[mod 0.12.20] Transformer

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monty
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[mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by monty »

Type: Mod
Name: Transformer
Description: This is a mod that expands the control over the power grid
License: Public domain
Version: 0.0.1
Release: 15-02-2016
Tested-With-Factorio-Version: 0.12.20
Category: Crafting,energy
Tags: accumulators, energy
Download-Url:
transformer_0.0.1.rar
(101.59 KiB) Downloaded 331 times
LONG DESCRIPTION
Detailed DESCRIPTION
Mod Basics

Mod details : Plz visit the summery before reading these segments for greater ease of understanding.Aimed for those who want to know how mod works.
Basic Functioning
working principle


Summery

ToDo
Side note
Thanks

VERSION HISTORY
Declaration
LICENSE
Last edited by monty on Thu Mar 03, 2016 8:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Supercheese
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by Supercheese »

Looks nice, I'll try it out. I was bothered by the 10MW limitation of the Transformator mod, and this looks like a good way to get around that limit.

monty
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by monty »

There has been a little error in explaining.
The maximum power output is ((output shown/85)*10)(so for 85 GW its 10 GW)

This is the maximum voltage output that the transformer can give.Apparently this happens to be 1000:1 to the input, which in explanation is aimed to be 10:1

So for the max output ,1000 sec of charge leads to 1 sec of discharge.
But max charging time is still set at 60 sec and max energy stored is defined at the upper limit.

So a small transformer(input 1 MW, output 10 MW , MAX OUTPUT 1000 MW)
Will charge till it can provide 60 sec of 10 MW, which happens to be 0.6 sec of max output.
So thats why if it was attached to an output greater than 10MW, or of the order of 100 MW, a small peak would be observed.

I just added this feature to utilize the steam plants fully for the small time that the output needs are low. or provide small energy boost if there is huge fluctuation in output demand.
If you guys like this feature, it can be enhanced by changing the liquid ratio (in entity(consumer fluid volume) and control(max amount) ).

This is what it looks like.
Connections
Charging
Max output
The charging effect 1
Chargine effect 2

monty
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by monty »

Hi,
If anyone has any remark or review , please share it.

I have made these mod to add upon other mods, and enhance the game play. But for some time, i will be discontinuing from the posts.
During this time please share your views.Anyone who finds anything that needs changing, please go ahead and do so.Also feel free to develop upon them.

They might have some issues ,due to the rush to share them(i had very small amount of time to make them), but they have all been tried, so they can be worked with.

I hope you all enjoy them.
See you again after a while.

Bye

exi2163
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by exi2163 »

This is not a transformer, this is an enourmous capacitor. As there is no concept of voltage or amps in the game a transformer per se is not needed anyway. However there is a need change the priority of electric sources. Therefore i expected the mod to raise the priority level of the output above everything else - which it does. From the name Transformer i would not expect it to store such insane amounts of energy. Initially i thought the 100-1000MW transformer could be used from 100MW to 1000MW but the maximum sustained throughput is 100MW. - You explained all of this but i overread it as it's a lot of text :P
The 100-1000MW transformer stores100MW*60s = 6GJ of energy. A vanilla accumulator stores 5MJ. This transformer therefore is the equivalent of 1200 accumulators! Those accumulators only have a maximum discharge rate of 360MW though.

So in terms of material balance this is highly overpowered.

I am unsure where this leaves the mod. I guess you designed it specifically this way to accompany your playstyle. For me it is cheating as one transformer is way cheaper than 1200 accumulators (and way smaller, too!).

From a technology point of view you could do this with a redox flow cell. A tank of 2500l of sulfuric acid in a vanadium redox flow battery would yield about 225MJ of stored energy (90kJ/l <=> 25Wh/l) to bring this into relation.
As this is almost the same as a full tank of hot water (212 MJ) we could use temperature to store the energy.

The question would be: Does anybody want something like this? I'll just edit the files and reduce the amount of fluid than can be stored to a very small amount so that it works the way i think it should. I prefer building and using accumulators.

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MasterBuilder
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by MasterBuilder »

Please make your files .zip instead of .rar. The game can read mods as .zip files, .rar must be decompressed/recompressed first.
Give a man fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

pofigismo
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by pofigismo »

For anyone who wants this to work with 0.14, here is the download. I renamed it to 0.0.2, although the only thing changed is one line removed and one line added in the original files of the mod, just for compatibility with 0.14.
Attachments
transformer_0.0.2.zip
(104.35 KiB) Downloaded 166 times

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Philip017
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by Philip017 »

hello, i downloaded this off the mod portal (v0.0.4) thinking, oh cool, this looks like a neat thing, but looking at how it seems to be working in game the transformer is drinking a continuous amount of power :?

example right now i am using the small version that has 1mw draw, this draw is continuous and doesn't seem to be dependent on the load on the other side that is 300kw-1mw varying ALOT!.
i do not want to loose power, so using this transformer much like a diode.
but the transformer pulls 1mw and my load pull an average of half that, either the transformer has a massive accumulator, that is still charging at 1mw after 30 mins, or something else is wrong?

i tried the 10MW version on my same load and the transformer drank 10MW constantly :shock: ?

what am i missing?

