Which part of Redpower do people see as laggy?

[PhilHibbs]

Well, with RedNet you can put a lever on the cable itself. But, yeah, someting that connects to basic blocks might be useful.
And there is also awesome PRC ^_^

I think it would be cool if the basic cable didn't connect to *anything* and you had to attach separate connectors on the sides that you wanted to connect. Or just hit it with a Precision Sledgehammer (awesome name for an item) to add or remove connections on the sides you want.

 

[PonyKuu]

I think it would be cool if the basic cable didn't connect to *anything* and you had to attach separate connectors on the sides that you wanted to connect. Or just hit it with a Precision Sledgehammer (awesome name for an item) to add or remove connections on the sides you want.

Yeah, that might work too.
However, It is better to connect/disconnect cable by shift-clicking it with Precision Sledgehammer (I like the name too) rather than adding new items.

 

[Emy]

There's a forced-connection mode, if you click on the middle of the cable with the hammer.

However, it's somewhat limited (to prevent power loops). To demonstrate that, the left lever in the screenshot will light up the lamp. However, the right lever will not toggle the door.

 

[PonyKuu]

Oh, nice!

 

[PhilHibbs]

However, the right lever will not toggle the door.

Hm, not being able to open doors is a problem. I have all my pressure plates rigged up to underground repeaters to extend the signal to the door and keep it open for longer. Sorry, Rednet, you can't replace Redpower for me yet.

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

Hm, not being able to open doors is a problem. I have all my pressure plates rigged up to underground repeaters to extend the signal to the door and keep it open for longer. Sorry, Rednet, you can't replace Redpower for me yet.

Think you're misunderstanding what Emy is saying there.

 

[Emy]

Hm, not being able to open doors is a problem. I have all my pressure plates rigged up to underground repeaters to extend the signal to the door and keep it open for longer. Sorry, Rednet, you can't replace Redpower for me yet.

It's not that you can't open doors, it's that you can't provide indirect power through a force-connected block to another block.

Both of the doors in the following screenshot can be toggled by the lever. The one on the left is sitting directly on the cable's faceplate, and the one on the right is via a vanilla NOT gate transmitting the redstone signal upwards through stone.

 

[power crystals]

Yes. The rule is (99% of the time) when the "plate" shows up on a non-API-aware block, it will accept weak power but only produce weak power. If it's a cable, it will provide strong power but only accept strong power. If it provides strong and accepts weak everything goes to hell unless I weaken the power at the outputs, which I don't want to do since so much rednet stuff is based around exact values being transmitted. So doors are basically the single weak link, which you can manage by just sticking a torch on the end of the cable so I'm not really that worried about it.

 

[PhilHibbs]

OK, so it's fixable with torches, I guess that's not too bad.

 

[Golrith]

I found out from GregT that the reason RP2 tubes are so laggy (remember he decompiled her code without asking a while back?) is that every tick the item is in a tube system, the system checks every possible path for the item to go to see if it is valid or not, and then calculates the shortest route.

Then, combine that with storage rooms of mass numbers of cheap Barrels, and Redpower suddenly has a ton of valid destinations that it was never really designed for. Having those 100+ barrels compared to 10-20 diamond chests really increases the cpu usage for redpower.

 

[PhilHibbs]

I found out from GregT that the reason RP2 tubes are so laggy (remember he decompiled her code without asking a while back?) is that every tick the item is in a tube system, the system checks every possible path for the item to go to see if it is valid or not, and then calculates the shortest route.

I don't see how that can be true, since items only ever change direction at intersections. I'll try adding a shortcut pipe behind an item to see if it turns around in the middle of a run of tubes tonight.

 

[PonyKuu]

I used to like RP2 like you, but then I took an ME cable to the knee.

Actually I still like RP2 but now it just not as awesome as other mods that develop faster... I never worried about lags too much since I only played SSP, but that may change soon... People say that it's lagging. It's kinda a shame since I can remember that Greg made a tutorial that suggests to get rid of BC and use RP2 instead to reduce lags. But I trust KingLemming, and he is saying that it's true.

 

[Siro]

I used to like RP2 like you, but then I took an ME cable to the knee.

