Fluid energy source

[eradicator]

LONGQUOTE

[quote="bobingabout"][quote="eradicator"]@bob:
The energy interface is actually quite useful (though got less useful do to some performance related changes in 0.16 >_>_>_>_>) for scripted consumption. For production it's still nice with "free" energy sources (wind, water), but yea, not for continuous consumption, but that's what the boiler/engine prototype should do.[/quote]
I'm not going to repeat myself, so I'll just quote instead:
[quote="bobingabout"]... that doesn't actually have an input ... I'm not saying it's useless, just limited ...[/quote]
And yes, I like to avoid scripting for the previously mentioned reasons... compatibility issues... game performance, etc.[/quote]

Lulz. Why is everybody picking on that one side comment. I just said it's not quite as useless as you make it sound from my point of view. Also if you voluntarily abstain from scripting (for any reason) then obviously a prototype that was created to be used with scripts isn't going to be terribly useful for you ^^. That's like saying a car is of limited usefulness because you don't want to use fuel.

-> Back to topic.
The main content of that post was me saying "changing reactor adjacency bonuses is already possible".

[mrvn]

This made me think: Can't you use a nuclear reactor but set it to accept crude oil barrels and output empty barrels?

You would then need heat pipes and heat exchangers but they could be hidden in a compound entity. You would then have a liquid fuel boiler working on barrels.

[eradicator]

This made me think: Can't you use a nuclear reactor but set it to accept crude oil barrels and output empty barrels?

You would then need heat pipes and heat exchangers but they could be hidden in a compound entity. You would then have a liquid fuel boiler working on barrels.

Sounds neat until you remember the constant-consumption mechanic of the reactor. :/

[bobingabout]

And that still runs on barrelled oil. you could more easily code a new "Oil powered boiler" that uses barrelled oil directly, and even add a return item slot to give empty barrels, if you set a new fuel category on both the barrel and the boiler.

The point is that we want to be able to use piped oil directly as a fuel source, which means we need support for using fluid as a fuel type option on a standard energy_source tag.


Of course you then still have issues where certain entities like the reactor, and the locomotive currently have a burner= tag rather than an energy_source= tag, forcing them to be item burners, but lets take things one step at a time. Having the ability on everything with an energy_source tag, like boilers, mining drills and assembling machines would be a great starting point.

[mrvn]

Add an assembler that barrels oil and 2 inserters to move the barrels between the "nuclear" reactor and assembler. Add a small steam tank and hook the inserters into that so they stop when the steam output is backed up.

For me the important part would be to make this work without Lua script on_tick. Checking the fuel, water and steam fluid boxes every tick and then modifying them to fake produce steam is a no go for UPS.