In your opinion: BuildCraft of Redpower

[KirinDave]

I think it's really interesting that people think RP2 tubes are "more powerful" when pre-Sortron Buildcraft actually has much more powerful and programmable logic. And the Emerald Pipes can be really, really, really powerful.

What I think Buildcraft really lacks is some sort of conditional routing tool. If it has that functionality, I sure can't figure it out. Like, for example, a gate like the diamond gate that instead of routing on item type can do direction selection based on pipe wire signals. Because the main thing that BC can't do easily is route a 1-to-many fanout of machines without an intervening chest, whereas RP2 is so good at this that you can actually make cyclical networks and so long as the restriction tubes are put in the right place it'll still work.

You can do it in BC with a chest: you use an AND gate to detect an empty inventory on the target and a clear pipe and emit a pipe wire signal to the chest (1 pipe away) which will pull from the chest if the pipe is clear AND the pipe wire signal is set. But this is obviously awkward and very slow due to the traversal speed of extraction pipes.

I really wish that someday we'd get a "sorting gate" that when placed on a junction pipe could make routing decisions. Pipe wire is so cool, but it has only very elementary applications and due to the slow speed of pipes it almost always lets items drop.

 

[DoctorOr]

Yeah and do you really need yet another transport system that people will compare to all the others? To stand out it would have to be beter then everyone elses.

Yes. To be better than the big two wouldn't be that hard.

Although Applied Energistics really might be the ultimate peak, some people (cough*slowpoke*cough) have stated they feel it to be overpowered, presumably because of the ability to store simply massive amounts of items in a single Minecrack block area.

 

[Hydra]

Nobody's mentioned the RP Manager yet, which can often negate the need for laggy Timers. They're expensive though :|

And they currently have a nasty bug that can crash your server. Took our admin quite some time to restore a large area to a backup created a few hours before.[DOUBLEPOST=1361783879][/DOUBLEPOST]

But thermal expansion does every other transport so wonderfully, I'd like to see what comes up with pipes, it could be really cool or useful...or both. Sorting systems are mid game for me, so price isn't a huge worry, transporting everything with tesseracts (no, I don't do that ) could get expensive and impressive.

TE created an MJ and liquid transport system because BC's versions didn't cut it and there weren't any alternatives. BC pipes work a lot better and there are alternatives (RP) so there really is no point in creating yet another item transport system.

I personally don't like routers. They feel too cheaty.

 

[JasonZZ]

I think it's really interesting that people think RP2 tubes are "more powerful" when pre-Sortron Buildcraft actually has much more powerful and programmable logic. And the Emerald Pipes can be really, really, really powerful.

What I think Buildcraft really lacks is some sort of conditional routing tool. If it has that functionality, I sure can't figure it out. Like, for example, a gate like the diamond gate that instead of routing on item type can do direction selection based on pipe wire signals. Because the main thing that BC can't do easily is route a 1-to-many fanout of machines without an intervening chest, whereas RP2 is so good at this that you can actually make cyclical networks and so long as the restriction tubes are put in the right place it'll still work.

You can do it in BC with a chest: you use an AND gate to detect an empty inventory on the target and a clear pipe and emit a pipe wire signal to the chest (1 pipe away) which will pull from the chest if the pipe is clear AND the pipe wire signal is set. But this is obviously awkward and very slow due to the traversal speed of extraction pipes.

I really wish that someday we'd get a "sorting gate" that when placed on a junction pipe could make routing decisions. Pipe wire is so cool, but it has only very elementary applications and due to the slow speed of pipes it almost always lets items drop.

Your sorting gate is an iron pipe with a gate triggered by pipe wire. Put a wooden pipe in the direction items come from, and your iron pipe will route one way or the other based on the pipe wire signal.

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[baw179]

Your sorting gate is an iron pipe with a gate triggered by pipe wire. Put a wooden pipe in the direction items come from, and your iron pipe will route one way or the other based on the pipe wire signal

....including sending your items back where they came from. -_-

 

[baw179]

I've actually gone with a BC pipe system for my ore processing and barrel storage this time. Normally I would use RP but the whole system seems to cause me silly single digit FPS and it drops nearly to 0 once there's a bunch of items moving slowly through the tubes. Since the revamp with the gold item pipes in BC you can reduce the pipe travelling time for items to nearly nothing if you install 3 gold pipes in a row so entity lag is no longer an issue. I also use a lot of item tesseracts to remotely teleport items to each area of the processing system to save even more 'items in pipes' time. It's perhaps not as compact and space efficient as a RP system would be with covers, but space and 'compactness' have never been a concern for me and it works well.

 

[Lambert2191]

I find pipes to be extremely incompatible with barrels.
You have 3 barrels in a row for say.. steves carts tree farm:
stuff coming along in rp tubes; knows exactly where it wants to go, goes there, no problems at all.
stuff coming along in pipes; oh.. hmm nah I don't want to go in this barrel with all my friends, nahhh not this one either, oh y'know what I'll just pop out here and lay on the ground and fuck your shit up... coz thats how I roll!

 

[baw179]

I find pipes to be extremely incompatible with barrels.
You have 3 barrels in a row for say.. steves carts tree farm:
stuff coming along in rp tubes; knows exactly where it wants to go, goes there, no problems at all.
stuff coming along in pipes; oh.. hmm nah I don't want to go in this barrel with all my friends, nahhh not this one either, oh y'know what I'll just pop out here and lay on the ground and fuck your shit up... coz thats how I roll!

