Mod Feedback [By Request] RotaryCraft Suggestions

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Omega Haxors

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Jul 29, 2019
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A little bit of an idea for ReactorCraft.

Vacuum tubes. Right click one of your Tokamak electromagnets with a vacuum tube in hand and then right click a second one to link them. Repeat this on all of the magnets to complete the chamber. Once complete, pump out all the air by placing one or more pumps to the chamber and applying LOTS of torque across the pumps. Once all the air is out you can start the fusion process.

Obviously the tube in question must be pretty sturdy to handle all the heat and pressure. Perhaps bedrock and blast glass would work. Maybe something stronger.

Why use this system?:

- Lag optimization. No longer do you have to rely on a lot of entities and instead use a single entity that handles everything. This includes plasma density, neutron emitting, heat, and magnetism.

- Proper punishment for containment breaches. With the existing system you can pop the reactor in the middle of nowhere and containment breaches are no big deal. Maybe a few singed tress but that's about it. Having a vacuum chamber punishes breaches with maintenance cost and potential cleanup if they melt. There's also having to re-pump the air out, too.

- Realism! No longer can fusion occur in broad daylight and in rain with no effect on its performance.

- Safety. No longer is accidentally falling into the reactor instant death. Granted, the vacuum tube does get VERY hot so touching is still strongly discouraged.

- Energy cost. Right now it's very easy to set up a Tokamak reactor on a low energy budget. Having to supply a lot of torque to pump out the vacuum chamber in a timely fashion will ensure that players at least have a form of nuclear reactor beforehand.
 
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1M Industries

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Jul 29, 2019
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A little bit of an idea for ReactorCraft.

Vacuum tubes. Right click one of your Tokamak electromagnets with a vacuum tube in hand and then right click a second one to link them. Repeat this on all of the magnets to complete the chamber. Once complete, pump out all the air by placing one or more pumps to the chamber and applying LOTS of torque across the pumps. Once all the air is out you can start the fusion process.

Obviously the tube in question must be pretty sturdy to handle all the heat and pressure. Perhaps an alloy of bedrock and blast glass would work. Maybe something stronger.

Why use this system?:

- Lag optimization. No longer do you have to rely on a lot of entities and instead use a single entity that handles everything. This includes plasma density, neutron emitting, heat, and magnetism.

- Proper punishment for containment breaches. With the existing system you can pop the reactor in the middle of nowhere and containment breaches are no big deal. Maybe a few singed tress but that's about it. Having a vacuum chamber punishes breaches with maintenance cost and potential cleanup if they melt. There's also having to re-pump the air out, too.

- Realism! No longer can fusion occur in broad daylight and in rain with no effect on its performance.

- Safety. No longer is accidentally falling into the reactor instant death. Granted, the vacuum tube does get VERY hot so touching is still strongly discourage.

- Energy cost. Right now it's very easy to set up a Tokamak reactor on a low energy budget. Having to supply a lot of torque to pump out the vacuum chamber in a timely fashion will ensure that players at least have a form of nuclear reactor beforehand.
I LOVE this idea. It sounds really good. Even better would be in conjunction with barium "getters" to clear the vacuum tube. Of course, you would need a complicated set-up to build and store these getters. (They react with oxygen almost immediately.)
 
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EyeDeck

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Apr 16, 2013
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In Thaumcraft, one of the first things the player typically does is to make a crucible, heated with a burning block of netherrack. After researching nitor, and making some in a crucible, the player can then replace their burning netherrack with a piece of nitor, which serves the same purpose, but a bit less dangerously.

Can we have Thaumcraft nitor work as a valid heat source for steam engines?
 
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Omega Haxors

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Jul 29, 2019
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In Thaumcraft, one of the first things the player typically does is to make a crucible, heated with a burning block of netherrack. After researching nitor, and making some in a crucible, the player can then replace their burning netherrack with a piece of nitor, which serves the same purpose, but a bit less dangerously.

Can we have Thaumcraft nitor work as a valid heat source for steam engines?

By the looks of it a lot of the things in Rotary cannot transfer their heat except when hardcoded in.

