BC conductive pipes are being changed...

[Abdiel]

Machines are more lossy now to make up for the lossless pipes. Expect
low power draws even when idle.

This sucks for people on servers with non-renewable fuel sources. I really wish there was a conductive pipe switch that you could turn on or off and wouldn't need basically an energy cell per machine.

On the other hand, which machines does this affect? Lasers and refineries? Can't think of much else from vanilla Buildcraft (and I really hope other mods don't start adopting this stance).

 

[Poppycocks]

Man, you guys sure are a bunch of downers, such a minuscule nerf and you're already crying your eyes out despite being given really awesome pipes in the same package. Jeeze, talk about never satisfied.

What I'd do is add iron conductive pipes to be used with gates for turning stuff off and a fat heat-up phase to all machines -_-. That'd teach ya!

 

[Ryiah]

What I'd do is add iron conductive pipes to be used with gates for turning stuff off and a fat heat-up phase to all machines -_-. That'd teach ya!

I'm sure Greg could think up a few things to do to it...

 

[arentol]

Perhaps it'll recommend a movement toward distributed power generation? There's not really much reason to have hundreds or even dozens of MJ/s going on most pipe runs, barring heavy-duty boiler rooms.

We actually used to effectively have distributed power only as power loss made centralized power prohibitive. I think there is really no need to go back to that constrictive model. A model where you can CHOOSE when to centralize and decentralize is much more fun I think. Being forced to use one or the other just ends up adding frustration to the game.

Ignoring the game design questions, would that even be technically possible? Once you start crossing many chunks at all, you start opening space for a lot of undesirable behavior. The engine may well require that to be a place where people use tesseracts.

People pump oil and lava through BC pipes from places very far away, or they used to anyway before Tesseracts a/o Railcraft a/o Ender chests. I never did that for very long distances so I don't know how they kept it all loaded, but people made it work so I don't see why it wouldn't work in this case. Besides, for the most part I am not talking about moving power 50 chunks or something, I am thinking more like a power plant on the outskirts (or deep below, or high above, etc.) someones base, or on the edge of a city on a server. Imagine how it is with the new changes above.... Even with a communal power plant right in the middle of a city of 49 32x32 plots, if you want to distribute just 32MJ to each house, you would need (according to some rough calculations) about 448 diamond pipes, 256 gold pipes, and 128 stone pipes, and doubling the MJ distributed would pretty much involve just drastically increasing the number of diamond pipes. With my idea it would be only about 500 pipes total and most of them would be the cheap "long distance" pipes... But the biggest benefit would be that to expand the capacity you would only need to change what is connected to the one diamond pipe at each individual plot, not basically rebuild the entire system by running a second set of diamond pipes.

Also, if it was programmed right, such a system wouldn't need to involve calculating lots of details in the intervening chunks even if you did a long run. The special diamond pipes would actually act pretty much like tesseracts with connectivity through the new "cheap" pipes acting like the frequency. So the power would in effect teleport from the input diamond pipes to the output ones. This has a side benefit of greatly reduces calculations on the server.

 

[Hydra]

Seems like these new pipe changes will be really good

I personally don't really see the changes as "very good". A diamond per 4 pipes just for 256mj/t is silly.

 

[Pokefenn]

I personally don't really see the changes as "very good". A diamond per 4 pipes just for 256mj/t is silly.

The new pipes will allow you to be more specific with your energy.
Also conductive pipes were useless before, VERY rarely having use, you will now be able to use gates with your pipes alot easier now.
(Also im a old conductive pipe fanboy, back when they didnt explode, i really missed them being useful)

 

[Hydra]

The new pipes will allow you to be more specific with your energy.

Restone Energy Cells allow me to be VERY specific in how much power can go through.

 

[Pokefenn]

Restone Energy Cells allow me to be VERY specific in how much power can go through.

I forgot to put "apart from energy cells".
But still, cant ever go wrong with gates.
(And also there is the annoying price of energy cells and crafting recipe)
And also, you can use gold early game till you have diamond, 64eu/t is still very good, you can run a quarry not at max speed with it and all your machines, which can allow you to get the diamonds you need (Anyways i always have loads of diamonds spair.......)

