I don't understand what all the fuss is about. I mean, yes, I understand that each respective side is vehemently supporting their side, and it is clear what side they are supporting, but I kind of view it as arguing about if a bear is going to crap behind this tree or that one.
All of this debate petty bickering is going to have zero effect on the ultimate outcome of if/when Elo is going to update RP2 or not. All of the personal attacks, circular reasoning, and vitriol are going to make it release any faster or prevent it from releasing. This isn't an argument you can win, and of course we all know how important it is to win an argument on the Internet in the first place, and venting your spleen in an uneducated and quite bluntly childish manner is not going to help.
As far as myself? It'll happen when it happens, all the pissing and moaning isn't going to affect it in the slightest, and in the meantime I have a mod pack with viable alternatives that I am working on.
Rednet isn't perfect, but it does get close. I don't like having to make a whole PRC just to throw a timer on something or set up a three-way NOR Gate as a failsafe for my nuclear reactor. However, the cables themselves are very elegant, and the logic behind the system is clean. In most cases, it will work quite adequately. It removes needing to work as a microblock by having multiple built-in channels, each facing being able to go to a different channel, and obviating why you'd need them smaller in the first place. They can go anywhere you want them to go, they work with Microblocks and I believe even BC Facades. And the PRC, with all it can do, is quite worth the price of admission if you use it to its fullest extent. You can handle multiple independent systems simultaneously with a single block. That's pretty flippin' amazing. Plus it is exceedingly CPU friendly, which is unfortunately not something you can say about RP2's Logic module.
Immibis Microblocks is a clear and away replacement for RP2's because it works with other mods (except TE, due to a major crash bug that is still being worked on). Basically, everything you could do with Microblocks in RP2? Can be done with Immibis's version. Plus it works on pipes, AE cable, and other mod things you'd like to hide. Except Redstone Conduit and Liquiduct Pipes, because of a problem they're working on to resolve. But hey, at least it works with more than itself. Of course, it has the same downside that RP2's microblocks had... tile entities are not CPU friendly when used en masse.
RP2's Pneumatic Tubes were clean and elegant with a simple yet powerful and (more importantly) consistent logic behind the routing, and made BC Pipes cry in a corner. And honestly, this is probably the biggest thing (other than in-line inexpensive logic gates) that I miss the most about RP2. For those small jobs you don't want to hook up your ME Network to. For example, I've got a system of four Pulverizers receiving ores from my auto-mining facility. They send their primary output to an Induction Smelter and secondary to a Powered Furnace. These are separated to avoid clogging the induction smelter with a single bonus ore. Currently, I've got a series of iron pipes running to a gold pipe that feeds to a vanilla hopper that feeds into the appropriate machine. What I'd really prefer are some pneumatic tubing. It would run faster, cleaner, and without the need of the hopper acting as a buffer or the risk of something falling out of the pipe. Infinitubes does not replace this functionality because it requires power, and if I was going to use a powered system, I'd just use blinkin' AE and be done with it. This is one aspect of RP2 I have not found a clear replacement for.
Frames... were a good idea, but a real cludgy hack. I can't say that I really miss them. If that Ugo mod was Forge compatible, I'd be tempted to test it and see how it really works, but since it's MLMP, I have less than no interest in it. The way Frames worked just... was not elegant. It caused crashing, did funky things, and caused no end of hassles for server moderators with frame bores that generated and loaded up a hundred thousand chunks in a straight line overnight and suddenly the file size for the server quintupled.
I happened to really like Elo's computers. I considered them VASTLY better than ComputerCraft, simply because they aren't a 'do anything you want and get away with it' solution. CC is a strong mod. But anyone with half a grasp on LUA code can pretty much have minecraft run itself. When any problem you face returns with a solution of 'make a turtle and...', then you've got a mod that is just... too much everything. Besides, I have fond memories doing FORTH on my old TRS-80, so it's like seeing a friend I haven't met in twenty years, and getting back in touch. AE makes the Sortrons obsolete, but if you could take a FORTH computer, just for the ability to send signals, and hook it up to a rednet system... that would be my idea of nirvana. Heck, you could make a manual kludgy setup with an I/O port, bundled cable, one colored cable of every flavor, and some rednet cables that color-coordinated their inputs, but that would take a line of 16 blocks to do. I'd much prefer just hooking up the rednet cable directly to the I/O Port. Hell, have a custom logic page for the PRC to interface with an RP2 computer's I/O output, and done. I'd buy that for a dozen diamonds!
But really? I'm having too much fun with packs like ResonantRise and ShneekeyCraft to worry too much about RP2 updating or not.
