Dumb Modular Powersuit Tricks

[Darknesschaos]

I would love to see the addition of 'useless' modules too. One that I had in mind was a Jukebox module that would store and play music discs. Something like a portable record player.

 

[YX33A]

I would love to see the addition of 'useless' modules too. One that I had in mind was a Jukebox module that would store and play music discs. Something like a portable record player.

Not sure one can play music without it being left behind when you move, but I fully support the addition of "Utility" functions on the power tool. One which would be very handy would be a "button pressing" module, which when selected, has no right click function. Thus one can right click on things without running the risk of your power tool doing something you don't want it to do.(and while I know one can just disable all of my right click modules with the configuration menu with a hotkey, this would be easier to use)

 

[Darknesschaos]

Not sure one can play music without it being left behind when you move, but I fully support the addition of "Utility" functions on the power tool. One which would be very handy would be a "button pressing" module, which when selected, has no right click function. Thus one can right click on things without running the risk of your power tool doing something you don't want it to do.(and while I know one can just disable all of my right click modules with the configuration menu with a hotkey, this would be easier to use)

Most things are programattically capable, it just depends on the hoops to jump through to make it happen and how worth the result is to warrant the effort.

 

[Qwertz]

Mm, does MPS add any interesting GUI-elements? I'd LOVE a "FOF" (friend or foe) system that would add targeting elements to things on the screen (either red for enemy, or green for friendly/neutral). Maybe have a way to disable checking on some things (all friends, chickens, etc). And an addition for aiming with ranged weapons, perhaps (when you have your bow selected, it gives you a target to use to hit the enemy). And, of course, an upgraded version that "scans" enemies to see their health, velocity, etc.

I'm going to have to start camping on the MPS thread, it seems!

Those ideas sound awesome, I would love to see those features added!

 

[Guswut]

Those ideas sound awesome, I would love to see those features added!

You should look over this link for even more awesome ideas that the mod author is going to look into: http://www.machinemuse.net/todo.php

 

[Qwertz]

You should look over this link for even more awesome ideas that the mod author is going to look into: http://www.machinemuse.net/todo.php

Lol, I just read that yesterday.

 

[KirinDave]

As with every module, Ion thrusters have two recipes, the "vanilla" and the greg Tech (Ultimate pack).
The Force field emitter also has two, the vanilla one costing 4 ender pearl (and 5 solenoids, but those are only iron, redstone and bits of gold).
As you need two of those, that means you need 8 ender pearls.

Ultimate is misconfigured worse than I thought if that's what they're actually deploying. Bug report that.

 

[YX33A]

Well, it's not exactly a "dumb" trick, but try using Jetboots before adding a Jetpack. Yes, it's half as effective, but costs half as much(and IIRC consumes half as much power). Plus if it's not enough thrust, you can usually get the parts back by salvaging it.
Another "dumb" trick is using the parachute. It slows your fall to a crawl, but also prevents fall damage. You have to sneak to use it, though. Which means it acts funny with the Glider Wings(as both work via sneaking while falling), which I also suggest trying out. With a way of getting higher up then normal(aka jump assist or pillaring) you can get pretty far if your armor isn't super heavy.
Everyone rushes to get Jetpacks because "they are the best". But if you can't afford the best, you can at least get around better with cheaper upgrades.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Well, it's not exactly a "dumb" trick, but try using Jetboots before adding a Jetpack. Yes, it's half as effective, but costs half as much(and IIRC consumes half as much power). Plus if it's not enough thrust, you can usually get the parts back by salvaging it.
Another "dumb" trick is using the parachute. It slows your fall to a crawl, but also prevents fall damage. You have to sneak to use it, though. Which means it acts funny with the Glider Wings(as both work via sneaking while falling), which I also suggest trying out. With a way of getting higher up then normal(aka jump assist or pillaring) you can get pretty far if your armor isn't super heavy.
Everyone rushes to get Jetpacks because "they are the best". But if you can't afford the best, you can at least get around better with cheaper upgrades.

I like Glider Wings, but I generally have them hotkeyed to be usually disabled unless I really want them, because they tend to be very situational.