Perhaps it's time for a universal heating API for rotary to allow dynamic heat transfer to both other Rotary blocks and also to vanilla blocks and entities as well as any mods that use a heating system. This would allow for things such as heater death traps and dramatically streamline things such as the laser and heat ray.

The effects of heat would be fairly universal. Sand turns into glass. Ores smelt. Wood and flammables ignite. At extreme temperatures you can expect blocks to melt. Of course heat will transfer at a fixed rate to it's neighbors through conduction. Transparent blocks will not transfer heat as effectively or at all. What happens if water gets too much heat? You could get a nice hot spring that gives a small refreshing health bonus and regen. If you have reactorcraft installed... i'll just leave that to the imagination what happens at upper temperatures.
 
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Mattasdqwe

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Jul 29, 2019
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Not really a suggestion but how much lag does the fusion reactor generate when it's not being rendered but being chunkloaded?
just wondering if my computer can handle it...
 

Omega Haxors

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Jul 29, 2019
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Not really a suggestion but how much lag does the fusion reactor generate when it's not being rendered but being chunkloaded?
just wondering if my computer can handle it...

Most of the lag that comes from the Tokamak is from rendering due to all the turbines and entities. Minecraft is terrible at dealing with large amounts of entities so even the relatively cheap fusion ball will choke most rigs if you get enough of them. This is the primary reason you get derp rendering on your turbines, similar to letting steam escape into the sky. The game simply cannot handle that much load at once.

Take out the rendering by remotely chunk loading and all you have is a few calculations. There's no load at all, really. You'll want to come back to do maintenance every now and then, though, so you're not off the hook entirely as far as lag goes. Just make sure you get the job done right the first time and you should never have problems.

I would also recommend you check to make sure that your VDGs won't short out in the rain. I went through hours of rigorous testing to make sure that nothing would go wrong. It rains once and there goes my 10 million RF/t along with any nearby trees.
 
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Reika

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By the looks of it a lot of the things in Rotary cannot transfer their heat except when hardcoded in.

Perhaps it's time for a universal heating API for rotary to allow dynamic heat transfer to both other Rotary blocks and also to vanilla blocks and entities as well as any mods that use a heating system. This would allow for things such as heater death traps and dramatically streamline things such as the laser and heat ray.

The effects of heat would be fairly universal. Sand turns into glass. Ores smelt. Wood and flammables ignite. At extreme temperatures you can expect blocks to melt. Of course heat will transfer at a fixed rate to it's neighbors through conduction. Transparent blocks will not transfer heat as effectively or at all. What happens if water gets too much heat? You could get a nice hot spring that gives a small refreshing health bonus and regen. If you have reactorcraft installed... i'll just leave that to the imagination what happens at upper temperatures.
DragonAPI has most of that built in. I can control what provides heat and what sinks it, globally, for all my mods. That said, I often deliberately override it - like lava not heating ReactorCraft boilers - for specific cases where world heating is highly inappropriate.
 

Kirameki

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Jul 29, 2019
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Most of the lag that comes from the Tokamak is from rendering due to all the turbines and entities. Minecraft is terrible at dealing with large amounts of entities so even the relatively cheap fusion ball will choke most rigs if you get enough of them. This is the primary reason you get derp rendering on your turbines, similar to letting steam escape into the sky. The game simply cannot handle that much load at once.

Take out the rendering by remotely chunk loading and all you have is a few calculations. There's no load at all, really. You'll want to come back to do maintenance every now and then, though, so you're not off the hook entirely as far as lag goes. Just make sure you get the job done right the first time and you should never have problems.

I would also recommend you check to make sure that your VDGs won't short out in the rain. I went through hours of rigorous testing to make sure that nothing would go wrong. It rains once and there goes my 10 million RF/t along with any nearby trees.
Caveat: If you're using the Monster 112 version (Ancient, I know, but some people still are), beware: it will still eat up TPS even if just chunkloaded, and I had one instance where, normally there's ~1K plasma entities, but overnight that went up to 300K, with 10K fusion events and something like 13K+ neutrons. It cleaned itself up with time but that was really strange and murdered TPS. (again, this is on an ANCIENT version so this is probably no longer an issue.) Frankly I'm surprised nothing melted, though I did overengineer it with massive sinking to other boilers for safety.
 

