[MOD] voltbuild, a fork of itest [voltbuild]

[ElectricSolstice]

Okay, I tried it and the speed is far better. :)

I did notice something strange though. I cooked 13 steel ingots and got 16 refined iron ingots. It also gave me more tin and copper ingots than it should have.

Thanks for spotting that. The fix was simple, so it's already been fixed and sent up to github ^_^

[ElectricSolstice]

As a warning, the next update hasn't been done yet, but when the gameplay balancing is done. There's going to be some changes and some gameplay balance unrelated features added. For the game balancing, there's going to be a few changes to craft recipes, including the macerator and extractor, and changes to energy to all objects (such as how much energy a battery stores, how much energy a coal generator produces, how much energy a tool requires, and more). For the unrelated features, there's a craft added so you can now make and use single use batteries, and there's going to be an underwater ore or two. The uses for these new ores probably won't be added yet, but will be there for use in future crafts. Keep in mind, none of this has been released yet, but will be when the balancing is done.
On the very slim chance someone was writing a clock component, there are probably going to be changes to that code too in order to simplify the api.

[ElectricSolstice]

Finally, the first series of gameplay changing is done. CRAFTS WERE CHANGED!, including but not limited to the macerator. I'll be working on some documentation next. As part of the gameplay changing, many machines had their energy usages changed and the miner even was changed to make tunnels instead of magically digging up the ores through the wall. Unrelated to gameplay balancing, a couple of underwater ores were added to later be used for future crafts. Scuba gear still needs to be incorporated into this mod. If you find any bugs, let me know, as many changes were made to the internals of the code. As part of it, the clock component api was changed. Not really simpler but has been abstracted down to making the machines rely on basing their behavior on a few variables rather than having overclock have to look at what type of machine it is.

[ElectricSolstice]

All recipes are now inside crafts.txt under the doc folder within the voltbuild mod folder. Any "" inside the recipe means no item there. Both the actual item name (example, voltbuild:electric_furnace) and description (example, Electric furnace) are placed in the file, so a text editor with a find capability can find the item by either one.

Let me know if having the crafts there is of any help.

[ElectricSolstice]

I went ahead and made my own scuba gear for the mod. Instead of using a global step, it experiments with using minetest.after

To use the scuba gear, just have it and some air cells in your inventory and it'll deplete your air cells as you swim under water. To make air cells, you'll need to put a air compressor component into a compressor to make it stop doing it's normal compression and start making air cells.

[jenova99sephiros]

Please pipeworks support!

[Nore]

There was pipewroks support in itest IIRC, so it should still work now.

[jenova99sephiros]

oh sorry...

[ElectricSolstice]

Please pipeworks support!

Thank you for pointing this out ^_^ I just tested the electric furnace with pipeworks and noticed that it could send the things it had cooked into a chest, but receiving from a chest into the electric furnace didn't quite work because it's missing a couple of group properties. I'll work on adding better pipeworks compatibility soon to both allow receiving items from chests into machines and to make it so the pipes actually look like they connect to the machine.

[ElectricSolstice]

Well, support for pipeworks has been improved, allowing chests to send in items into consumers as well as sending uranium into the nuclear reactor. Visuals haven't been fixed yet because I'm asking a question about the pipeworks code and don't want to add code that I might not even need.

[ElectricSolstice]

I went ahead and fixed the visuals for the pipework tubes connecting to the voltbuild machines by using the connects function instead of relying on the connect_sides table.

[jenova99sephiros]

oh!Great!

[ElectricSolstice]

Two new nuclear reactor parts added. One is merely the fan component allowed to be crafted into a reactor fan and vice versa so you can cool down the heat inside the reactor instead of only dealing with the reactor's overall stress or temperature. The other part added allows you to generate a bit more energy inside the nuclear reactor using the heat inside the nuclear reactor. This allows a little more in the way of design decisions for the reactor.

[ElectricSolstice]

This mod now also contains a geothermal generator and a new component, a mobile solar panel.

[ElectricSolstice]

Poll added for seven days to see if people are using this mod or not and to see if people need more documentation for this or if I can just focus on adding new stuff.

[fairiestoy]

Seems like you are putting much effort in this mod :3 To your poll: What about asking somebody else who is a bit more familiar already with this mod to help you creating documentation? It looks like LionsDen is testing it very well, maybe he likes to ? ;). This way you could concentrate on experimenting. I think there are a few people using this mod in singleplayer. Sadly less servers are using it due to some missing tools they are used to ( mining drills, lasers (!) although i wouldn't recommend lasers ). But thats something for later since its very balance-sensitive to add such tools. If you make them too simple to craft, people will have no challenge and just get to end-game equip very fast. If its to hard, most people will loose interest because they get annoyed by a challenge they cannot imagine to be handled.

