[0.12.x][v0.12.1] Bob's Greenhouse mod

[bobingabout]

I suppose the main solution would be to make it more energy hungry, so that burning the wood being unviable, and also change the recipe without fertiliser to be even less efficient than it already is. Which basically means, you only really do this if you want wood for crafting. The fertiliser requirement makes it a little less wise to just burn it, because the fertiliser requires resources, though no more so than burning coal anyway.

[iamwyza]

Random, can this be a sticky like the other mod discussions?

[madtulip]

That seams to be a good solution to me. Without fertilizer energy should be effectively lost by producing wood via the greenhouse and using it as fuel. With fertilizer the direct use of petroleum gas to solid fuel should yield more energy.

Ontop of the energy requirement to produce wood being larger than the energy gained, the energy to produce the wood should ALSO be larger than the energy generated by the coal/oil required to produce equal amounts of synthetic resign/wood. That would imply that if you currently burn any oil or coal for energy you would be better of to not produce resign or wooden boards from the greenhouse but use your coal or oil instead thereby limiting the greenhouse to an early game, pre oil installment only to bridge the gap until oil is available. That might already be the case if the first condition is true, depending on the amount of ressources used for normal/synthetic resign/wood which i dont have infront of me right now.

[DOSorDIE]

I love the new Greenhouse mod ... Good Job Bob,
but it whould be nice when i can see that it is working ... there is no animation or else.
So i must make that manuell if all works like i will
Some litlle lamp that are blinking or else is enough.

[bobingabout]

Although there is an active animation in the folders, I decided not to implement it for a simple reason.... It gets drawn on top of the pipe attachment graphics.

[Aonova]

Although there is an active animation in the folders, I decided not to implement it for a simple reason.... It gets drawn on top of the pipe attachment graphics.

I was not able to replicate that problem in particular, however, I had a different issue when uncommenting the working-visualizations for the greenhouse

ugly graphics

Not really sure what causes this problem. Anyways, I created a new graphic (see attachment), one which does not cross overlap mostly with the pipe placements, and added some light to the working animation:

code

Code: Select all

working_visualisations =
    {
      {
        animation =
        {
          filename = "__bobgreenhouse__/graphics/entity/greenhouse-light.png",
          width = 113,
          height = 91,
          frame_count = 1,
          shift = {0.2, 0.15}
        },
		light = {intensity = 1, size = 6}
      }
    },

And it looks nice enough now:

new graphics

That should suffice for some working graphics, no?

[Aonova]

That should suffice for some working graphics, no?

"Haha, no", my OCD dictates.

Active greenhouse was hard to distinguish in daytime, so I made an animation for it.

crappy GIF of animation

Implementation
1) download animation file:

greenhouse-on_anim.png (605.42 KiB) Viewed 6787 times

2) modify greenhouse entity script:

replace original working_visualisations

Code: Select all

working_visualisations =
    {
      {
	animation = {
		filename = "__bobgreenhouse__/graphics/entity/greenhouse-on_anim.png",
		width = 113,
		height = 91,
		priority = "high",
		frame_count = 15,
		animation_speed = 0.3,
		line_length = 15,
		shift = {0.2, 0.15}
		},
	light = {intensity = 1, size = 6}
      }
    },

Tested and did not find any weirdness. Have fun guys.

[DOSorDIE]

Looks great
Bob you know what to do

[Nexela]

The bottom left greenhouse still looks like it has a gap between the pipe and the greenhouse. But my eyes are old so I could be wrong. They do look nice!

[iamwyza]

The bottom left greenhouse still looks like it has a gap between the pipe and the greenhouse. But my eyes are old so I could be wrong. They do look nice!

I see the gap in the bottom left as well.

[Aonova]

The bottom left greenhouse still looks like it has a gap between the pipe and the greenhouse. But my eyes are old so I could be wrong. They do look nice!

Thanks! The gap issue for the north fluid port is due to bob using the generic assembler-3 fluid port graphics, which is ofc a different shape than the lab-based greenhouse. To fix that, one would have to create a custom fluid port graphic and redefine the fluid port property of the greenhouse entity to include it.

It does look pretty ugly tbf. I'll work on a fix asap.

[Aonova]

Welp, got a fix for the ugly top pipe

screenshot

Capture.PNG (255.14 KiB) Viewed 6803 times

Implementation

1) Download new pipe graphic and place in entities folder of mod:

greenhouse-pipe-north.png (9.98 KiB) Viewed 6803 times

2) Modify greenhouse entity script:

replace the pipe_picture property of the greenhouse fluid_boxes

Code: Select all

        pipe_picture =
		  {
			north =
			{
				filename = "__bobgreenhouse__/graphics/entity/greenhouse-pipe-north.png",
				priority = "low",
				width = 44,
				height = 58,
				shift = {0, 1.2}
			},
			east =
			{
			  filename = "__base__/graphics/entity/assembling-machine-3/pipe-east.png",
			  priority = "extra-high",
			  width = 40,
			  height = 45,
			  shift = {-0.78125, 0.15625}
			},
			south =
			{
			  filename = "__base__/graphics/entity/assembling-machine-3/pipe-south.png",
			  priority = "extra-high",
			  width = 40,
			  height = 45,
			  shift = {0.03125, -1.0625}
			},
			west =
			{
			  filename = "__base__/graphics/entity/assembling-machine-3/pipe-west.png",
			  priority = "extra-high",
			  width = 40,
			  height = 45,
			  shift = {0.8125, 0}
			}
		  },

