This is going to be great!
Pipe Overload, Alternating Power System, No Power Storage. I personally like the Alternating power specifically. Also the amount of power everything requires is too low to handle anything like Big Reactors so being able to use RF on them really hurts Buildcraft.
You mention Pipe Overload. This was canned not due to RF, but due to the
fact most of the explosions were caused by Minecraft's wonky chunkloading, not user error. I have some ideas on bringing exploding kinesis pipes on overload back, but those are just ideas. As for Alternating Power System, let's face it: it doesn't change
that much with BC alone. Only the extraction mechanics.
Playing with a BC RoC focused pack and I am remembering reasons why I shelfed BC for other mods.
One bugbear I would change is how you acquire pipe sealant. <snip!>
I consider it every time. There's a config option for it and it might well become a default.
I think most of our balance concerns are caused by both thoughtless pack makers and people's inability to create their own pack easily to their specifications or due to how MC multiplayer works.
Nope! Our balance concerns are caused by the fact balance, in the current modpack community, is impossible to achieve. The only resource limiting you in Minecraft is time and that makes it hard to balance around - GregTech shows why dumb balancing on spending time alone doesn't really work.
Unfortunately Asie or his predecessor (I forget which) jumped on the RF bandwagon when FTB was all "RF only" under the pretense of MJ being too difficult to maintain and aparently being the same as RF.
I also think BC still has pipe overload just no explosions by default. As ugly as they are BC energy pipes have the best non ui based method of gaugeing power.
No. I jumped on the RF bandwagon when I saw the only mod staying on MJ was RailCraft (and Forestry, but the RF fork was gaining more traction than the MJ version). It was a "compromise or die" scenario.
I know this and take this into account, I've nerfed the Dynamos back to their original generation. So they dont overpower buildcraft's setup, however I have had to come up with new numbers for the new Dynamos. I'd rather not get too off topic though. So I won't be responding to anything not atleast semi-related to Buildcraft from this point on.
To a certain extent yes, but for a few reasons.
1) This would fix RF Overpowering Buildcraft machines.
2) This would allow a more controlled balance by asie over the mod.
3) Buildcraft would be allowed to be more eccentric with what it does with power.
4) This being the least credible, I miss MJ with all of its quirks including alternating power.
(1) Making dynamos output 40 RF/t and half their RF/fuel unit, from my experience, worked well enough. Gave Combustion Engines that edge.
(2) Very true. I still regret it for that reason solely.
(3) Also true, though not really - I can do whatever I want with RF, it's all about the social aspects of it.
(4) A lot of the quirks are still in RF BC.
(The following one is going to be
really good)
So, I'll be honest. I only just started looking at Buildcraft recently. And unfortunately for buildcraft I had encountered ProjectRed / RedPowered prior to this. Looking over buildcraft I agree with everyone else on this thread : Your piping system is redonculous! Rediculously inneficient and messy and hard to work with - but ironically. I think most people if they dont want to suffer with the inefficiency of your pipes, will just use ProjectRed - especially now it's caught up to the latest forge/mod servers.
The piping system is designed to be redonculous
intentionally. Think of it as if it was a puzzle game: you get simple pipes with simple rules and your job is to connect the pieces.
Saying all this! You're robots are Fricking Adorable! I personally would love to see them developed further, most of the piping system could easily be thrown away if these things could reliably fly around sorting items, taking items to furnaces or crafting tables or altars on request and not just one at a time, but with an actual requestable amount (up to a stack per request).
...Oooh.
Seriously though, If you develop these robots as an alternative to logistics pipes, I would use them for Everything! Did I say how adorable they were? Did I?
Please make this happen - screw logistic pipes I want an army of small robotic minions running around after me.
Check out Logistics Pipes' Routing Robot.
Ps; Another interesting thing that would be cute is audio. Actually have each bot make different sounds based on travelling, working, etc
Sounds are hard to get right.
There is an additional logic thing I could suggest. Give robots the ability to detect pipes and fly along them (ie, they don't treat the pipes as solid during pathfinding). It would be a great and useful way to help prevent robots getting lost during long trips, or when they need to get in and out of small holes. If you're worried about bots becoming too overpower thats easy fixed too - just let us upgrade them with different functions!
So Steve's Robots?... Eh. I'd say that the pathfinding needs work, but detecting things in-world is computationally expensive.
Yes, how dare there be more than one type of pipe. Seriously, don't like multiple types? Pick one and stick with it. And completely miss the feature of certain pipes not connecting to other types. Stone and cobble are separate and distinct and will not connect with each other so they can be run side by side without interacting. Gold is a speed booster. Sandstone doesn't connect to inventories. Wood extracts, Emerald only extracts some things. Diamond sorts. Everything has it's purpose, and that's a big part of the utility.
