Honestly, I really don't see an issue with any of this. Maybe not everyone will agree, but personally I'm a firm believer in the modmaker's right to maintain intellectual property, and decide what happens to theirs.
- GwnG
Liked specifically because of this bit. You, as a content creator, have a right to determine what happens with your content, insofar as your enforcement of your rights does not cause undue harm to others or their property. In the realm of games, I'm okay with most
basic forms of DRM: CD keys, one-off online authentication, requiring a login to use said content (while being able to enjoy it single-player and offline without a constant internet connection), and so on. Those are all perfectly valid and not unnecessarily draconian, and they also don't introduce what amounts to malware (like what Sony attempted to do with their music CDs carrying freaking rootkits) on to their users' systems.
You may disagree with this, and you may disagree with how Reika is enforcing his rights as a content creator, that's fine. He, as well as others, also have the right to, for lack of a better term, call you a belligerent arse if your posts are unduly provocative, or what amounts to a liar if your posts contain blatant falsehoods. What cannot be argued is that Reika is acting well within his rights with regards to his mods. What he's attempting to do, from what I can gather, is to try to give himself some social wiggle room when some arse starts mouthing off about how "RotaryCraft/ElectriCraft/whatever is broken" when they're the ones responsible for said breakage in the first place. It'd allow him to say: "Well, either you didn't read the rules, didn't bother asking if change X would break things, or ignored my warnings that change X would break things. Either way you go, this isn't my responsibility, since
you're the one that broke things, not me."
Pyure, brotha, you're reading things way,
way the wrong way. You're implying smug superiority where there is none. Its a simple matter of fact: Reika's big mods have a very set progression that laymen may not very well grasp upon cursory observation. Basically, they're reading some blurbs about the mod and/or skimming the handbook, but they don't bother to actually
play with the mod for a while before deciding X, Y, or Z mechanic is unbalanced or could be changed. You're acting like this is, say...IC2, and changing a recipe in RoC is equivalent to changing a recipe for a metal plate in IC2. You are far,
far less likely to seriously hose IC2's progression with Minetweaker because its not as strict in terms of progression as RoC or Chromaticraft. Let me give ya an example, again comparing IC2 and RotaryCraft...
Let's say you want some kind of ultra-fast ore processing. With IC2, you can mine and farm for a long, long time and shoot almost straight to the top tier, with enough patience. All you need is enough resources; power generation is a lot simpler (from what I can recall) and good ol generator spam will actually get you somewhere, if you spam 'em enough.
However, if you want to do the same thing with, say, a RotaryCraft grinder, you've got a
lot more on your hands than a simple investment of resources and time. You need to know the shaft limits, how gearing works, you need to automate lubricant production to make sure that your gearboxes don't grind themselves down to complete uselessness. You can't just setup an extra big-ass charcoal farm and do a little clever wiring, you need to actually know how all these things work together, and engine spam just doesn't work in RotaryCraft
until you're already at the top-tier of machinery. However, let's run some numbers, shall we?
- The grinder's speed (in how many ticks a given operation is completed) is calculated like so: 900 - 60 × log₂ (speed + 1); it also requires a minimum of 128 Nm of torque at a minimum of 4,096 watts of power.
- Using Wolfram Alpha, we can see that, to get a grinder to run at peak efficiency (1 operation per tick), you need to be running at 32,768 rad/s. (I rounded up to the nearest power of two, since RoC uses powers of two almost exclusively and WA's exact return value is 32,390.6 rad/s.)
- Multiply this by 128, and you get 4,194,304 watts required to run a grinder at max.
- When chained together, RoC engines only add their torque together, their speed remains unchanged. You cannot chain together two engines that operate at different speeds.
- The simplest way to get the 4MW of power we need would be to daisy-chain 4 hydrokinetic engines together. These require lubricant to function and a significant amount of it, at that. However, with this, we run into a problem. One hyrdo generates 16,384 Nm @ 32 rad/s. Four hydros would, therefore, give us 65,536 Nm @ 32 rad/s. To get that 32 rad/s up to the 32,768 rad/s we need, we'd have to get a number of gearboxes equal to a 1024:1 ratio, geared toward speed, which could be done with two 16:1 and one 4:1 gearboxes which also require a constant lubricant supply. This would be all well and dandy, but we get into a serious issue: 65,536 / 1,024 = 64; that's half the torque we need to run the grinder, so it won't turn.
- The next step would be to use a shaft junction to combine the power of two microturbines, which would give us 32 Nm @ 131,072 rad/s. This would actually do the job, requiring only a single 4:1 diamond gearbox geared for torque.
As you can see, you'd need to be well into the jet fuel stage before you could even
consider running a grinder at maximum efficiency. This would require either several Magical Crops farms or, if you're going for a pure RotaryCraft method, a blaze farm and magma cube (or slime) farm, ethanol production, two grinders, one for each soul sand and netherrack, as well as a large, replenishing supply of coal as charcoal will not work in a fractionator. Powering the bedrock breaker is impossible without getting into jet fuel, so creating an upgraded shaft junction would have to wait until
after you've already achieved jet fuel power. The only potential way around this, that I can see, would be some clever gearing and a quartet of charged, regular industrial coils. Even
then, that may very well not work.
To compare this to...pretty much any other mod besides
maybe GregTech is insane. By changing a
single recipe, in this case bedrock ingots, you effectively obviate
most of RotaryCraft's content, allowing you to jump straight to the endgame without so much as bothering to take the steps in between. If that's your pack's thing, then that's okay.
However, your complaints will hold absolutely no water if you whine that
your changes allowed you to get to RoC's endgame in a scant few hours, and I believe
that is what Reika's after,
not telling you what you can and can't do with his content.
(Also, yes, I have spent a
lot of time researching how to do things in RotaryCraft. Yes, I know I'm a complete, utter dork.
)