Anywho, if anyone has any idea how "priority" and "shift" properties work on sprites, please enlighten me. That would be a giant help for any future graphic endeavors of mine

[bobingabout]

Shift is measured in tiles, and tiles are 32 pixels in size, so if you want to move it 1 pixel, it would be by 1/32. you can either put that in directly (the game allows it) or use a calculator to get 0.03125, and use that instead.

[Aonova]

Shift is measured in tiles, and tiles are 32 pixels in size, so if you want to move it 1 pixel, it would be by 1/32. you can either put that in directly (the game allows it) or use a calculator to get 0.03125, and use that instead.

So if i understand properly, shift = {a,b} means shift sprite right a tiles and down b tiles. Thant makes much more sense . I somehow came up with the idea that shift was based on a factor of the size of the sprite itself, so , for example, shift {1,-2} would move the sprite its own width right and double its width up. Thanks for clearing it up

[Arch666Angel]

Priority should influence the order in which sprites are rendered, but so far I have never seen any difference when playing with this setting

BTW doing pipe overlays is one of the most annoying tasks when doing new buildings.

[bobingabout]

Priority should influence the order in which sprites are rendered, but so far I have never seen any difference when playing with this setting

BTW doing pipe overlays is one of the most annoying tasks when doing new buildings.

there's render_layer too, of which there are actually 4 different sprite render layers for entities alone.

[tster]

That seams to be a good solution to me. Without fertilizer energy should be effectively lost by producing wood via the greenhouse and using it as fuel. With fertilizer the direct use of petroleum gas to solid fuel should yield more energy.

Ontop of the energy requirement to produce wood being larger than the energy gained, the energy to produce the wood should ALSO be larger than the energy generated by the coal/oil required to produce equal amounts of synthetic resign/wood. That would imply that if you currently burn any oil or coal for energy you would be better of to not produce resign or wooden boards from the greenhouse but use your coal or oil instead thereby limiting the greenhouse to an early game, pre oil installment only to bridge the gap until oil is available. That might already be the case if the first condition is true, depending on the amount of ressources used for normal/synthetic resign/wood which i dont have infront of me right now.

Burning wood is an interesting addition of bob's mods, giving you an alternative to solar for renewable enargy. I think that making it a net-negative energy source would detract from the interest. Also, it makes no sense to make it a net-negative energy process, considering that trees are getting energy from the sun.

That being said, they are currently fairly overpowered. Without fertilizer, a single greenhouse produces a net of ~22.66 trees/min. Doing the math a greenhouse is a net of ~89.166 MJ/min (aka: 1.49 MW). Compare that to a MK3 large solar panel producing 240 kw, and it's pretty clear that they need some balancing, especially with how simple they are.

My recommendation:

1) reduce the base recipe from 15 wood to 5 wood and make it take 60 seconds. That makes the energy output 153 kw. Adding in the overhead of the inserters and assembly machines needed for your setup, you probably will end up around ~100 kw, which seems decent given the complexity.
2) add a MK2 greenhouse with 2x crafting speed, bringing the energy output to 306 kw. Make the recipe for a MK2 require some fairly high level electronics (or advanced inserters or something)
3) Reduce the fertilizer recipe from 30 to 15, bringing it back to what it is now. I don't have the time to do the math on comparing the fertilizer efficiency with the solid fuel efficiency, but it should be significantly more efficient to use fertilizer than solid fuel. To make up for that, I think fertilizer should be more complicated to make maybe.

With those changes, wood will still be usable as a renewable fuel source, but it's not so overpowered, and requires a decent amount of automation to make it viable as a primary power source. I would like to keep wood more powerful than solar from a land point of view as solar has the advantages of 1) extremely simple setup with no logistics required, and 2) zero pollution creation.

[bobingabout]

I've already made a few changes for the next release.

Greenhouse consumes 4x the power
basic-greenhouse-cycle gives 5 to 15 wood (listed as 10) instead of 5 to 25, and takes twice as long to complete
advanced-greenhouse-cycle takes a little longer to make too, but not as long as the basic.

[WoodyDaOcas]

excellent I just hope I'll be able to download those before the Sunday, I'm leaving for vacation and there's no internet connection on the cottage :/
Thank you for your work

[bobingabout]

Greenhouse 0.13.2:
* Made greenhouse more power hungry. (4x)
* Made the basic greenhouse tree growing recipe last longer and give less wood.
* Made the advanced recipe last a little longer too.
* Added active animation