Hey I know the second one, it's Cogs of the Machine right? Yeah, I remember that from back when I was reading the modlist and it was not completely usable yet...
Yep, that's the one.
(Mana not being convertable between magic mods) Well, I am surprised. Well, not actually surprised, but disappointed because that's one thing I really need to happens before I can make a magic only pack make sense to me...
It ... is strange. Some mods have many different types of mana internal to them, perhaps with some partial conversion (nb: I admit to not really understanding, nor using, Thaumcraft, but it has a bunch of different ones, and two flavors of each?)
(power being convertible, and progress mixable in tech mods)
It make sense, especially from my definition of a tech mod.
I defined a tech mod fairly simply:
To be a tech mod, it needs to be somewhat possible to exist following a set of rules that are based on the "real world" and of minecraft. (infinite water, putting >1m^3 in a single block, partial gravity...) (okay, maybe not that simple actually
)
But what kind of "real world"? Something that is beyond our current technology might still be possible, and if implemented might seem like magic. At one point, turning coal into diamond would have been considered silly; later, possible but not yet within our technology. Today, it's doable, but the energy cost is ridiculous. As a quick example, let's say someone had a power distribution network that was based on linking black holes, transmitting stellar power through a black hole network, and holding a black hole captive inside a variable sized box. Yes, you would need a huge box, but you can make it smaller on the outside.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Or, "Any technology that is not magic is not sufficiently advanced".
So, in that set of rule, it makes total sense to be able to convert pressure into rotational energy and then into heat energy and maybe into electric energy, so while it's not expected of tech mod to work that way, it does make total sense, so it's of course better if they can.
However, there is absolutely no need for a common power system. Rather, two machine for each power system, each capable of doing the conversion in a single way. Kind of what reika did with shaft power and RF. Of course, with loss, and according to the various tier if needed.
But this doesn't scale. Worse, it means that each mod would have to make power gen appropriate for, and understand, potentially a dozen different other-tech mods. Lets say it was up to Forestry to make a "forestry power to Reika shaft power" converter. What would it use?
Reika said, "My system isn't going to be understood and balanced by others, so I'll do it for them". Another mod based on strength of a packet and frequency of that packet (how I understand the old forestry power system to have worked) would have to replicate what it does for each power system. A simple mod that says "Burn this fuel for this power per tick for that many ticks" might have a very different idea as to the conversion, and would not be expected to get it right in complicated cases.
But in that logic too, we shouldn't have 20 copper and tin type either.
Off-topic, but I really hope that in 1.9.4 we can have a single universal mod that manages all instances of every add-on ore. So that we don't have six different mods adding tin, but one mod adding tin and six different mods using tin.
(If there was no inter-mod power in tech)
I guess you can kind of guess my answer there from what I said above. While it's a logical default behavior, it doesn't encourage modpacks at all, and it doesn't make any sense from my definitions of tech mod. So I would be pretty pissed off, ...
Yep. People expect and want conversion between tech mod powers.
So, lets say I had a tech mod that had a system for draining the "stored solar essence out of plants", and transmitting that "solar energy" as "beams of light", that could travel straight lines as long as there was a line of sight to a receiving block? Would you claim that it needs to have conversion to a mod based on pistons pushing in-and-out for making power?
(Just because I don't know of a mod based on it, does not mean that it isn't a fairly well understood mechanical system. Now, granted, there's usually some rotating thing next to that moving piston, but if you've played ... I think it was "Impossible Contraption", you know that you can convert linear motion power and rotational power with just a block
.
Lets back up for a second: how we got to this discussion point:
>>>>> I though RF couldn't get worse with insanely huge numbers...
>>>> Well, this is what happens ... Power creep is unavoidable.
>>> If you think RF has just gotten to the "why bother?" point, why not try a tech mod where things matter?
>> Rotarycraft and reactorcraft ... There's not a single (tech) mod that you can combine with it without rewriting completely said mod.
> It is not just Reika; he's just the most obvious. ... What's a tech mod? Is it "Uses RF"? I don't think so.
How are you going to try to determine the conversion between power mods? Let's take a simple case: lightning. Let's say you have a lightning rod, and it's able to capture the power of a lightning bolt, put it into a battery, and output it as electricity. Does a bolt give you on the order of 15,000 RF of power (Don's lighting mod), or does it give you on the order of 1 million RF of power (IC2, I think?)? If I wanted to convert something from Reika system, where the weakest engine basically generates 1 kW of power--256 rads per second, 4 Nm--into Cogs of the Machine, do I just say, "they're both rotational speed and power so just do a direct translation" and instantly overwhelm the highest-end device that that mod has?
Magic mods often don't convert power types within themselves, let alone across different magic mods.
Tech mods tend to have conversion, but lose all the fine points in the process.
Tech mods don't have a consistent scaling (Reika models real world high-tech devices, but winds up being exponential; CotM has reasonable low-tech realistic-ish numbers; and RF mods ... seem to just be arbitrary points on an arbitrary graph, and usually linear) nor balance (Reika's tech progression is about infrastructure-based gating; most are about quantity of resources and automated crafting based gating.)
Some tech mods are based on the idea that a little power loss will be common, and normal; others are based on "any power loss is a disaster" (Reika), still others are "What's a loss?".