 

[Hydra]

You can post all you want but no one isn't going to use conduits. Aside from that they're functionally better they're also less computationally intensive than pipes.[DOUBLEPOST=1371059307][/DOUBLEPOST]

No, conduits have a fixed 5% loss when sending/receiving power to/from machines and non thermal expansion engines.
What is the computational impact of conductive pipes vs conduits? Has it changed for the pipes?

AFAIK they only lose 5% when power enters the conduit system, not when delivering it. So for every 100mj you put in 95mj should end up in whatever machine you want to power.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Awaiting the inevitable flame-war because one mod changes another

 

[Loufmier]

Awaiting the inevitable flame-war because one mod changes another

not gonna happen. its not that case

 

[King Lemming]

The changes to BC sound like a counter to TE's "no MJ loss so long as you use as much TE stuff as possible" system: Presumably conduits would always feed power to machines that don't really need it, causing constant waste. If so? Well, I'm betting we'll soon see a TE update to try and put conduits back into the "just build these once then forget about the whole MJ distribution system" area again.

You may notice that TE machines and engines are more expensive than BC equivalents - that's why they are spared the 5% loss. The loss was also there for balance purpose with BC's pipes. If BC is going lossless, then we'll have to see, the loss may make sense, it may not. Computationally, it would of course be beneficial to remove it.

May as well clear up some things while I'm here.

In 1.5+, conduits have a transfer limit of 1000 MJ/t per any given input or output. This is plenty.

Right now, we're working pretty hard on TE 3.0, so I'm going to lay this out now (and this info has been floating around for a few weeks already) just so people know that this has been long planned:

-Energy Cells are sided input/output, can transfer to each other, face has a charge meter.
-Energy Conduit no longer has input/output, just works.

-4 Tiers of Energy Cells, Portable Tanks, and Strongboxes (portable chests)
-Energy Limiter + Switch Conduit
-2 Tiers of Energy Conduit

I figure that last part will draw notice - we've already got it coded and ready; people wanted an early game conduit that didn't do much but would let them set up a workshop, so we're adding that. The transfer max is currently 5 MJ/t, though obviously engines work fine with it.

Computationally, I haven't looked at the code, but I'd bet that pipes fundamentally have not changed. That is to say, 8000 pipes still tick 8000 times. 8000 conduits only tick N times, where N is the number of networks.

Either way, this is good for BuildCraft, looks like a nice set of changes.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Well, makes me less inclined than ever to use BC machines, not that I used many to begin with, but I do approve of the changes to the pipes. It would make me more inclined to use them early-game rather than limping around on a clockwork engine until I could get conduits going. Makes it less of a rush to make a Mad Dash(tm) through the nether for something to make nether bricks out of for the Magmatic Crucible.

The gated pipes I see viable uses for, although if cobblestone and stone energy conduits still don't connect, I could see a problem. Running a Stone Conduit 16 MJ line down the feed, then splitting off half in two directions each with Cobble is something I could see myself doing, but if they still won't connect there's gonna be a problem.

Using the throughput to throttle certain sub-systems (such as using a stone conduit to throttle your Lasers to 16 MJ/t) makes a lot of sense, and I could certainly appreciate it.

But BC machines becoming 'lossy' is just going to kill any chance of anyone ever wanting to use one. The hunt for the Better Quarry will become far more fierce.

 

[CovertJaguar]

Computationally, I haven't looked at the code, but I'd bet that pipes fundamentally have not changed. That is to say, 8000 pipes still tick 8000 times. 8000 conduits only tick N times, where N is the number of networks.

Which of course also says absolutely nothing about how expensive each of those ticks are.[DOUBLEPOST=1371073748][/DOUBLEPOST]

But BC machines becoming 'lossy' is just going to kill any chance of anyone ever wanting to use one. The hunt for the Better Quarry will become far more fierce.

BC has always been lossy, we just moved the loss around. It was never meant and never going to be a system like IC2 where you can account for every MJ spent.

And who leaves a non-active quarry up for long anyway? And the idle draw is only 2 MJ/t. Not like its drawing 50 MJ/t just sitting there. You were previously losing like 10x-20x that's just piping power around. Pipes leaked like sieves, I'm amazed any power got anywhere at all. If anything this is a buff.