Wagon153

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Jul 29, 2019
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In Thaumcraft, one of the first things the player typically does is to make a crucible, heated with a burning block of netherrack. After researching nitor, and making some in a crucible, the player can then replace their burning netherrack with a piece of nitor, which serves the same purpose, but a bit less dangerously.

Can we have Thaumcraft nitor work as a valid heat source for steam engines?
I don't think nitor should work for two reasons.
1. "Magical source of heat/light"
2. The thaumonomicon itself says Nitor produces a negligible amount of heat, barely able to heat up a crucible. How could it provide the amount of heat needed to produce a constant stream of steam?
 
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Celestialphoenix

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Tartarus.. I mean at work. Same thing really.
I don't think nitor should work for two reasons.
1. "Magical source of heat/light"
2. The thaumonomicon itself says Nitor produces a negligible amount of heat, barely able to heat up a crucible. How could it provide the amount of heat needed to produce a constant stream of steam?

Agreed.
3. Fire/lava provides a suitable amount of danger/risk vs the reward of "free" energy- using Nitor would negate this risk, and cut out gameplay mechanics.​
 

EyeDeck

Well-Known Member
Apr 16, 2013
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I don't think nitor should work for two reasons.
1. "Magical source of heat/light"
2. The thaumonomicon itself says Nitor produces a negligible amount of heat, barely able to heat up a crucible. How could it provide the amount of heat needed to produce a constant stream of steam?
First, Netherrack itself would have to, in some way, be magical itself in order to burn forever.

"This flame seems to be fuelled by magic itself. The number of uses for an everburning flame seems endless, but unfortunately it seems to produce much more light than heat. Despite that it could still prove to be a steady source of energy."
The thaumonomicon doesn't say the heat produced is negligible, just that less of it is produced than light. Evidently enough energy is produced to boil water, heating the crucible to a boil precisely as quickly as burning netherrack.

I would also like to point out that the steam engine doesn't produce very much power itself; converted to RF, it only outputs about 2.9 RF/t.

The danger aspect regarding an open flame versus a more controlled, magical flame would ultimately be up to Reika.
 

Reika

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First, Netherrack itself would have to, in some way, be magical itself in order to burn forever.

"This flame seems to be fuelled by magic itself. The number of uses for an everburning flame seems endless, but unfortunately it seems to produce much more light than heat. Despite that it could still prove to be a steady source of energy."
The thaumonomicon doesn't say the heat produced is negligible, just that less of it is produced than light. Evidently enough energy is produced to boil water, heating the crucible to a boil precisely as quickly as burning netherrack.

I would also like to point out that the steam engine doesn't produce very much power itself; converted to RF, it only outputs about 2.9 RF/t.

The danger aspect regarding an open flame versus a more controlled, magical flame would ultimately be up to Reika.
I treat netherrack as being infused with petroleum distillates, hence the infinite burning (and the Boom Miner achievement).
 

aTeLe

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Jul 29, 2019
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I played many times with boring machine on gold and bad server and never had that problem...
Maybe an /opis check could give you some information, not sure but might help
Hey, it took a long time but I'm back. Not sure if it helps, but here http://imgur.com/a/NYEw2 (For American fellows: it's a decimal comma, not a thousand)
Some Information:
The ping in general is quite bad (100-150ms - playable) and the reason lies somewhere in Minecraft/Java. And the peaks are the delays I'm talking about. We have a root server with different mc-servers and other applications, the ping is better on another mc-server and I have a 50ms ping to the teamspeak on the same server. (which is still not the best - others have 20ms to our server, the peaks are only in mc)
Maybe I should run opis exactly when a lagg happens, because it seems not that helpful. But it's not easy to time it.


This issue does not happen at start, but only as the server runs for a while? This is affecting the server, not the client, correct?

Can you add the following debug flags to the server startup, and send me the tail end (200-300 lines) when the lag happens?

-XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -XX:+PrintHeapAtGC -XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution -XX:+PrintGCDetails -Xloggc:GC.log
Hi sorry that I couldn't answer earlier. I started now the Server with these parameters. It happened first when I ran a Rotarycraft-Boringmachine for a very long time. And now it only laggs when the boring machine is enabled.
I tried to open the file, after the lagg happened.
Here, get the last 1000 lines - I hope there is something in there, that can help you.
http://pastebin.com/D5dVV43d
 

abculatter_2

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Jul 29, 2019
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So, I just played around with the anti-engine-spam mechanics of shaft junctions. It seems, to me, rather inelegant and band-aid-ish, given that it has no real basis on the physics that RoC bases itself on.

It seems like a much better solution to the problem would be to nerf steam. (Hydrokinetics already got the bedrock upgrade nerf, which is fine, AC engines require occasional human input, DC provides so little power that spamming hundreds of them would just be stupid, and wind could stand to gain more use. I can't think of any other engines where engine spam would be exploity, due to fuel requirements.)

I propose that steam engines should have their mechanics changed a bit, so that they produce less power the lower heat they have. (To, combined with the later suggestion, provide a use for flywheels, which currently aren't particularly useful in RoC, though they really should be) Additionally, the passive heat providers (lava and fire) could be made more erratic in how they heat steam engines or just stuff in general, with the heat jumping up and down randomly. This would encourage the use of the heater for heat-based machines, rather then just plopping down a block of lava/netherrack, as it would provide a consistent and constant level of heat. It would also give a use for furnace fuels in RoC which currently are pretty much useless once you have a furnace heater, as well as by extension the woodcutter. (And I suppose also blaze spawner controllers.)

EDIT: Also, not sure if you're aware, but Railcraft coke doesn't work in the RoC blast furnace.
 
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Reika

RotaryCraft Dev
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So, I just played around with the anti-engine-spam mechanics of shaft junctions. It seems, to me, rather inelegant and band-aid-ish, given that it has no real basis on the physics that RoC bases itself on.

It seems like a much better solution to the problem would be to nerf steam. (Hydrokinetics already got the bedrock upgrade nerf, which is fine, AC engines require occasional human input, DC provides so little power that spamming hundreds of them would just be stupid, and wind could stand to gain more use. I can't think of any other engines where engine spam would be exploity, due to fuel requirements.)

I propose that steam engines should have their mechanics changed a bit, so that they produce less power the lower heat they have. (To, combined with the later suggestion, provide a use for flywheels, which currently aren't particularly useful in RoC, though they really should be) Additionally, the passive heat providers (lava and fire) could be made more erratic in how they heat steam engines or just stuff in general, with the heat jumping up and down randomly. This would encourage the use of the heater for heat-based machines, rather then just plopping down a block of lava/netherrack, as it would provide a consistent and constant level of heat. It would also give a use for furnace fuels in RoC which currently are pretty much useless once you have a furnace heater, as well as by extension the woodcutter. (And I suppose also blaze spawner controllers.)
No, the problem is not purely steam engine spam, but spam of any engine type.
 

abculatter_2

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No, the problem is not purely steam engine spam, but spam of any engine type.

Well... Thinking about it a bit more, now I see your logic behind it. (To encourage using more difficult and finicky higher-tier energy generation, such as nuclear and fusion, instead of just spamming, for example, jet turbines, right?) It does solve that rather nicely I suppose, though it still seems a little jarring. What about adding tiered shaft junctions, (without a bedrock one, so that people don't just spam those and the nerf is completely negated) and/or making junctions require lubricant if they combine more then such and such amount of energy? And the amount of lubricant required increases exponentially? Or it could just require lubricant if they combine more then four engines, else break.
 

Reika

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Well... Thinking about it a bit more, now I see your logic behind it. (To encourage using more difficult and finicky higher-tier energy generation, such as nuclear and fusion, instead of just spamming, for example, jet turbines, right?) It does solve that rather nicely I suppose, though it still seems a little jarring. What about adding tiered shaft junctions, (without a bedrock one, so that people don't just spam those and the nerf is completely negated) and/or making junctions require lubricant if they combine more then such and such amount of energy? And the amount of lubricant required increases exponentially? Or it could just require lubricant if they combine more then four engines, else break.
There is already a bedrock junction, as by that point the techtree has been completed.