That's nothing to do with barrels, that's just BC pipes in general. They see every non-filter junction as a 50/50 choice. It's a bit of a PITA setting them all up, but a d pipe on top of each barrel quickly solves the problem and - unlike RP tubes - if you decide to empty the barrel to make something, when you come back it won't have some other random item in it!

 

[Lambert2191]

That's nothing to do with barrels, that's just BC pipes in general. They see every non-filter junction as a 50/50 choice. It's a bit of a PITA setting them all up, but a d pipe on top of each barrel quickly solves the problem and - unlike RP tubes - if you decide to empty the barrel to make something, when you come back it won't have some other random item in it!

ah so one of the only advantages of BC pipes (cost) is eradicated. And if you'd played with Steves Carts tree farms, you'll know that if you leave that thing running for any reasonable length of time, it is EXTREMELY difficult to "empty" one of those barrels.

Easy enough to solve with diamond pipes.

again, using diamond pipes destroys the advantage of BC pipes. If this common setup requires diamonds, then tubes become cheaper.

 

[Hydra]

Easy enough to solve with diamond pipes. If you have item X going in one direction (down into the barrel) and the rest onwards, that item will fill up a barrel and only if it's full it will move on. It's very easy to fill a storage and have the rest overflow into for example a voidpipe that way.

I mean, tubes are 'better' in many ways but unfortunately they have their own issues (biggest issue currently is the effect on framerates they seem to have) as well.

 

[Bibble]

Alternatively, you can use routers. The way that barrels were meant to be used.

The tube/barrel system is fine, unless it causes some FPS issues. I'm starting with a new world at the moment, and wondering about this very issue. I have to say that I'm more than tempted to go with the pipe system, given the FPS problems I had last time. Might also consider getting an assembly table earlier, as that does make pipes very useful at extracting from chests (rather than the redstone requirement of transposers/filters, or the blutric requirement of sorters). I also quite like being able to use a redstone energy cell on the wooden pipe, if I need to empty the thing really quickly.

As far as an SC farm goes, it'd be quite nice to be able to just switch out barrels when needed (yay! gravity gun!), and not worry too much about mis-fills.

To be perfectly honest, it seems to be a matter of personal preference at any rate. Also, I'm slightly intrigued by the either Twilight Forest or TC3 "sortingwood" stuff. It looks to still be WIP, but might be interesting.

 

[baw179]

ah so one of the only advantages of BC pipes (cost) is eradicated. And if you'd played with Steves Carts tree farms, you'll know that if you leave that thing running for any reasonable length of time, it is EXTREMELY difficult to "empty" one of those barrels.

Extremely difficult to empty a barrel? What the heck? Not understanding you at all. I'm guessing you mean the SCTF fills them up too quick? Well if that's the argument then you have greater issues in your processing systems if you can't put something in place before your tree farm makes 65,536 saplings/logs.

 

[lolpierandom]

Extremely difficult to empty a barrel? What the heck? Not understanding you at all. I'm guessing you mean the SCTF fills them up too quick? Well if that's the argument then you have greater issues in your processing systems if you can't put something in place before your tree farm makes 65,536 saplings/logs.

It's pointless though, I never use up all of any given resource that I'd want to sort automatically- anything that I'd use completely up I'd probably just dump in a project table or seperate "parts" chest.

 

[vineet]

Or maybe TE will make tipes (or pubes)

 

[Poppycocks]

Or maybe TE will make tipes (or pubes)

But I already have those .

 

[Hydra]

But I already have those .

You have tipes? You might want to go see a doctor!

 

[Poppycocks]

You have tipes? You might want to go see a doctor!

Yikes!

 

[Lambert2191]

you have greater issues in your processing systems if you can't put something in place before your tree farm makes 65,536 saplings/logs.

I have something in place, something perfectly suited to the job. It's called pneumatic tubes. They work spotlessly with barrels and I'd not switch to BC for anything related to storage.

 

[jnads]

There isn't any superior system yet in the debate of BC vs RP2.

BC still has advantages in that it's FAR easier to get early-game, and it's quicker to set-up, moderately complex machines. I like it for my dumb automated ore-processing systems. It is kinda clumsy to make them compact, since you have to invest in lasers + assembly table.

RP2 still excels at the whole intelligent pipe thing, and not allowing a stack of items to go floating into the world. Also it's superior with barrel sorting. The bad thing for sorting with machines in RP2 is you have to power the Sorting Machine. Which is crummy if you don't really use RP2 power for anything else.


Emerald Pipes do solve some beefs with BC systems. Mainly making Autocrafting Tables more useful.

 

[KirinDave]

Your sorting gate is an iron pipe with a gate triggered by pipe wire. Put a wooden pipe in the direction items come from, and your iron pipe will route one way or the other based on the pipe wire signal.

I know that iron gates can respond to redstone signal edges to rotate themselves (and they never point to wooden pipes). But what does confuses me is what you said about pipe wire. Iron gates respond to pipe wire?

I've seen "system is full, void all" shunts installed using a T junction of pipe wire and gates. But this doesn't really solve the N-way fanout problem. People love RP2 pipes because they can do things like put 18 barrels on a line and RP2 will dutifully fill them up. I just wish we could find a way to approximate that behavior with BC pipes. I'm bored to tears of redpower sorting machines and tubes, I want more options!