Your complaint about AE1 was IC2? What?
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My complaint about AE1 wasn't about AE1 itself ever; it was about that AE1 becomes too easy coupled with almost any other mod which was then popular in modpacks, be it Ender IO, IC2 or Mekanism.
Forgive men for being obtuse but how does ore processing make AE1 too easy?
Not ore processing, solar panels.
i usually don't have a opinion on balance, but i agree here. solar panels are really strong(note:not OP) when used with AE.
Just solar panels, or are other forms of energy too easy too? Would Mekanism hydrogen generators be too easy? What about a tree farm and something that burns wood? What about a big reactor connected to a laser drill? What sort of power generation would you consider better.
Also, couldn't this be solved by increasing the energy requirements of AE?
I only ever used solar panels in 1.4 when my ignorance of configs held me tethered to Gregtech. Besides, its just energy generation. Isn't that a play style/config preference more so than a mod design issue?
AE1 is probably easy because it has a simple design. There aren't many discreet "machines" in AE1. To make an AE system you need to know about controllers, cable, at least one of ME chests, storage drives, storage busses, data disks, the terminals, interfaces and if you want to go a bit further, import and export busses, the crafting multiblock and one or two extra blocks. The components of an AE1 system are all very intuitive and it is often clear from the names what they do. And they do there job simply. Compare the export bus to logistics pipes. In LP you can use extractor modules, quicksort modules, provider pipes, wooden pipes etc to take stuff out of inventories. Only one of those "machines" has a function that can be clearly inferred from the name.
I thought that AE1 was easy and simplistic (edit: by this I mean that I did not feel like spending an afternoon on making a simple ME system)*. I solved this personal problem by using other mods, often in concert with AE. Balance never entered the equation for me in the AE1 era. AE2 looks more complicated than AE1 did and I prefer the look of it, and that definitely is not a balance issue.
Just my 2 cents of course, definitely not a value judgement about anything.
*Ironically, after I had made 2 or 3 really complex inventory management systems I planned to go back to making a pure ME system for my main base. No messing around with storage busses etc. Inventory management had stopped being a gameplay priority for me, so I can see both sides of the argument.
I thought that AE1 was easy and simplistic (edit: by this I mean that I did not feel like spending an afternoon on making a simple ME system)*. I solved this personal problem by using other mods, often in concert with AE. Balance never entered the equation for me in the AE1 era. AE2 looks more complicated than AE1 did and I prefer the look of it, and that definitely is not a balance issue.
Just my 2 cents of course, definitely not a value judgement about anything.
*Ironically, after I had made 2 or 3 really complex inventory management systems I planned to go back to making a pure ME system for my main base. No messing around with storage busses etc. Inventory management had stopped being a gameplay priority for me, so I can see both sides of the argument.
Any update session will be jarring, but 1.7 in general seems to be a hugely mixed bag.
can anyone tell me what the 1.3 update was like for modding? i wasn't really here that long ago.(modded MC)
Nope fundamentally different systems.
http://ae2.ae-mod.info/Molecular-Assembler/
No more expandable multiblock towers. Now you have to craft a new modal for each pattern, and the pattern. Not to mention you will still have to deal with the channels.
Sure. Big long history to follow:
1.2.5 was awesome, but there were about four big mods that everyone wanted to use: Buildcraft, IC2, EE, RedPower 2(beta). There were actually a lot of other mods that a lot of folks were using, but modpacks were not as much a thing. So if someone knew about a particular mod that was useful and fun, they'd include it. And if something was a really good add-on or infrastructure for a mod they wanted to use, it went in the modpack. Thaumcraft really came into its own about 1.2.5, as did Mystcraft. Logistics Pipes was THE premiere automated way to do logistics, while RP2 did the grunt-work of mobile quarries and making a sorting system functional.
Direwolf20 was really getting to be a big name in Let's Plays, and because of his videos, people started to promote the hell out of mods and learn how they worked. But modpacks were difficult and you had to download and install everything piece by piece. A large modpack had maybe 25 - 35 mods in it. The Technic Pack launcher was a thing by then; the problem with it was an issue of permissions, as the Technic folks didn't want to ask permission for IP which was freely downloadable, even when asking for permission was the ONLY thing the modder wanted them to do. So this led a lot of modders and modpack makers to avoid the Technic launcher.
Then came the 1.3 update, and some of the big things it changed were the graphics rendering system, the way the save files and world-map data were structured, and the code-scrambling obfuscation. Forge took a while to update because of the complexity. RP2 vanished because it was just too much work. Eloraam was going to skip 1.3 and go to 1.4 when it came out, just because of the time it was taking to figure out the new rendering and get Forge running. With a major hole in the general mod ecology, a lot of people went looking for alternatives. By 1.4, RP2 was forgotten and Buildcraft was huge.. leading people to look for alternatives. IIRC, in 1.5, Thermal Expansion and its itemducts came on the scene, and RP2 was sadly left behind for what we thought was good. Resurrection projects had recently manifested to get the best parts of RP2 back in the game, starting with red alloy wire and logic gates.