Pipes should remain just as they are.
Almost. Some of the pipes
are useless, like the quartz pipe or the old lapis/daizuli color sorting system (where their only edge over lenses and filters is being dynamically configurable with gates - something almost nobody uses).
I do miss the redstone pipe from the old 1.2.5 days, used to have a crafting system that was quite slow due to a complex item, so every time it finally produced an item and it sent down a redstone pipe, it emitted a signal that triggered an alarm
I believe the redstone pipe was just from an add-on, not sure if it still exist though
Redstone pipe? Any pipe + Basic Gate [Item Travelling -> Redstone Signal]. With a gold/quartz/emerald/diamond gate, you can even filter by item type!
Personally I do feel the amount of transport (and fluid) pipes is a tad silly, particularly the cobble/stone/quartz pipes. Now you can colour your pipes to not connect, once you have access to gold pipes, you really don't need any other 'just transport this' pipes. That said, I do find the various tiers of kinesis pipe useful, to segrgate power. Some might argue you can use an iron kinesis pipe for that purpose, but to me it's more conveient to stick a (for example) cobble kinesis pipe in to limit the flow where needed.
Other than the Stone/Cobble/Quartz which are all flavors of the same pipe (just with different drag and not connecting to one another) Each other pipe has it's use.
Sandstone Pipes avoid connections to anything except other pipes.
Iron Pipes are useful for converging item/fluid flows.
Clay Pipes are useful to inserting items or fluids into tanks.
Diamond Pipes are useful for basic sorting, if you need more room, you can use this in combo with the item painting system or lists.
Wooden and Emerald Pipes are the extractor pipes, where the latter lets you filter items, and in the case of fluids has a better throughput.
Gold Pipes, speed up items, and have the highest fluid troughput of the bc pipes. (and now they are colourable tend to obsolete stone and quartz pipes completely, unless you really cannot find gold as coloured glass isn't that hard to get.)
And all this without needing to use Gates, Pipe Plugs or other pipe attachments, which add a vast amount of possiblities to the system.
Wise words. There are a few other pipes out there, but the thing really does need a cleanup.
One thing I've noticed from the above, no one mentions the newest pipes, the lapis xxxxx thingies that I think are BC's version of coloured item sorting. Fact that I don't even know their name shows I don't understand them (and never used them
).
Check out Lenses and Filters.
This is a good example of how id make all pipes work.
That function could have been put in to a new pipe, but no it's a handy gate feature.
Id have it so you only have wood and stone pipe for the start that work like they do now. Then iron pipes that can be altered with logistics gates/ modules to do what current diamond and routing pipes do. Like if you have a junction in your pipes and you want it to sort, just whack a sorting/ routing module and it will sort like diamond. They would come in three tiers iron would let you sort 16 item types, gold would allow 32 types and diamond would allow 64. Those same modules would have other functions too like splitting and round robbin distribution. Also each modual would have the ability to use different levels of redpipe wire.
But somehow this has been considered "cludgier" than the current system.
Aparently Immibis tried a modual based transportation mod like I described. He shelved the idea. Possibility due to the community preference for smarter item routing pipes. That or it was somhow more cludgy then useing several kinds of pipes. I don't see how but agree to disagree I guess.
My response to that is:
The problem I have with that idea is that instead of having a lot of different pipes you now have a lot of different modules thus you don't really fix the problem. Getting your system to work now also requires more crafting steps and more steps when building it for no real benefit.
Pretty much.
As has been mentioned earlier in this thread, there's kind of an upside and a downside to BC's polychromatic pipe scheme. On the one hand, having fifteen different colored pipes in the same area doesn't look good in some aesthetics; but on the other hand, it makes it much easier to see what the pipes are actually doing, since they all do different things, unlike the smarter pipes found in RedPower, Thermal Dynamics, and the like. If all of BC's pipes looked the same, you'd have to interact with each and every one of them all the time just to figure out what's going on (which sounds like a pain in the rear), or use some kind of item like Logistics Pipes' HUD glasses to differentiate them at a glance- in which case, why not just have them look different anyway?
In addition, BC already provides a solution to the aesthetic issue: facades. If you don't like how the pipes look, hide 'em. If you're going for the factory-with-items-zipping-around-in-exposed-pipes look... well, your options are to embrace the polychromaticity, or use a less transparent pipe from another mod.
This is the exact reason for all of what we've done. There are more interesting aesthetic means to make BC pipes look good, however their ugly look is highly symbolic to us and we're reluctant to get rid of it.
Alright, keep the questions coming!
