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  1. #1
    Lazy Idle Couch Potato Heptagon_ru's Avatar
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    Deus ex machina. Your opinions about liveliness of mod devices.

    I love Transfer Pipes from Extra Utilities, with goodies flowing. Can watch them for long time. I love ender chests and tanks. Tinkers Construct's smelter and crafting tables. Open Block tanks. Translocators. Hang Glider.
    They are alive, they have clear concepts and they show what is happening.

    Some or many other machines, starting with quarries and to mills, macerators, electric-laser thingies and all others I haven't even seen - they are like deus ex machina. One block with no external animations does whole lot of work. Speaking metaphorically, gray block covers all your needs in this, black with green sprites - in that, black with a green square - and you don't need to do anything anymore.

    Still some advanced blocks (new for me) are quite awesome - a saw table I saw at TC building, DOM's rotating mill wheel and the huge propeller (but it bloody levitates! ). On the previous server I saw some nice end-tier designs at J's base: the deep laser megadrill "from Half-Life", the ringish energy reactor (thermonuclear?) ...

    So I can't quite understand what makes me uneasy about these "deus ex" blocks, but they surely do.
    I don't like all those super-powerful crafting grids and digital ultra storage, or even 4-block quarry (quarry, pump, energy src, dump chest). One blocks contains half of the game. Maybe I just don't understand their complexity and beauty. And, haven't finished even transfer pipe-based storage, I am actually doomed to repeating mundane operations like resources logistics and processing, instead of "fire and forget" as e.g. J does (everyone actually. J - because I was more frequently on his base on the last server).
    I feel those super-systems are like another Minecraft inside of Minecraft. So it is like I don't play Minecraft, I first have to make a smaller Minecraft inside, so it will work a lot instead of me, and only then I should play the remaining ordinary Minecraft.
    Or maybe it is a mod development quality, or maybe some mods are made by extravert people who like appearance a lot, and some by intraverts, who like complex functionality more ...

    What do you think guys? Have you ever had similar feelings? Which do you prefer? What do you think about those silent mega-powered one-block devices?

    Oh, and I know that all the animations makes server laggy, thats why transparent pipes are bad, etc.

  2. #2
    I couldn't agree with you more Hept. I really enjoy a dynamic atmosphere in this game. This is why my plan is to make horribly inefficient and large machines that look nice. The watermill is an example of this. My plan is to make a simple block processor, but I only want to use animated machines and item transport. The current goal is to use conveyor belts and minecarts to move items between the HUGE Immersive Engineering machines in an attempt to make as many types of building blocks from generated cobblestone.

    After this project, I will be working on making the rest of the city more lively with NPCs and Jurrassic Park. This will be a very big project with many live elements. Don't worry about the early game, it's quite bland. We can make this world into what we want to see.

  3. #3
    As far as I'm concerned we build things because we like building them. Not to be as efficient with a single machine block as possible. So if you want to see items travel pipes, that's fine. However we do have to keep in mind that with each new Minecraft version the mods become that much heavier for the server to run. So we can't all have giant bases with tons of buildcraft pipes running everywhere any more. This is part of the reason why we want players to only do community builds. We can still build everything, but we only want one copy of each build.

    We have a few mods that give us very efficient item and energy handling. But that doesn't mean we can't have mine carts running between locations to deliver goods. If it's fun to build, we should. Within reason, of course

    I like the idea of DOM building elaborate train systems just so he can move blocks around. I also like the NPC farmer and seeing a worm keeping 3x3 farm blocks hydrated and an automated chicken cooker. The things I like the most are expensive multi-block structures that perform a single function. I'm looking forward to building an IC2 factory that processes uranium for a bunch of nuclear reactors. They've changed the way they work since I've last did any serious IC2 stuff so it'll be fun to figure out how things work. Previously you had a cross-shaped structure of 7 blocks and that was the reactor. Just put some uranium and some cooling things in and you got EU power. Now the 7 block structure needs a bit lead cube around it and you need to pump cooling liquid in and out of it. The heated cooling liquid then needs to go through a bunch of chillers to be turned onto cold cooling liquid which can then go back into the reactor.

    Figuring out these kinds of puzzles is what I like about tech mods. But I agree, the visual aspect of it can be a bit bland. Seeing a single passive block work miracles of engineering isn't as interesting as seeing mine carts load/unload or NPCs moving around and doing things.

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