 

[Memorian]

I use the glider wings all the time, they are super awesome for getting around, just jumping and gliding all the time! Also i use them alot in the nether when out looking for fortresses or other things, it's usually not hard getting up high, and the gliding over large lava oceans

 

[MachineMuse]

Thanks for all the support everyone!

I don't know about the ice issue. I don't think it's related to the fact that most movement modules don't work underwater. Can you post an issue on my github so I stop forgetting? I heard about it once before I think.

 

[OmegaJasam]

I actualy have problems on worlds where I don't have the parchute these days. I often use it to stop me over shooting a small jump over on, precision stops at high speeds are amazing.... but without it I tend to do things like jump into the top of an infernal furnace X_X'

 

[ICountFrom0]

I would rather enjoy a Bistromathics generator.
As long as you are eating, or have eaten in the last second or two, your energy level is unknown, and thus infinite.

So, an Improbability generator would reduce the cost of teleportation, but require a large gold brick?

So, I'm thinking about the wormhole drive, putting it in terms of Diablo, maybe... perhaps teleport anchors might be a good description for it?

What if you construct a block in the world, and a function teleports you to that block. Select one at random, or the closest one you are not already at if you have more then one?

Oh, and the sooner that you get a bee protection mode in the armor, the sooner I will offer you tribute and worship.

Of the "not going to happen soon" Zoom is the one that sounds both hardest, and most glee inducing. Maybe you can find somebody to 'lend' you the code?

 

[MachineMuse]

It's not going to happen because it's an inherent feature in optifine. I haven't looked into how possible it would be with Forge at the moment.

I don't like the idea of blocks that teleport you, mainly because tile entities and frames. It might end up working out that way, but I will have to do some abstract tinkering to get it to work the way I want it to.

I don't know how to do bee protection armor and I'm not thrilled about the idea of digging into yet another unfamiliar API when my own still needs a lot of work. That might be a job for MPS-Addons, the set of modules Andrew2448 has been developing (currently auto-feeder, generators, and portable crafting table - soon to be an item magnet as well. They have been moved into a separate mod for 1.5, which will be available on my site as well, once we get everything sorted out)

 

[baw179]

I am actually putting my MPS away in my GT world a bit huffily. I have fixes for a few problems, but not all of them, and with these new versions of it's very hard to not just take the easy road and use the Advanced Jetpack/Nanochest combo and those tools. Since this is actually a pretty highly rated google thread for the module, I figured it'd be nice to continue the discussion here. Please not that this advice takes GT-centric config more into account than the IC2 recipes. It also applies a bit more to TE.

Problem 1: The Suit's Batteries are Microscopic!
You can charge an MPS in any IC2, and even LV power sources do a good job of that. That's because the config has a file that says 1 EU = 50J. This seems great, right? Cheap charging! Right... except that any IC2 tools you do will be taking 50x the EU cost from that. One medium-level battery (which uses lapotronic crystals) can hold 500kJ. This is a mere 10000EU, even a humble electric wrench or electric treetap can bankrupt your armor! For direct comparison, this is the size of the feeble internal battery on your Diamond Drill.

You might suggest an upgrade to the battery, but look at the costs for the extreme end capacitors. 6 chrome and 2 lapotronic cryatls. Anyone who's familiar with Gregtech should immediately spit-take; that's an expensive build for armor. It's more expensive than many pieces of quantum armor, and you'll need to manufacture multiples of them! That battery can hold a much huger sum: 10x! So now we're holding a whopping 100000 EU. Fire a mining laser and plummet to the ground like a wounded bird.

Even worse, if you do forego a chestpiece of wear an IC2 chestpiece, if your armor is on the bottom half of your body it'll be sapped before the top due to the MPS mechanics. Since salvaging capacitors seems to never work (I tried it on a testmode server and didn't have it work 10 times out of 10, make sure to make a wise choice.

Solution: There is a config entry "Joules per IC2 EU". As counter-intuitive as this seems; you want to turn this down. Honestly you might even want to bring it below 0 if you want even some sort of parity with the actual cost of what you're sinking in. You drop multiple Lapotronic crystals in a capacitor, you expect something like the EU you put in. I'd recommend setting this to 0.5. This means you'll need more hefty charging resources for your suit.

Problem 2: Even if you change that constant, the tools themselves are sorta costly.