 

[King Lemming]

Which of course also says absolutely nothing about how expensive each of those ticks are.

Correct. Each network tick cost is on the order of the number of nodes, NOT the number of conduits in the network. Basically the conduits between things don't tick, only the ones adjacent to things that generate or use power.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

BC has always been lossy, we just moved the loss around. It was never meant and never going to be a system like IC2 where you can account for every MJ spent.

Point conceded, and I understand, even applaud, the logic behind it. However, my prediction on the unintended consequence of this decision remains.

Having said that, the only three 'machines' which I've ever really used from BC are the Filler, the Quarry, and the Pump.

The Filler is largely a time-saver, being able to clear out terrain quickly and build square structures quickly. This is its intended purpose, and it does a marvelous job of that, but I can also just do this manually if I need to, since I'm usually going to baby it anyways.

The Quarry... well, everyone is already trying to find the Better Quarry, this will only make that more fierce. With TC, this has become a somewhat less attractive option, when you can get such a higher rate of return out of manual mining, the automatic option become far more balanced. You're trading time of manually mining for the speed of automatically gathering resources while you do something else, which is a fair balance point.

The Pump is relegated mostly to Nether Lava pumping stations these days. The Aqueous Accumulator makes a far superior water source, and hardly anyone ever uses Oil anymore since there are so many options that don't require a Refinery to output optimally. Removing it will make server admins cheer, but there will be a lot of disgruntled people wanting some way to get cheap lava for their power supply.

As far as the Assembly Table and Lasers... well, if these are going to be a constant drain when not in use, then likely I'll just disconnect the power line when not in use. Maybe hook up a Gate to an Energy Switch Pipe. Ironically, gates will become more useful with this change as conductive pipes might actually be used after the first nether expedition, however they are also fairly easy to disconnect from your main power system.

I wonder, can all of the mods that run on MJ be able to function without BC installed? If TE3 introduces conduits that are inexpensive, then BC may well go the way of IC2. I mean, sure... before I started ShneekeyCraft, I thought IC2 was 'absolutely necessary'. But then I realized that it really wasn't. I mean, there's really no point in installing such a huge mod for a couple of machines and an early-game energy network...

 

[Poppycocks]

If anything this is a buff.

QFT

Computationally, I haven't looked at the code, but I'd bet that pipes fundamentally have not changed. That is to say, 8000 pipes still tick 8000 times. 8000 conduits only tick N times, where N is the number of networks.

Which of course also says absolutely nothing about how expensive each of those ticks are.

 

[King Lemming]

QFT

Hah. I like CJ, regardless of what he thinks of me. I wasn't trying to be disingenuous with the figure there, just typed that up in a hurry and had to run; you may notice the time delay in replying.

The parses don't lie though, and the people who swear by the lag reduction aren't all crazy. I do system optimization for a living. I'm sure the new conductive pipes are much improved in that regard though, just like the improvements on BC's liquid pipes.

 

[Poppycocks]

Hah. I like CJ, regardless of what he thinks of me. I wasn't trying to be disingenuous with the figure there, just typed that up in a hurry and had to run; you may notice the time delay in replying.

The parses don't lie though, and the people who swear by the lag reduction aren't all crazy. I do system optimization for a living.

I was quoting the part where he said the change to pipes/machines is a buff. It truly is, I can't understand how don't people see this.

Regardless of that and to your post: Yes, I know, you're on my supreme ruler of the galaxy list, remember? Hah, a little joke, but yes I do hold your skills in high regard.

So, did you like ever get to play minia? I have always wondered what it's like.

 

[King Lemming]

I was quoting the part where he said the change to pipes/machines is a buff. It truly is, I can't understand how don't people see this.

Regardless of that and to your post: Yes, I know, you're on my supreme ruler of the galaxy list, remember? Hah, a little joke, but yes I do hold your skills in high regard.

So, did you like ever get to play minia? I have always wondered what it's like.

Yeah sorry for the confusion, I just didn't want to quote the youtube video embed. That's really what I was responding to.

And nah, I've never played Minia, but the screenshots are pretty darn impressive.