[MOD][WIP .15] High Voltage 0.0.7 : Energy over distance

[Jeroen D Stout]

I should probably put this more boldly somewhere, but the red light blinding is an artefact from how I arrange for power. Basically I had a problem where accumulators started sending energy back and forth and hacked my way into this not happening. I think I could solve this by giving the entities which masquerade as accumulators a fixed drain.

It's not to do with accumulators, though if you'll notice, things on the far side of an accumulator have little ticks where they have less charge, the transformer sends too little and too much electricity over all the time. So you need some accumulators for that.

Incidentally...

I found out the hard way how many accumulators you need to fire lasers at an outpost. The game's vanilla central electricity grid makes it easy to funnel MW over to laser turrets... with High Voltage you need tons of accumulators to cover up for that bit where power requirement goes up a few dozen times for a brief moment. It's exciting but I am also considering making a "rapid discharge" accumulator that costs energy to maintain (fixed drain) but also can discharge itself at a much faster pace for those emergency situations.

[TK_Neg]

Rapid discharge accumulators would be nice for those using a mostly vanilla mod pack. Otherwise a person could probably pick up Bobs or something else, I'd imagine.

Speaking of bobs mods and regarding the case where copper wires are treated as a single circuit: bobs throws in different types of wires (tinned copper, insulated, gilded) that you may or may not be able to put on power lines. (This literally just came to mind, I've not checked if you can myself.) Assuming it's possible to string them up on lines, is it possible to have those different types of wires be different circuits, and by extension different transmission strengths, possibly with varying degrees of strength decay over distance?

Apologies for the rambling thoughts, and please let me know if I need to attempt to clarify!

[Jeroen D Stout]

Rapid discharge accumulators would be nice for those using a mostly vanilla mod pack. Otherwise a person could probably pick up Bobs or something else, I'd imagine.

Speaking of bobs mods and regarding the case where copper wires are treated as a single circuit: bobs throws in different types of wires (tinned copper, insulated, gilded) that you may or may not be able to put on power lines. (This literally just came to mind, I've not checked if you can myself.) Assuming it's possible to string them up on lines, is it possible to have those different types of wires be different circuits, and by extension different transmission strengths, possibly with varying degrees of strength decay over distance?

I'll probably make it a separate mod, if I get to it. At the same time having to have a huge accumulator array means you need to keep your off-site mining bases larger and means you need more infrastructure... so it has its upsides.

The wire... if it were possible to have custom wire I actually would have done it from the start! But I am afraid that there are only three wire types hard-coded into the engine (from what I can tell) and you cannot use custom ones. The game is also super-iffy about telling you exactly what is going on with wire networks, so checking multiple wire systems might even be a bit more difficulty. Having a second tier of transformers might do the same thing... and yet... vanilla Factorio does not have many "2nd tier" buildings that do the same but with better stats. So I am not sure if I really want to do that.

Problem with upgrades is that limited power throughput creates an interesting challenge that shouldn't be solved with just throwing more infrastructure at it. At least, that is how I see it

[bbgun06]

Performance is much improved with the latest update! However, I suggest increasing the maximum energy per circuit, because roboports and lasers use so much power. One roboport draws 5MW, so that is enough to max out any circuit it's attached to. If it gets just a few robots charging there, then everything else on the network will be almost shut down. Also each laser turrets takes 2.4MW, so that's essentially 1 per circuit also. I think 10MW maximum current per high voltage line would be sufficient.

Meanwhile, I found another bug. I placed a new medium pole, removed all wires from it, then connected two green wires to it. (Then I decided I didn't want to leave it as the disconnected pole entity.) So I reattached a copper wire to it, and the game promptly crashed.
Here is the error:

Code: Select all

Error while running event highvoltage::on_tick (ID 0)
Expected target_circuit_id for target entities with more than one circuit connector.
stack traceback:
	__highvoltage__/control/regularPole.lua:98: in function 'replaceRegularPoleEntity'
	__highvoltage__/control/regularPole.lua:184: in function 'updateRegularPole'
	__highvoltage__/control.lua:265: in function <__highvoltage__/control.lua:232>

And a screenshot. The lone pole to the NW of me is the culprit.

[osldgoth]

This is either a bug or I am doing something wrong. In this example, I have 3 high voltage lines from steam engines to some centrifuges. Of the transformers at the centrifuges only one is actually receiving power, the other two are sending it back. the power should no be going back to the steam engines. I have rebuild the transformers at both ends, re-wired everything, reconnected the transformers while there was high demand for power and little demand for power - nothing I do gets the other two transformers to receive power instead of sending it back to the steam engines.* here are some pictures.

steam engines

centrifuges

* I did get more power there once I removed the transformers AND the big poles then replaced them. why would replacing the big poles have an effect on it?

I've seen this happen a couple other locations in our game, it is really annoying.

[db48x]

We started to get serious about the walls. Since we can't really use laser turrets, these are just ordinary turrets with inserters to move ammo along their length.



(also, I had to move a whole train line two tiles south, but that's not really related to the mod.)

[db48x]

Ow:

Code: Select all

Error while running event highvoltage::on_tick (ID 0)
Expected target_circuit_id for target entities with more than one circuit connector.
stack traceback:
	__highvoltage__/control/regularPole.lua:98: in function 'replaceRegularPoleEntity'
	__highvoltage__/control/regularPole.lua:184: in function 'updateRegularPole'
	__highvoltage__/control.lua:265: in function <__highvoltage__/control.lua:232>

I had placed a power box down next to a pole with some green wires connected to it.