Basically, the maxout point of most of the tools is somewhere around the "Advanced" Gravisuite tools, but their power consumption at those modes is really high. Well before you have any iridium on you, you can have an Advanced Diamond Drill and a cool million EU on your back. But let's say you think GraviSuite's new toolset is OP. Fair enough! Even compared to the basic Diamond Drill it's a tough comparison. A diamond drill can use up to 80 EU per operation. If you're wearing even a basic lappack, you can mine ~3750 blocks before having to recharge. Using ONE of the non-iridium bearing batteries and using a 2/3 overclock (which is about as fast as the diamond drill in my estimation) your 500kJ battery gives you 665 blocks broken, 17.5% percent!. Even if you were to utterly forego armor spend 20kg of your 26kg weight allotment on these batteries,that'd be 1 megajoule and another 2 lapotronic crystals., you'd still be running out of steam at a mere 1330 blocks.

So until you have the maximum battery, the tools are prohibitively expensive to use. Overclocking tem basically ruins your day. So if you do implement my fix for problem 1, the only reason you would't just use the IC2 tools charged off your battery is that you You might want to point out the generators as a counterpoint, but wait a sec on that...

Solution: Welp, you need to go into the config settings and reduce the base costs for the core tools. The exact number? I'm not sure. I'll update this part of the post once I have a better idea. My guidepost is that the 50% overclock should be competitive with the diamond drill and the 100% should be competitive with the diamond drill in terms of speed. A bad way to to fix this is to up the base speed to make lower settings more competitive because you could easily end up with 40x mining speed. Due to the regenerative generator it should be less efficient, but not the less-than-30%.

Problem 3: The Kinetic Generator Does Not Help With Problem 2

Problem 2 is that the tools are too expensive, but MPS has regenerative power. One relatively early solution is the Kinetic Generator. The Kinetic generator is worth its weight in batteries for the leg and foot upgrades; maxing out every movement assist doesn't even offset the power gain by 50%. Amazing, right? But when you do go mining the tool consumes so much energy that you find yourself running back and forth in your branch mines. And the solar panel won't help you here (good luck building it on a GT config though). It seems wrong that the kinetic generator generates huge sums of power on boosted leaps to the point where moving will recharge your suit faster than a Charge-O-Mat.

Solution: This is more for the mod designer to address. In the interim we could increase the cost of the movement skills to come closer to balance with the generation of the kinetic engine, or decreasing the max threshold of the kinetic generator. The config values are straightforward, but I'm not sure what the right call is.

Problem 4: Under Gregtech, the recipes are insanely expensive. Under IC2, they're quite cheap. Under Thermal Expansion, they're gated only on a bit of infrastructure.

There isn't a fix for this. It's just a balance problem. The MPS recipes for IC2 are crazy iron hungry, but any decent automining will enable better-than-gravitysuit results without any iridium and they completely invalidate every other kind of armor in the game. The Gregtech recipes require more chrome than a fusion reactor. It's actually more cost effective to build a Gravity Suit! The net result is pretty amazing, but there is literally no in-between. You either have every bit of speed you want or none of it at all.

I originally fell in love with the mod because it has a power curve. But I confess it feels very haphazard. On my DW20 server, using the MPS turned me into an unparalleled god. I put away a quantum suit for it. On my AdvanceCraft (consider it like Ultimate but with a bit more) server, I've sunk a ton of resources into my suit and I'm underperforming and have to put down my suit a lot.

Solution: There isn't one. Sorry.

Right. So let me get this straight. You CHOOSE to play with a Gregtech pack and then have the nerve to go complaining to Muse that everything is too hard to make and the recipes should be nerfed. Not sure if serious... Here's a suggestion : if you don't like the hardness of the recipes in GT then don't play it (or learn how to modify your OWN config)! I play the DW20 pack and the recipes are just fine and require no alteration at all. The recipes are reasonably resource intensive and that's exactly how they should be as the tool and armour are both extremely powerful.

