Logistics Pipes Vs. Applied Energistics

[GPuzzle]

Am I a bit dense, or missing some obscure cultural reference, but how does Slye's signature suggest his deep unending hatred of logistics pipes - and I think he has stated his case for Applied Energistics well without appearing to show much if any "dislike" of Logistics pipes. Are we reading the same thread?

Also can anyone tell me what the range of the remote requester is. Say I had two bases on the opposite end of a biome (must be around 500 blocks at least), would the remote requester work? If not, could I have an ender chest or tesseract at each base with the appropriate pipes on them (I forget which ones).

It has to do with getting hit in the head and getting dumber.
Yeah.
But honestly, I was joking. LP is good, it's just not designed for the same things as AE. And that's something people don't seem to realize. They compare LP to AE but in the long run, they're comparing apples to oranges - the two are similar (apples and oranges are fruits) but fundamentally different. LP is much more fun to me because it gives me the fun and challenging grinding version (silos holding all your items...) but at the same time, it's just not made for mass storage. It's based around sorting and keeping items supplied. AE's focused around automation (LP is quite, but generally is the kind of automation that requires something to be continually dumped into, like keeping a peat-fired engine supplied) and massive storage. Honestly, I like LP more, not because of any batshit crazy insane grinding, but because it feels like I am working for something, instead of just slapping a few 4k drives and some ME Cables.

 

[PhilHibbs]

It has to do with getting hit in the head and getting dumber.

I'm not a big fan of AE, but nonetheless Slye has made perfectly reasonable and sensible points about AE vs LP, there's no need to start throwing insults around.

 

[GPuzzle]

I'm not a big fan of AE, but nonetheless Slye has made perfectly reasonable and sensible points about AE vs LP, there's no need to start throwing insults around.

Have you read what I said after? I was joking.
Anyway, I just can't stand all the hate being thrown at LP. It makes no sense!
It's like comparing apples to oranges - they're similar, but not equal!

 

[draeath]

Clearly, oranges are superior.

 

[PhilHibbs]

Have you read what I said after? I was joking!
Anyway, I just can't stand all the hate being thrown at LP.

Yeah, you've said you're joking now, 12 hours after you initially implied his stupidity. And I still don't see any hate anywhere, just reasonable discussion and comparison of features. You appear to be wearing rage-tinted spectacles.

 

[casilleroatr]

Oranges are not the only fruit

 

[Hoff]

Oranges are not the only fruit

Nor are apples.

I'm sure we all find a certain flavor most appealing to each of us and want others to see it as well but sometimes lose sight that they too have a flavor they like. It's all history now; lets forget it all.

For what it's worth though; I like fruit salad.

 

[TheLoneWolfling]

Nothing is wrong with chests...if you have the space. Some worlds (before barrels) I would have a line of 30 chests. This is a lot of room in my factory, and I prefer some compactness. Also, I would always run out of space for something (especially for things like cobble), and having two chests on your network providing the same thing is kind of dicey. I'm never sure which chest wins.

If you run out of space for something, just add a DSU for it.
As for compactness, that doesn't really matter. You can connect remote inventories very easily with LP.

Also, even with these 30 chests, I still found myself using my remote requestor into my ender pouch to get mats. I cannot stand "being an ant on speed" ... running to this chest to get X and that chest to get Y so I can load another crafting table. I type very fast, so typing is not an issue with me.

Same.

The crafting pipe mk III required an assembly table if memory serves. I never had documentation on why this was so much better, so I never used them. Perhaps this might have solved my issue?

The Mk III has an internal buffer, similar to RP2's tube system. The Mk II + Mk III also craft 16 at a time instead of 1.

I can easily make tesseracts with AE, not sure what the issue is here. With a minium stone, 4 iron = 1 ender pearl so I'm not worried about keeping a transposer filled. AE just crafts the ender pearl for me (easily, unlike trying to craft these in LP...in which you would have to replace the minium stone when it wore out) and I usually have tons of iron by the time I need tesseracts.