[ElectricSolstice]

Seems like you are putting much effort in this mod :3 To your poll: What about asking somebody else who is a bit more familiar already with this mod to help you creating documentation? It looks like LionsDen is testing it very well, maybe he likes to ? ;). This way you could concentrate on experimenting. I think there are a few people using this mod in singleplayer. Sadly less servers are using it due to some missing tools they are used to ( mining drills, lasers (!) although i wouldn't recommend lasers ). But thats something for later since its very balance-sensitive to add such tools. If you make them too simple to craft, people will have no challenge and just get to end-game equip very fast. If its to hard, most people will loose interest because they get annoyed by a challenge they cannot imagine to be handled.

Cool, this mod is more aimed at singleplayer anyways since it's where I'm testing it but does have a couple things added specifically for use on servers, such as limiting who can add and remove things from nuclear reactors.

Hmm, I could pm LionsDen to see if he would like to. This mod could probably use some tutorials for beginners. Luckily, the crafts.txt file is created for me by the init script as long as i set generate_docs to true, so keeping up with the changes in crafts is no problem. It's just every other documentation that would require at least a partial touch. If it would help, I could probably add code to automatically generate a list of which machines are generators, consumers, batteries, and so forth.
If more autodocumentation is not needed though, I can probably go onto other things because feels like the mod could use more components and nuclear parts to really take advantage of the framework I added for those things. The components api though still feels like it needs some smoothing out and maybe a couple of features to make it easier. However, for today, I might just instead add a solar power rechargeable battery. Would be same as a regular re_battery but would slowly charge as you walk in the sun.

On a side note, thought this mod already came with a mining drill and a diamond drill because the mod I forked off of had them. Actually, it has those tools plus a machine that does mining for you that I ended up trying to nerf a bit in my mod. I haven't tried the mining drill in technic, so is it majorly different from the drill in this one? The drill in this one basically acts like a pick but uses electricity instead of durability.

[fairiestoy]

After i wrote my post here, i stumbled over that doc generating and its a nice idea. It cuts out manual rework of the recipes. With a bit of effort it would be even possible to write a little text to each machine ( maybe a short description about setup and usage ) and let it also be autogenerated. Up to now, haven't seen that feature in a mod, therefore nice idea.

About that drill: Almost forgot that its present here, my bad :P. The main difference between this drill and the technic:drill is the optional Tier which offers more energy to be pumped into it and the fact that its possible to choose between modes to mine different amounts of nodes at once. For example Mode 5 = 3x3 field of nodes with one click. One has to say, this is a bit overpowered and might (again) destroy the game balance. Therefore your drill is good as it is and forget my sentence about it in my previous post ;).
That solar battery is neat x)

[ElectricSolstice]

After i wrote my post here, i stumbled over that doc generating and its a nice idea. It cuts out manual rework of the recipes. With a bit of effort it would be even possible to write a little text to each machine ( maybe a short description about setup and usage ) and let it also be autogenerated. Up to now, haven't seen that feature in a mod, therefore nice idea.

About that drill: Almost forgot that its present here, my bad :P. The main difference between this drill and the technic:drill is the optional Tier which offers more energy to be pumped into it and the fact that its possible to choose between modes to mine different amounts of nodes at once. For example Mode 5 = 3x3 field of nodes with one click. One has to say, this is a bit overpowered and might (again) destroy the game balance. Therefore your drill is good as it is and forget my sentence about it in my previous post ;).
That solar battery is neat x)

I was thinking about adding that to the doc generator. I could add a table to each object that should contain a summary and a usage tip on the object. When running the doc generator, I could have it print warnings to the command line for any voltbuild object that doesn't have the table that contains the documentation information.

Thanks ^_^

[emmetcooper]

Awesome mod. :D but I'm having trouble trying to install it. i always get this error. How do i fix this?

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

03:06:13: ERROR[main]: ServerError: LuaError: error: D:\GAMES\Minetest\bin\..\mods\voltbuild/charge.lua:72: attempt to compare number with nil

[ElectricSolstice]

Awesome mod. :D but I'm having trouble trying to install it. i always get this error. How do i fix this?

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

03:06:13: ERROR[main]: ServerError: LuaError: error: D:\GAMES\Minetest\bin\..\mods\voltbuild/charge.lua:72: attempt to compare number with nil

Which version of minetest are you using? O: If your minetest version is less than 4.7, you probably need to update.

