, "'solutions'". Shneeky made an important point about automation though. Some things just aren't worth it. For a rolling machine, the most automation I do would consider doing is hooking it up to power I can easily turn on and off and then put a hopper above it, maybe another hopper below if it pulls out properly. Then I would dump the stack or two of iron into the top hopper and come back in five minutes for my plates. I don't even do that, although I do like to keep my thermionic fabricator and rolling machine off the grid most of the time.
Rolling machines aren't even good or dumping single stacks in, because 2 plates = 8 iron tank walls? I think? And if you're doing a boiler, it still doesn't need many plates. I usually calculate exactly how may i need so i don't waste.
Actually I'm with Skyqula on this one. You just aren't thinking big enough.
Imagine if you have a bank of 10 rolling machines. And AE system is set up with a crafting pattern to send iron to a central distribution platform that will then divy up any iron among the 10 rolling machines appropriately and then AE takes the finished plates out of the rolling machines. The purpose being to cut down the time it takes to make plates by up to a factor of ten through parallelization.
That's a lot of power wasted on those rolling machines when they aren't working. You could just build in excess power generation, but that's wasteful. So you need a way to automatically supply power to the rolling machines when they have work to do. You could also put in a manual switch, but that defeats the point of setting up an automatic AE system for it. Especially if your AE system is very extensive and you use a lot of wireless access terminals.
I actually had a similar problem in my last build. I solved it by just keeping a steady stack of plates on hand at all times and having way more power gen than my normal use, but it would have been much much more elegant to use gates to monitor the rolling machines.
I have never had the need for a ton of plates and I the pace of my game tends to be quite slow. If we are talking about this in the context of the shneekeycraft modpack then perhaps the ability to shut off power to rolling machines simply isn't worth keeping buildcraft in the pack. Its certainly not my place to decide what's included.
I will say though Snooder, I appreciate you want your Iron plates and you want the Now, but... well I don't think I will ever be thinking that big as far as rolling machines go. I just have a dedicated REC for my Thermionic Fab and Rolling Machine that is activated by rednet. If I want to use it I flip a lever. I know thats not what you want but I am not going to personally go through a huge automation process that requires at least ten gates to make in an assembly table, ten rolling machines (pistons are the most annoying recipe imo) and an expensive AE system, when in comparable time (maybe even less time) I could have made all my iron plates as and when I need them. Also, you would probably have to segregate the bit of your AE network with dark cable which will just be another hurdle to automate otherwise you are wasting more power.
If you wanted to have a rolling machine hooked up to an extensive AE network with multiple access terminals then you could run rednet alongside your AE network that can turn a REC on and off. That way, you could have a lever in your boiler room and your liquid storage room.
I will say though Snooder, I appreciate you want your Iron plates and you want the Now, but... well I don't think I will ever be thinking that big as far as rolling machines go. I just have a dedicated REC for my Thermionic Fab and Rolling Machine that is activated by rednet. If I want to use it I flip a lever. I know thats not what you want but I am not going to personally go through a huge automation process that requires at least ten gates to make in an assembly table, ten rolling machines (pistons are the most annoying recipe imo) and an expensive AE system, when in comparable time (maybe even less time) I could have made all my iron plates as and when I need them. Also, you would probably have to segregate the bit of your AE network with dark cable which will just be another hurdle to automate otherwise you are wasting more power.
If you wanted to have a rolling machine hooked up to an extensive AE network with multiple access terminals then you could run rednet alongside your AE network that can turn a REC on and off. That way, you could have a lever in your boiler room and your liquid storage room.
That's very interesting, and I bet it would work. I see it as some sort of anti-Tekkit, where you're dropping the BC line rather than the IC2 one. Interesting.
I've also dropped IC2. And I won't be dropping the BC 'line', just Buildcraft itself. I'll still have Forestry, Thermal Expansion, and a few others that run on MJ. Thanks to the Energy API, they don't actually need BC installed to run independently.
It seems to me, then, that to completely replace Gates, I would need a device which can detect the following:
- Has Work (flag on/off)
- Power capacity (sliding scale)
- Inventory Capacity (sliding scale)
- Tank Capacity (sliding Scale)
- Specific item in inventory (number of items)
OpenPeripheral would be your friend for those. Does your pack have ComputerCraft?
No. I do not, and will never, use ComputerCraft. It's a 'do anything you want and get away with it' mod. Significantly more powerful than EE2, if that gives you any indication. An entire paradigm shift to reach a whole new level of magnitude more powerful than EE2. EE2 only gave you unlimited resources. CC can automate any task you the player could do, which turns the game into a LUA Coding tutorial game.[DOUBLEPOST=1374969914][/DOUBLEPOST]
I wouldn't say 'hate'. I just refuse to use it.
CC would be awesome as a way to introduce kids to programming in a fun environment. But not so much in any game where you actually want a challenge outside of scripting.
CC has been a fun way to introduce me to coding in a fun environment and I am twenty something. In seriousness though, I hope you don't mind if I make one or two assumptions on your position regarding Computercraft. It seems that the most troubling aspects of computercraft (other than pastebin) for some people automation are done with turtles e.g. turtle quarries, farms, inventory interaction etc. The gate functionality that you can replicate with openperipherals can be done with Computers alone. Perhaps a config option to disable the crafting of turtles would be good. Having said that, you would end up removing one mod only to replace it with two more just to replace a small aspect of the original mod.
You brush over one of the key problems: Pastebin. You don't even need to be able to code. All you need is to pastebin someone else's code and you're done. The mod author even fully admitted that one of the major balancing features of CC is the challenge of writing code. Even assuming this is a valid point, Pastebin completely eliminates it.
Can you disable the crafting of turtles entirely? No turtles, no way, no how, ever? If so, then I would reconsider CC.