Interesting ae2 setups/challenges

[rdemay91]

I personally enjoy the channels with ae2. I know a lot of people agree and a lot don't. I am curious to find out how people setup their ae2 systems. Or a challenge for people to try to simplify networks or complex as can be.


I have a challenge and would like to see pictures if someone can and its can you make a 'server' room of drives all connected and on only one channel of main network.

 

[b0bst3r]

I have 1 dense for AE crafting, 1 dense for storage (or 2 depending on how big I go) and 2 for machine automation, so far that's been enough channels off 1 controller.

 

[jaquadro]

I actually love the challenge of the channels system. Even the crappy crafting processes are interesting once you find ways to automate it all away. I used a combination of designs I found and my own. I'll post some screenshots of my AE2 stuff later.

Your challenge is ambiguous to me. "One channel" in the most literal sense is only going to allow one drive. If you mean one ME Controller face attachment, then you're going to top out at 32 using either dense cabling or tunnels. If you mean one cable and you can do anything on the controller/drives side, your theoretical limits become 256 or 1024 drives depending on the cabling you use.

 

[rdemay91]

I actually love the challenge of the channels system. Even the crappy crafting processes are interesting once you find ways to automate it all away. I used a combination of designs I found and my own. I'll post some screenshots of my AE2 stuff later.

Your challenge is ambiguous to me. "One channel" in the most literal sense is only going to allow one drive. If you mean one ME Controller face attachment, then you're going to top out at 32 using either dense cabling or tunnels. If you mean one cable and you can do anything on the controller/drives side, your theoretical limits become 256 or 1024 drives depending on the cabling you use.

Well only one channel one main network so basically a subnet for storage but that's easy the challenge part no cables showing and like a server room for all drives like you see in movies long rows of serevers full of data

 

[jaquadro]

Do you accept hiding them in the floor? Or a room underneath to hold your subnet controller and/or interfaces for chaining together subnets? Because it should be pretty trivial at that point.

 

[rdemay91]

Well the max you can have is 32 channels without subnets/p2p and I base this on an over killed ae1 build I did. I had an insane amount of drives in a concrete room with password protected door like a real life server room. Row in between a set of 2 drives that go pretty far. But with channels its harder to pull something like that off. Not impossible, I believe I could do it but it wouldn't be as impressive as ae1 build. Still interesting though.

 

[RJS]

Have you seen the Super Soaryn Drive? Without the section that allows the drives to be inserted/removed from another terminal, it's an infinitely expandable storage that requires no controllers and only takes up one channel

 

[rdemay91]

I know but its all done to expand more use a subnet and so forth I am doing something like that on current server but with channels its harder to replicate what I did with ae1

 

[jaquadro]

Here's one way to get a ton of drives into a single bank.

Each slice of 8 drives in the bank will route to its corresponding P2P tunnel on the bottom. Note I've separated them with cable anchors to avoid any funny business. Same with cable anchors on top of the dense cable to prevent a drive connection.

Since all the tunnels connect directly to the controller and are equal to a length 1 hop, the channels will never route sideways through the machines. The drives will act a bit weird until you get all the tunnels configured with your memory card. For every 32 drives, you'll need one P2P tunnel on the controller. So each controller tunnel is mapping to 4 drive tunnels.

I could extend the length of that bank up to 32 slices before maxing out the dense cable carrying all the tunnel channels, though I would need to reconfigured the controller so that the controller-facing tunnels aren't sharing channels with the dense cable, and to be able to fit more tunnels on the faces. Then I could pop a cable anchor on the end and start a new dense cable line and extend it further still. The only requirement is that every connected machine in a bank must eventually come back to the same controller. No subnetting halfway through. Now while I setup cabling for 2 banks in that image, they don't have to share a controller. I could put each bank on its own subnet, and connect that back to a central controller.

If you want to turn your controller into an aesthetic focal point, this is my favorite design:

The only caveat is the dense cables only have 24 channels left to play with.

 

[rdemay91]

Oh damn that's insane challenge complete I thought drive were full blocks it looks like they all connect

 

[madnewmy]

I need to spread out my base(s) duh to my weaker computer so i use a lot of quantum bridge (by a lot, I mean almost every 32 channel has it's own bridge)

I just restarted on a new world where i got some deep storage and seed/fluix crystal automation at one place, more storage with processor automation at another and the "new" base at another one it helps a dam lot on FPS! (And not randomly picking up stuff because you forgot to close your magnet)

 

[rdemay91]

Wow how does that affect your tps with all the different areas that need to be loaded and such[DOUBLEPOST=1414034773][/DOUBLEPOST]The magnet part sucks I do it a lot. But I got a decent computer and luckily get around 100-250 fps

 

[madnewmy]

Playing on a server so tps isint that much affected

But I mean, i load like 1x1 or 3x3 a few times isint so bad

 

[rdemay91]

Oh well nice I don't use those quantum bridges too much[DOUBLEPOST=1414038275][/DOUBLEPOST]Any challenges on creating interesting are systems I've seen the ssd by soaryn hard to top that and jaquadro showed an insane setup that I'm still trying to understand

 

[jaquadro]

Oh damn that's insane challenge complete I thought drive were full blocks it looks like they all connect

I don't understand the full blocks part of that comment. Everywhere I talked about a drive I was talking about the chassis block that holds up to 10 cells. They're definitely full blocks.

 

[rdemay91]

I don't understand the full blocks part of that comment. Everywhere I talked about a drive I was talking about the chassis block that holds up to 10 cells. They're definitely full blocks.

Thats 124 me drives i still cant see how they dont mess up with channels but i do say i am impressed just add a few more rows like that and thats just like the server room i built with ae1 hiding wires of course

 

[jaquadro]

Thats 124 me drives i still cant see how they dont mess up with channels but i do say i am impressed just add a few more rows like that and thats just like the server room i built with ae1 hiding wires of course

It's all to do with how the P2P tunnels are setup. Each device is going to follow the shortest path to obtain a channel. The path length from any of the P2P tunnels in the bank to the controller is 1. That means each device in the bank is going to try and get a channel through exactly one P2P tunnel (the one directly under it). There's no other equal length path which is where most of the implicit machine connections cause problems.

If the P2P tunnel path lengths included all the cable between the two tunnel ends, this wouldn't work. If I arranged the bank tunnels in a way that a machine could find an equal length path to two or more of them, this wouldn't work.

The tools for working around the channel limitation are pretty genius; they're just not immediately obvious. It's a shame this mod picked up such a bad rap as a result.

 

[rdemay91]

So even with them touching it doesn't "short circuit" them that's neat and yea the rap it got was bad at first glance I was skeptic then I actually installed it and played a lil in creative and decided greatest mod ever minecraft is about creativity and ae2 takes that to go crazy

 

[ljfa]

No rhymes, no flow, meaningless lyrics. Yep, AE2 definitely has bad rap

 

[rdemay91]

Anyone else have unique ae2 builds they would like to share? Or perhaps challenge people to do the impossible with ae2.