I took a quick look at that line of code, and it is supposed to be a number because the line right before it asks the game for the light value at the player's position. So make sure you check which version of minetest you're using, because that error shouldn't be occuring.

EDIT:

Is this your first time using this mod or have you used it before and it worked?

[emmetcooper]

I'm using 0.4.7 for windows. It worked a few times but from time to time it displays that error message and stops the world from loading. Does it have incompatibility with other mods? because i have other mods installed like technic and VanessaE's mods.

EDIT: Right now I'm trying to make it work for linux.

EDIT: Whenever Voltbuild is enabled along other mods, segmentation fault happens. i have 4Gb of ram.

[ElectricSolstice]

I'm using 0.4.7 for windows. It worked a few times but from time to time it displays that error message and stops the world from loading. Does it have incompatibility with other mods? because i have other mods installed like technic and VanessaE's mods.

EDIT: Right now I'm trying to make it work for linux.

EDIT: Whenever Voltbuild is enabled along other mods, segmentation fault happens. i have 4Gb of ram.

Hmm, strange. I changed the two lines of light code to check if the light returned is nil, so download and use the latest version of the voltbuild mod to see if it fixes the problem.

I haven't used this mod that long with the new solar battery code so maybe it's possible that somehow the light being returned is nil instead of a number. Let me know if the problem continues.

Stops the world from loading? So it only occurs when you load the game and not in the middle of when you're playing? What are all the mods you are using when the segmentation fault occurs?

[Nore]

minetest.get_node_light can return nil (IIRC, if the area is not loaded). Therefore, you should detect that in the mod.

[emmetcooper]

One thing I confirmed though is that the Segmentation fault is triggered when you enable technic along with voltbuild. I'll try to look in detail why this happens to me. Also is that the current official version of minetest doesn't contain the "get_breath" method that sometimes brings up an error. I'll try to find a patch for this.

[Krock]

Awesome mod. :D but I'm having trouble trying to install it. i always get this error. How do i fix this?

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

03:06:13: ERROR[main]: ServerError: LuaError: error: D:\GAMES\Minetest\bin\..\mods\voltbuild/charge.lua:72: attempt to compare number with nil

try to get the newest minetest-dev version

[ElectricSolstice]

minetest.get_node_light can return nil (IIRC, if the area is not loaded). Therefore, you should detect that in the mod.

That's what I did in the change to the two lines of light code :3 Therefore, emmetcooper should remove the current voltbuild mod in there and replace it with the newest one if that user hasn't already.

[ElectricSolstice]

One thing I confirmed though is that the Segmentation fault is triggered when you enable technic along with voltbuild. I'll try to look in detail why this happens to me. Also is that the current official version of minetest doesn't contain the "get_breath" method that sometimes brings up an error. I'll try to find a patch for this.

If you don't mind going without the scuba gear, you can just comment out one line. Comment out line 64 in the file consumers.lua. On that line it says

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

dofile(modpath.."/scuba.lua)

Change that line to

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

--dofile(modpath.."/scuba.lua)

Make sure to load the world again after making this change.

If you must have the scuba gear, then you'll just have to update your minetest version :3

Could you list all the mods you are using? Will try it with technic to see what errors I get, but would be useful to know all the mods in case the problem is more complicated than that.

[emmetcooper]

Sure :)

Technic
Technic WorldGen
Technic Chests
Army
Concrete
ExtraNodes
Pipeworks
MoreBlocks
MoreOres
MoreTrees
Farming Plus
Home Decor
Framed Glass
Infrastructure
Craft Guide
Mesecon
Plant Life
Scuba
Stargate
Streets
Unified Dyes
Unified Inventory
VoltBuild

:D

I'm trying to make a MineTest Version of Feed The Beast. :D

[ElectricSolstice]

Sure :)

Technic
Technic WorldGen
Technic Chests
Army
Concrete
ExtraNodes
Pipeworks
MoreBlocks
MoreOres
MoreTrees
Farming Plus
Home Decor
Framed Glass
Infrastructure
Craft Guide
Mesecon
Plant Life
Scuba
Stargate
Streets
Unified Dyes
Unified Inventory
VoltBuild

:D

I'm trying to make a MineTest Version of Feed The Beast. :D

Cool, thanks for including my mod in the modpack ^_^ Interesting that you would pick both my mod and technic though. The two mods are kinda alternatives to the other as our electric systems are completely different.

I'll try getting all those mods installed to see if i pick up any bugs.