Actually I still like RP2 but now it just not as awesome as other mods that develop faster... I never worried about lags too much since I only played SSP, but that may change soon... People say that it's lagging. It's kinda a shame since I can remember that Greg made a tutorial that suggests to get rid of BC and use RP2 instead to reduce lags. But I trust KingLemming, and he is saying that it's true.

Basically, it's the unexpected stuff that can cause the most lag, such as overloading pipes or tubes with ridiculous amounts of stuff (like a bc loop attached to a quarry or a tube system that backs up because a storage inventory becomes full). But redpower does an amazing job of compacting redstone logic. And if you don't realize that the contraption you're building used to take up a chunk worth of vanilla redstone, the load it can put on the server can surprise you. One can also do unexpected stuff with an ME network, like building an enormous molecular assembly chamber thinking "yeah, THIS should speed up my crafting!" when all that does is bring the server to its knees (at least under 1.0.1, haven't tried in 1.1.0 yet).

 

[PonyKuu]

There are PRC and RedNet from MFR now. They are more compact and have some features RP don't have, so, it can be replaced, too. And RedNet doesn't have any visual updates so it might be far better in terms of lag.

What I don't like about RP tubes is the items bouncing back and forth. It's better than items spilled to the ground, but AE that just puts an item into slot if it's possible is more "elegant".

 

[Golrith]

I had an accidental redpower item loop without even realising. I wondered why my game world was taking a long time to load chunks, and generally be a bit sluggish.

Found a load of items cycling around a filter being recoloured, but unable to go to their coloured destination, so were looping back to the filter as the only valid nearest destination. Turned out I missed painting a tube, and when my quarry was running, overflow that should have got destroyed backflowed into all my machines and chests. So much for my perfect system that ensured that overflow always had somewhere to go, so nothing would get jammed up.
Great fun getting all that dirt and cobble out of all my machines....

 

[PonyKuu]

Actually I was more surprised by the fact that relays cause lags, because I though that using relays reduces lag since there are no redstone signal and so on.
Items in tubes are more... understandable source of lag - they are moved, rendered and so on.

 

[Freakscar]

What I don't like about RP tubes is the items bouncing back and forth. It's better than items spilled to the ground, but AE that just puts an item into slot if it's possible is more "elegant".

They only do that, if their destination gets blocked or rendered invalid, while the items are on their way already. RP2 machines do not send out items without reason. Of course, if you have, say, four furnaces outputting to some inventory and that inventory is (then) filled, the 'leftovers' still in the tubes are going back.

 

[PonyKuu]

I know. It's just a common situation when you want to process a lot of items and they don't fit into the inventory. Or when you use a Manager to stock an inventory with some items and take, for example two of them. Other Manager starts to send stacks of two items until that inventory has enough items again. If the tube is too long, second Manager will have enough time to send more than one stack, so items will move to the first Manager and then bounce back to the second one.

 

[PhilHibbs]

Actually I was more surprised by the fact that relays cause lags, because I though that using relays reduces lag since there are no redstone signal and so on.
Items in tubes are more... understandable source of lag - they are moved, rendered and so on.

It's probably because it's constantly checking if the target inventory has space. Hoppers are slower and so use less CPU because they are checking less frequently, although they are checking whether there is space for any of the four items that they hold whilst the relay is checking only for the one kind of item that it has sucked into its invisible holding slot. The insertion speed is one of the advantages of relays, a hopper can't keep up with a Recycler with 12 Overclockers in it, whereas a Relay can. That performance comes at a price, so I use hoppers unless I need a) speed or b) insertion from somewhere other than the top.

 

[Siro]

It's probably because it's constantly checking if the target inventory has space. Hoppers are slower and so use less CPU because they are checking less frequently, although they are checking whether there is space for any of the four items that they hold whilst the relay is checking only for the one kind of item that it has sucked into its invisible holding slot. The insertion speed is one of the advantages of relays, a hopper can't keep up with a Recycler with 12 Overclockers in it, whereas a Relay can. That performance comes at a price, so I use hoppers unless I need a) speed or b) insertion from somewhere other than the top.

If you use an array of recyclers though, relays end up not being as good as a (bandwidth upgraded) router or exporters (in stack mode). Not really fair to compare something that can move stacks at a time to something that can't.