Actually, you can autocraft including replacing minium stones in LP. It's just not very space-efficient. And that was just a quick example of the type of item that causes issues - there are many things that require liquid and a crafting recipe in different blocks.

How are provider pipes any more or less compact than export busses? They look the same size to me.

A provider pipe is the same size as an export bus. However, a provider pipe + gate is more compact than an export bus + level emitter, and chassis pipes allow basically as many things in a single block as you want.

As to expense, I've never really compared the mat cost properly.

AE is cheaper in some things, at least if you're concerne about space effecieny. That being said, quartz requires mining, whereas all of LP's resource requirements can be gotten other ways. Especially in the Unleashed pack, where UU-Matter is actually semi-useful, this becomes a big plus for LP.

The issue here would be that for LP, mat cost would appear to scale up faster as you need more storage. I do recognize that LP's mat cost has dropped significantly with some recent updates, but still...each diamond chest worth of slots (limited to 64 of most stackable mats) takes a diamond chest + chassis + 2 modules. One of the things I really really really like about AE is that they stack all mats of the same type into oneslot. In LP, you get that behavior in the requestor, but you still have to deal with the 64 item slot limitation in chests.

Use DSUs! My current LP system has a grand total of 4 diamond chests - and a bunch of DSUs. (And a bee chest and some other things. But that's my main storage.)

Also, as for resource cost LP is more resource-intensive if you're doing manual mining, but again all of LP's resource requirements can be met in a bunch of ways whereas AE requires quarrying / manual mining.

Finally I don't know why they nerfed LPs requestor like they did. I agree that AE's idea for remote connection is a bit under powerered and I don't know why mod authors feel they have to "balance" distance.

Neither do I. It's annoying and tedious (which is why I like LP in the first place) and it can be replicated with other mods. Not to metion that the time that it's most useful is when you're away from your base.

Do you have a GitHub account? If so, I would appreciate a comment on this commit and/or making an issue on the bug tracker.

Also can anyone tell me what the range of the remote requester is. Say I had two bases on the opposite end of a biome (must be around 500 blocks at least), would the remote requester work? If not, could I have an ender chest or tesseract at each base with the appropriate pipes on them (I forget which ones).

Range used to be infinite, no power use. Range now is ~400,000 blocks, although power use is now rather high - the limit is draining the power junction in a single open of the requester. (Power use is 2500LP = 500MJ if in another world, plus the distance in LP (or distance / 5 in MJ))

 

[Caaameron]

AE is better 95% of the time. Logistics crafters need a buff and AE needs nerfs (drastically increase energy consumption, make some recipes a little more resource intensive.

 

[Harvest88]

AE is better 95% of the time. Logistics crafters need a buff and AE needs nerfs (drastically increase energy consumption, make some recipes a little more resource intensive.

Yea but AE is an idiot at eating power day/night. LP doesn't require any idling power. So it's like Electric Furnace vs Induction Furnace in terms of power consumption. (one consumes power day/night while the other eat power whenever it's running)

 

[Malexion]

AE's power consumption being constant makes sense for its concept, its electronic, to read data(inventory) you need power or electricity and then to propagate it to the screen you also need power, same concept as your computer, even if the screens off it could be performing actions or checking if actions need to be completed until it is shut off. For LP half of it feels like magic, which in turn makes it much easier to setup in the early game and then link it into AE late game and move all of your stuff with ease, which is my preferred progression since both have their uses and both serve a purpose nicely. LP is perfect for Bee interaction, accomplishing a bit more than AE at the moment in that area, as well as sorting modded items out.

I do agree that AE could have a higher power draw, not for idle time but for import/export and crafting. AE is fairly resource intensive as is for parts and components, just a monstrous amount of quartz. Having a higher power draw will give reason to large power structures once more besides spamming quarries, which needs some form of discouragement.

AE still is expanding, and I can only hope that one day we will see a quarry that digitizes whatever it mines and streams it back, hopefully fixing some interaction with water and lava along the way as well as fixing the havoc quarry spamming incurs on SMP servers.