1.3 caused a lot of mods to stop updating as modders took forever to catch up. In 1.4, many did catch up, while in 1.5 a lot of new modders were now participating. Also with 1.5, the FTB modpack turned into the FTB launcher (which had the original 1.2.5 modpack and FTB map, but focused more on modpacks in general). On top of that, the Technic folks, having figured out that asking permission meant a LOT more folks were willing to have their mods in modpacks with a lot fewer complaints and legal threats, changed policy to suit, and now ask permission.
Direwolf20 was really getting to be a big name in Let's Plays, and because of his videos, people started to promote the hell out of mods and learn how they worked. But modpacks were difficult and you had to download and install everything piece by piece. A large modpack had maybe 25 - 35 mods in it. The Technic Pack launcher was a thing by then; the problem with it was an issue of permissions, as the Technic folks didn't want to ask permission for IP which was freely downloadable, even when asking for permission was the ONLY thing the modder wanted them to do. So this led a lot of modders and modpack makers to avoid the Technic launcher.
Then came the 1.3 update, and some of the big things it changed were the graphics rendering system, the way the save files and world-map data were structured, and the code-scrambling obfuscation. Forge took a while to update because of the complexity. RP2 vanished because it was just too much work. Eloraam was going to skip 1.3 and go to 1.4 when it came out, just because of the time it was taking to figure out the new rendering and get Forge running. With a major hole in the general mod ecology, a lot of people went looking for alternatives. By 1.4, RP2 was forgotten and Buildcraft was huge.. leading people to look for alternatives. IIRC, in 1.5, Thermal Expansion and its itemducts came on the scene, and RP2 was sadly left behind for what we thought was good. Resurrection projects had recently manifested to get the best parts of RP2 back in the game, starting with red alloy wire and logic gates.
1.3 caused a lot of mods to stop updating as modders took forever to catch up. In 1.4, many did catch up, while in 1.5 a lot of new modders were now participating. Also with 1.5, the FTB modpack turned into the FTB launcher (which had the original 1.2.5 modpack and FTB map, but focused more on modpacks in general). On top of that, the Technic folks, having figured out that asking permission meant a LOT more folks were willing to have their mods in modpacks with a lot fewer complaints and legal threats, changed policy to suit, and now ask permission.
So basically, 1.3 was a natural disaster that seemingly "broke" modding, working as a kind of extinction event -- but which later resulted in greater diversity and playability for mods in general. The 1.7 changes were rather like that, with some very big things that got stopped in their tracks for a while; however, we have had the experience of a major shift in Minecraft's code as well as better tools and support for modding and playing with mods, so many projects have been able to compensate like we couldn't do before.
what if 1.8 is also like 1.3? with all the changes...I already made that bet. 1.8 is gonna be awesome.
1.7.10 isn't that far off, honestly. So we'll be a version behind vanilla for a while. Mods are still a thing.
There were a lot of mistakes in here.
- Firstly, IIRC Tekkit had started asking for perms in 1.2.5, but past history left mods like Forestry excluded. If they didn't then, they certainly did in 1.4.
- You didn't mention the fact that 1.3 meant the mods written for client-side also worked on servers allowing mods like Thaumcraft and Logistics Pipes to be used by a greater audience.
- In 1.4 RedPower was not forgotten and was a key mod in most worlds. Not many people played modded 1.3 and when 1.4 came out people typically played with RP2.
- 1.5 TE did not have itemducts.
- The FTB Launcher came out in 1.4.2.
A big change in 1.3 was the proper client-server split so that single-player became just like multi-player (from the operating perspective) and there was no difference between the SSP and SMP clients and servers.
(Note: I haven't looked at the code for 1.2, so i am having an educated guess)
With 1.2, if you were playing single-player you directly referred to the server, if in multi-player (if there was no reference to the server available) you had to deal with creating packets to send to the server and server side you had to receive the packets and deal with them. There was no packet stuff to deal with in single player, so the client and server had to have different code. Making a mod work in multi-player was extra effort beyond getting it working in single player, and making a multiplayer-only mod work in single player required removing the packet handling.
With 1.3+, the single player basically launches both a client and a server and the client connects to the local server. While you can still refer to the server directly when in single-player to create single-player-only mods, you can also use packets everywhere. So you can have the same code working in single-player and multi-player, since it is the same logic. It is just a matter of making sure the client has the client and server code, while the server only has the server code. Forge now includes code to allow you to determine whether your code is running from the client side or the server side. This means you can bundle the same code in both client and server and have the client code only run on the client and not the server.
(Note: I haven't looked at the code for 1.2, so i am having an educated guess)
With 1.2, if you were playing single-player you directly referred to the server, if in multi-player (if there was no reference to the server available) you had to deal with creating packets to send to the server and server side you had to receive the packets and deal with them. There was no packet stuff to deal with in single player, so the client and server had to have different code. Making a mod work in multi-player was extra effort beyond getting it working in single player, and making a multiplayer-only mod work in single player required removing the packet handling.
With 1.3+, the single player basically launches both a client and a server and the client connects to the local server. While you can still refer to the server directly when in single-player to create single-player-only mods, you can also use packets everywhere. So you can have the same code working in single-player and multi-player, since it is the same logic. It is just a matter of making sure the client has the client and server code, while the server only has the server code. Forge now includes code to allow you to determine whether your code is running from the client side or the server side. This means you can bundle the same code in both client and server and have the client code only run on the client and not the server.