EDIT: it takes a massive 6 days to charge this thing, that is crazy! it should charge in the same rate that the standard accumulator charges and hold as much power, if more power is needed, adding accumulators on the receiving side should be done, wow.

@exi2163 u got those changes handy to borrow?


EDIT2:
i have tried all the other version and they seem to work fine, but the xl gives an error -
when placing the xl transformer gives this error:

Error While running event on_built_entity (ID6)
Unknown entity name: powerproducer-x
stack traceback:
__transformer__/control.lua:91: in function
'OnBuilt'
__transformer__/control.lua:38: in function
<__transformer__/control.lua:38>

pofigismo
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by pofigismo »

Philip017 wrote:hello, i downloaded this off the mod portal (v0.0.4) thinking, oh cool, this looks like a neat thing, but looking at how it seems to be working in game the transformer is drinking a continuous amount of power :?

example right now i am using the small version that has 1mw draw, this draw is continuous and doesn't seem to be dependent on the load on the other side that is 300kw-1mw varying ALOT!.
i do not want to loose power, so using this transformer much like a diode.
but the transformer pulls 1mw and my load pull an average of half that, either the transformer has a massive accumulator, that is still charging at 1mw after 30 mins, or something else is wrong?

i tried the 10MW version on my same load and the transformer drank 10MW constantly :shock: ?

what am i missing?

EDIT: it takes a massive 6 days to charge this thing, that is crazy! it should charge in the same rate that the standard accumulator charges and hold as much power, if more power is needed, adding accumulators on the receiving side should be done, wow.

@exi2163 u got those changes handy to borrow?


EDIT2:
i have tried all the other version and they seem to work fine, but the xl gives an error -
when placing the xl transformer gives this error:

Error While running event on_built_entity (ID6)
Unknown entity name: powerproducer-x
stack traceback:
__transformer__/control.lua:91: in function
'OnBuilt'
__transformer__/control.lua:38: in function
<__transformer__/control.lua:38>

Fixed in 0.0.5. Sorry for that.
As for the drain -that's how it was originally made and it's quite hard to change thing as the transformer is actually an entity made of 5 entities that simply drains power and converts it to liquid which is then converted off into power and it's just a huge thing that is quite hard to understand given that I'm not the one who made it originally. I can make the capacity far smaller if you'd want though. Please leave further comments on the actual mod portal by the way - far easier to notice them.

TheTom
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by TheTom »

Personally - I love them, but I have a couple of ideas:

* Rename the size (s, m, l, xl) to numbers (1,2,3,4) in line with all other mods that do this.
* Make the larger element take one or more of the smaller ones PLUS more material. This is in line with how this is generally handled in factorio.

And finally...

... not sure I like the storage at all. I would keep batteries and transformation separate. Right now I use bobs mod. More batteries. I want pretty much only a transormator to keep my outpost batteries charged WITHOUT the main base able to access this power. Same with some emergency power storage.

I like the new storage concept (a lot actually), but I would make them separate units from the transformers. Let the user decide what he needs.

Anson
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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by Anson »

quite a while ago in 0.12 or 0.13, i used the transformator mod (which has the same graphics as this mod), and thus was glad to find a 0.14 version now for my next map. BUT:

i also am using Foreman (the utility as well as the mod; but this post concerns the utility only).
when i start Foreman and it loads all my mods, it crashes with an error

Code: Select all

Error reading string. Unexpected token: StartArray. Path 'author', line 5, position 14
looking at line 5 of info.json in this mod, it reads

Code: Select all

"author": ["monty", "Pofi"],
I don't know the correct format of info.json files, but this mod seems to be the only one (out of a few hundred) that has an array of authors and that bugs out on Foreman in this way. even if an array of authors would be allowed, could you please make this mod also work nicely with Foreman, either by asking the foreman author to correct his bug, or by changing your author line, or whatever it takes ...

Thank you

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Re: [mod 0.12.20] Transformer

Post by MrBuisson »

Hi,

I think that's a great mod for power freaks like me, but it need few improvement :
Integrated accumulator : must be MUCh smaller. Transformer do not store much energy and are empty in something like one second, one xl trafo replace my 10K accumulator array from vanilla !
Permanant drain : I think this issue is linked to the large storage. If the fluid storage inside has a maximum capacity the moment it saturate the input power will fall.
Priority : at the moment, the transformer has lower priority than accumulator, it make the diode function comes too late. I like the idea of trafo working like pumps, pushimg energy forward as long as they can. edit : i think I'm wrong there :(
unconnecting : you can't shit clic to unconnect a trafo ! that mean they have to be placed first or all pole will have to be unconected to make a smart network. I'd rather the trafo unconnected by default :)

ps : From the description is seems that one watt on the input equal 10W on the output... which is kind of game breaking. in game I've seen 1 to 1, whihch can even be lowered to 1->0.9 (small) to 1->0.99 (xl). cost for the xl is also too low :p

edit :
under energy drop stress, power transfer seems to reverse ! my 100MW trafo produce energy on the input and drain on the output :( not having baterie indication makes it also hard to know wha't happening.

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