I have to say my favorite part of AE, is the simply beautiful and straight forward change-log updates, so few mods have a proper change log that it just gets ridiculous, it feels nice knowing someone enjoys providing for the community and their users.

 

[PhilHibbs]

I think that AE should significantly reduce its idle power draw, and massively increase the power draw whenever it does something. Pull a stack of cobble, and it uses a few EU. Fill an extradimensional barrel, and your MFE is suddenly half empty.

 

[draeath]

Input/Output and autocrafting (including all the input/outputs to use external machines...) should eat power. Idle running shouldn't do much.

Reasoning: I/O is like replication in Star Trek. That kind of thing, you would expect, would cost a lot of energy. Crafting would (reasonably) be a CPU-intensive task, which in turn would also pull a lot of power. Just refreshing the RAM and spinning the cooling fans would take, comparatively, almost no power.

 

[Ember Quill]

I like Logistics Pipes because of a few specific things that it can do better than AE. Such as the supplier pipe, which keeps specific amounts of certain materials stocked (which is really useful for Forestry and MFR farms that grow multiple kinds of crops, for example). Yes, it's possible to do this with AE, but it's a LOT more complicated for such a supposedly-simple task. Logistics Pipes can also function like sneaky pipes, route liquids without containing them in buckets or cans, and remote-request items from much further away. I don't know if it still has an infinite range though.

To be honest though, I mostly just like LP because I'm really not a fan of "magic blocks." In AE, you have one block that controls/powers the whole system, one block that stores everything, a big box that does all of your autocrafting for you, etc. LP doesn't suffer from magic block syndrome nearly as much as AE does. For autocrafting, you have a separate crafting table and crafting pipe for EVERY recipe. Instead of one block for storage, you can use barrels, DSUs, chests, or any other kind of storage.

And I just like seeing all of my items flying around between machines and storage and such. I like the design of LP more than AE. And while I do like how compact AE is as well as how quick it routes items, LP is honestly just more fun for me to use, and is better than AE in every way except compactness and speed.

The only thing I really dislike about LP is how it bounces items back when an inventory is full. But my LP networks always have a large chest (usually a diamond chest) that serves as an overflow for items that have nowhere to go, so I never get any items that bounce endlessly back and forth. They just get sent to the overflow chest, and a quicksort module on a chassis pipe attached to the chest will send items back into the logistics network when inventory space opens up elsewhere.

 

[PhilHibbs]

The only thing I really dislike about LP is how it bounces items back when an inventory is full.

What would the alternative be?

 

[frederikam]

Well my opinion of AE is that it lacks that satisfying feeling that everything is moving around in your automatic system, you're not just reaching what looks like some kind of chest chest without traditional slots. I like to have a setup of normal, polymorphic sorted chests, and a nearby request pipe, that actually output the items into the actual world. It just feels way more satisfying than the AE system.

Also isn't it beautiful to see that technical phenomenon of watching things flow around in your crafting system, with the task of creating an MV solar? Another thing is to watch items flow around without your command, just routing by itself. You can't get that experience in any other mod than Logistics Pipes.
And you can even use computers! Who know how much potential that adds to the mod. Basic computercraft peripherals is one thing, but a system like this? Massive potential .

Yes, AE seems like a more compact choice in terms of crafting and it performs better in terms of computer power. But in LP your crafting system is an actual contraption. And when it comes to the performance of LP it's still very neat to have on small servers or even "singleplayer". (Another reason why not to play on large servers)

 

[Staxed]

Well my opinion of AE is that it lacks that satisfying feeling that everything is moving around in your automatic system, you're not just reaching what looks like some kind of chest chest without traditional slots. I like to have a setup of normal, polymorphic sorted chests, and a nearby request pipe, that actually output the items into the actual world. It just feels way more satisfying than the AE system.