Muse, I'd just like to say a big thanks for the mod, it's a great addition and I'm having a lot of fun with it. The fact you can pretty much configure it exactly how you want makes it all the more awesome. I do however share the same concerns as slay_mithos in a recent post about the tool "locking" in your hotbar when you're trying to cycle to a different hotbar slot whilst sneaking. When it "locks" you wind up scrolling round your teleporter/crafting table/gun options on your tool instead of scrolling across your hotbar. After unintentionally firing your gun and teleporting across rooms a few times this quickly becomes very annoying, to the point where I've removed those mods from the tool altogether. I realise that a different key binding would theoretically 'fix' this, but that's easier said than done when you have other mods all using their own sets of keys and I simply couldn't find any key in a comfortable position to warrant using it.

One thing I do feel that I am missing from using the tool are enchants. I'd like to see a way to add the fortune, silk touch and looting enchants, and have them toggleable somehow. I note that you said in your first post in this thread the reason for your power tool was to save on hotbar space. As it stands it doesn't really save any space at all from a mining perspective as you still need to carry a separate pick for silk touch and fortune as well as a sword for looting (for example). I think you have most of the other tool/weapon enchants covered in other ways in the various modules, but those 3 seem to be missing. With them it would truly be the all-in-one tool and actually save on hotbar space like you intended. 2p fwiw. Keep up the good work!

 

[MachineMuse]

I don't really know how else to allow a wide variety of functions without taking up the entire alphabet in hotkeys. Soaryn suggested a radial menu like in CRYsis; maybe I will give that a shot and make it an option.

 

[baw179]

A small annoyance I've discovered today is the key binding page GUI thingy (DW20 5.2). It appears to be all messed up as when you first open it every module you have equipped are all bunched up on top of each other in the top left corner. However if you don't do touch anything in the GUI they eventually fan out vertically after around 5 mins of slow movement but it appears to be a bug of some sort. Also when you assign a new key it lands in the GUI directly over the top of any existing keys. For example, I accidentally chose 'escape' key and then when I chose the 'F' key as a new key to put the jetpack on, it put the letter 'F' right over the top of the 'escape' gif so it read 'escFpe'. I do of course realise you can drag them about, but it took me best part of 10 mins to even notice where the 'F' gif had landed as it was disguised in the 'escape' gif.

Another thing I find annoying in it is that none of the module images have any name tags on them when you mouse over. Some of them are obvious what they are from the shape (like the jetpack) but I have absolutely no clue what any of the others are.

Perhaps a little 'fine tuning' could be done in this area to make it a bit more intuitive/user friendly, Muse? Thanks.

 

[KirinDave]

Right. So let me get this straight. You CHOOSE to play with a Gregtech pack and then have the nerve to go complaining to Muse that everything is too hard to make and the recipes should be nerfed.

Cool conversational necro, bro. Perhaps instead of drawing your sword and charging into battle you should read the thread, Galahad.

 

[MachineMuse]

A small annoyance I've discovered today is the key binding page GUI thingy (DW20 5.2). It appears to be all messed up as when you first open it every module you have equipped are all bunched up on top of each other in the top left corner. However if you don't do touch anything in the GUI they eventually fan out vertically after around 5 mins of slow movement but it appears to be a bug of some sort. Also when you assign a new key it lands in the GUI directly over the top of any existing keys. For example, I accidentally chose 'escape' key and then when I chose the 'F' key as a new key to put the jetpack on, it put the letter 'F' right over the top of the 'escape' gif so it read 'escFpe'. I do of course realise you can drag them about, but it took me best part of 10 mins to even notice where the 'F' gif had landed as it was disguised in the 'escape' gif.

Another thing I find annoying in it is that none of the module images have any name tags on them when you mouse over. Some of them are obvious what they are from the shape (like the jetpack) but I have absolutely no clue what any of the others are.

Perhaps a little 'fine tuning' could be done in this area to make it a bit more intuitive/user friendly, Muse? Thanks.

That is not intended behaviour and I've never seen that happen before.

 

[Revemohl]

Something I just noticed recently is that the flight control module actually boosts your ground speed as well. I don't like it too much, since you just plop to the ground if you try any kind of movement, and since I've gotten used to moving around with the jetpack I guess I'll only use it for when I require precision floating or something like that.
Speaking of the jetpack, with enough practice you won't need a glider at all if you have it. Controlling your height might be easier with the jet boots, though.

Also, I'm perfectly okay with how expensive the jetpack is. Something this amazing was not meant to be easily obtained by a person!