Basically, given the very large differences between Tech mods, translating power between them is going to be inexact at best. At worst, all of the fine points that went into the mod are ground-up, pulverized, extracted, and squeezed out of existence.
In comparison, is it really so unreasonable to say, "this colored light is all about life, so I will convert it to that essence which is all about life"? Is it any different?
===
I asked:
Which of these two statements would you say defines a tech mod:
1. Tech mods are defined by power being convertible from A to B
2. Tech mods are defined by "anyone can flip the switch / place the blocks and it works".
You said, earlier,
To be a tech mod, it needs to be somewhat possible to exist following a set of rules that are based on the "real world" and of minecraft. (infinite water, putting >1m^3 in a single block, partial gravity...) (okay, maybe not that simple actually
)
And I replied (this post) with the question of future-tech, giving zero-point / vacuum energy (*), and Time-Lord technology as some examples.
#1 is not a definition, it's a consequence of the definition
#2 is also a consequence of the definition the set of rule I'm talking about doesn't change from people to people.
Why should "Based on real world physics" imply "convertible from A to B"? Can you convert an Electroweak force interaction into a gravitic curvature of space? (Slightly more serious, where does the strong force fit in? Electric, Magnetic, and Weak force are all different sides of the same math; then there's strong force, and gravity. Gravity is just ... different? Maybe?. Strong force?)
Real-world is basically dark energy, which we don't understand and may as well be magic; dark matter, which we don't understand and could be anything from dimensionally trapped normal matter to ... "magic"; virtual particles that appear and disappear with no rhyme or reason, that might be "magic", that might be particles traveling across our universe brane rather than inside our universe brane, except that the string theory that gives us brane theory says that those particles are brane-bound and cannot go cross-brane like that; and a tiny, tiny bit of stuff that looks and acts like points of numbers in a way that doesn't really make sense, and either obeys "spooky action at a distance" or else sees the whole universe as distance 0 (we're not sure yet, but last I heard, spooky action at a distance was looking more likely.) These sets of numbers have 4 fundamental interactions that we know about and understand, and three of them are mathematically "related" in the sense that if the total energy is high enough then you can make any of those three look like another of those three. Oh yea -- since our universe fits the equations for a non-rotating black hole with no net charge and no net spin, the outside will be exposing all the details of the entire universe in holographic encoding to any god-like being that can look at one point on the outside edge.
Of all of that, you are looking at convertibility of 1 of those forces on the tiny set of "points with numbers", and ignoring the rest.
And of that, we understand the EM force pretty darn well -- and we can use QM to make predictions that we don't understand, and we're guessing at the rest. Good guesses, and we're getting better every year. But converting freely? Maybe converting EM stuff around -- we do that at a very small scale today. Come back when you've got some Buuthandi built and we'll know the subject better. And then remember that full conversion of a single star is only what, "1" on the tech scale? We're still down at zero.
"Magic", of course, just means "Tech we don't understand yet".
===
How about this idea:
Technology (vs magic) means that it is repeatable, explainable, and decipherable.
Magic means that it cannot be explained in a way that it can be repeated by someone else, that it cannot be fully understood in a way that lets someone make a prediction about something new that turns out to be correct.
... not sure that's a good definition, actually.
===
Of course, I expect tech mod to be harder than flip a switch or place a magic block - that's good enough for magic mods where you need personal experience.
You misunderstood me.
Let's say that I have done all of these things that you list. Now I have these high-end tech blocks, items, and various supporting infrastructure items. I hand them to a new player, and instruct that player how to place them down.
Does it work?
Or, I have everything placed, and set up, and there's a switch that I can flip that will turn it on. Am I the only one that can operate that switch to turn it on, or can anyone switch it on?
Most magic mods operate from the point of view that it won't work for the other person. The one "magic" mod that does, Botania, behaves more like a tech mod with non-convertible power then a magic mod.
... Because it gives a sense that you're actually progressing, because it make sense that huge building are expensive, because there's not "money cost" in minecraft otherwise, and because getting more and more resources is core to tech mods, it make total sense that you don't get more and more resources just to make the game easier and easier.
Gee, that's directly the opposite of RotaryCraft, which doesn't get more expensive to make stuff. More expensive to run it? Perhaps. Certainly more infrastructure -- one engine consumes jet fuel, and your machine that makes jet fuel is powered by a different engine that needs lubricant, and those machines over there are making lubricant and relying on pumped water, and that pump requires ...
... Again, it make sense, it gives a reason to have many machines, that's just what tech is about; machines.
Actually, for me, a mod is more about what it lets you do, than the mechanisms for doing it. You could say that RoC is about the bedrock tools, the lights, the automated supplies of building materials, etc. That I have to build these engines and setups in order to use the tools/lights/etc is what makes RoC different from RF. (And how does walking on a beam of light possibly fit real-world technology?)
(*): Vacuum energy is a funny thing. As I understand it: If you said that there was EDIT: one atom in the universe, you'd be off by a factor of 10^80. Our understanding of the energy that should exist in the vacuum of space, and what we measure, is off by a factor of 10^120. So we know that there is something horribly wrong / incomplete with our knowledge, and it really seems like if we did know/understand, we could convert the energy of the universe's inflation into heat (along with friction, momentum, and general "work"). See Stargate: Atlantis.