Also isn't it beautiful to see that technical phenomenon of watching things flow around in your crafting system, with the task of creating an MV solar? Another thing is to watch items flow around without your command, just routing by itself. You can't get that experience in any other mod than Logistics Pipes.
And you can even use computers! Who know how much potential that adds to the mod. Basic computercraft peripherals is one thing, but a system like this? Massive potential .

Yes, AE seems like a more compact choice in terms of crafting and it performs better in terms of computer power. But in LP your crafting system is an actual contraption. And when it comes to the performance of LP it's still very neat to have on small servers or even "singleplayer". (Another reason why not to play on large servers)

Meh, I'm the complete opposite...I hate seeing the clutter of all those contraptions and all of my technical builds are always hidden behind walls to cover them up...hence I prefer AE a lot more...however, mixing them both is the best way to accomplish some things most effeciently.

Having AE panel on every floor of my builds next to the elevator/stairs just seems kind of realistic/modern to me (and I like modern)[DOUBLEPOST=1377597622][/DOUBLEPOST]

AE is better 95% of the time. Logistics crafters need a buff and AE needs nerfs (drastically increase energy consumption, make some recipes a little more resource intensive.

I would agree with this part if it were balanced a bit to add more normal resource requirements but less quartz requirement. Making the fluix dust for lots of cable for long distance areas (100+ blocks away) can get tedius when you run out of quartz a lot...but have about 1000 and 400 gold to spare...

 

[Skirty_007]

The only thing I really dislike about LP is how it bounces items back when an inventory is full. But my LP networks always have a large chest (usually a diamond chest) that serves as an overflow for items that have nowhere to go, so I never get any items that bounce endlessly back and forth. They just get sent to the overflow chest, and a quicksort module on a chassis pipe attached to the chest will send items back into the logistics network when inventory space opens up elsewhere.

I set up a small AE storage system connected to our LP system, and use that for the "default route" (I think it currently has 7 16k storage cells in it). That way I can identify things that need to be added to the terminus that's connected to the trash can, or that need their own storage chest/barrel, or just leave them there. I've also got a cc program (written by my partner) that monitors the storage system (through connection with LP) for certain items, and turns off the farms when the barrels are nearly full. I really love how easy it is to use LP alongside other mods.

There are three things I'd like to change about LP:

1. An active supplier module.
2. The crafting table thingummydoodle really needs the ability for the player to shift click into and out of the inventory.
3. Better documentation.

 

[zaq_hack]

Sorry to revive an old thread, but this was a very complete discussion of LP vs. AE. Many thanks to the posters before me.

Here's where I am. We have a server that has matured quite a bit. We have gobs of UU-Matter, ridiculous amounts of the base minerals, and even stacks of diamonds, at this point. Most of us roll with manyullyn weapons and tools and we leave a gravi chestplate in the charger for the next guy.

I'm on what I lovingly term "Factory 3.0." The first one was nice, but my intro to FTB left many things wanting. As I gained understanding of EU and MJ and different machinery, Factory 2.0 was born. My introduction to Logistics Pipes spawned the update to Factory 3.0 that we call "Wayne Enterprises" and can autocraft just about anything (including a gravi chestplate).

The issue comes as this: The factory is large. I have rows of 5-high stacks of auto-craft tables. I have lots of Logistic Pipes. What is the impact of this to the server as opposed to AE? I'm not looking forward to converting the whole mess, or even half of it, really. It does what I need it to do. However, the server is struggling even when no players are on-line. One Quarry and a few chunk loaders and I get "Server cannot keep up!" warnings.

I've learned a lot in this thread that I could do to make things more effective in LP. However, do you guys think I could fix some of the server-side lag by converting to AE? I will leave the game mechanics to the best system available for the task (meaning I'll probably mix both systems), but would it be less lag to drop items into a storage bus than having them float around looking for the LP final chestination?

 

[Hoff]

Impossible to say for sure really but I would say to test it. The routing logic cost for LP was drastically reduced and as such I have yet to see any kind of lag with it. It's very possible your lag issues have nothing to do with the LP at all and could be something like IC2 if you're on Unleashed 1.1.4/5.