[MOD 0.17.x] Modular Armor Revamp

[Ranakastrasz]

Just figured out how to add power to a Generator-Equipment via script. Should be able to get conduits working again.

[Ranakastrasz]

Conduits should be working now. I will submit this properly tomorrow, I don't have time now.

[Ranakastrasz]

V16.1.1

Added Conduits back in.

Not 100% sure they will work, working with new API elements, so should work.

Initial testing suggests it should.

Interestingly, the flashing fuel icon for the conduits goes away if fully powered, flickers rapidly if partly powered, and flashes normally if no power.

Conduits still do not work for vehicles/other.

[KNOWFEAR1337]

if you were wanting to get the coils working in other things than the armour, maybe you could have a look in the code for "Induction Charging" by Raeon. i've been using that alongside this mod, and it works to charge my suit and car/tank/train grids.

if there is one suggestion i could make though it would be for the battery that is 1x2 in size, if we could please have a horizontal version as well ? This might not e needed if your re-implemented coils end up being more powerful than the induction charging coils, but as they rely on stacking bonuses when next to each-other its good to keep then in a square and i tend to end up still using tier-1 battery's for a long time in my tier-1 modular armour for way longer because of how things fit together

[Ranakastrasz]

The horizontal size is part of the reason I made solar panels like that.

The other part is that nothing really fit as that shape.
I dont really want two versions of the t2 battery, so ye.


That mod will help a lot i suspect.

[Alagorn81]

Hi, ran into an odd error today, and thought I'd mention it here. When I try to craft the Light Armor, I get the following:

Error while running event Modular Armor:on_tick(ID 0)
__Modular Armor__/control.lua:342:attempt to index local 'grid' (a nil value)

If I try to craft the Heavy Armor, it allows me to craft the Light Armor, and then errors on the Heavy Armor craft.
I tried toggling off all other mods, and it still pops up every time I try to craft the Light Armor. I haven't had this one pop up before, so I'm not sure exactly what might be causing it. Thanks for any insight, and if you need anything else, let me know.

Edit: Also, I rolled back to version 16.1.0 and it works fine, so I think it must have something to do with the new code added in 16.1.1.

[Ranakastrasz]

Urgh. I know exactly why that happened last time. The API changed however and i have to figure out the new right way to do it. Joy.

Thanks for the report.

[Ranakastrasz]

V16.1.2

Fixed the crash when equipping non-modular armor.

Still need to investigate the Induction Charging mod to see exactly how it tracks modular-capable entities.

[Lylithrea]

Hello there,

I encoutered a little problem with my friend.
Everytime we try to put upgrades into our modular armor (doesn't matter which one) it closes automaticly.
But its still open, we just dont see it. So we need to press E 2 times before it opens (1 for closing modular armor, 1 for opening inventory).
Im not sure if its the problem of this mod, or just something in the settings in factorio, but it would be awesome if someone can help us ^^.

Thanks in advance! ^^

[thereaverofdarkness]

I'm liking this! I haven't got very far with it yet. I'm unable to get the conduit to work. Do I need to have a battery in the suit for the conduit to work? The solar panels charge my shields just fine but the conduit does not.

P.S.: You have two crash reports in the mod portal. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Modular-Armor/discussion

[Ranakastrasz]

Conduits, not sure. Should be working without batteries now. Are they flashing no fuel? Pretty sure they flash outside network, flicker if insufficient power, and go away if fully powered.
Need more details. They do not work in vehicles, just characters atm.

The crashes are probably because I failed a validation check. both are no character errors... Should be fixable, since I've seen it before.

Edit:
Odd, The validation to check if character exists is still there. API must have changed again. Probably.

Edit:

Ah, Game has updated 11 patches since I last tested. I guess I should read those patch logs.

[usafphoenix]

showing processing time usage at 0.510+ which is like 20x what most mods use.

[Ranakastrasz]

showing processing time usage at 0.510+ which is like 20x what most mods use.

Am aware of that, hate it, but not something I can easily change without reducing the tick resolution and/or using a rolling update. Which is probably reasonable, but I've never done the second before.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Conduits, not sure. Should be working without batteries now. Are they flashing no fuel? Pretty sure they flash outside network, flicker if insufficient power, and go away if fully powered.
Need more details. They do not work in vehicles, just characters atm.

I still don't have batteries to test with batteries, but the conduit is still not working without batteries. It doesn't work in vehicle or in armor. It's flashing no fuel whether or not I'm in my power supply area. It does not provide power to anything whether or not I have an alternate power source also in the armor. When I am in the power supply area and have the mouse cursor over the electric pole to show its supply area, it shows a blue cross at my feet. I also noticed sometimes when I have removed the conduit, the blue cross still shows at my feet while inside supply area.

[Ranakastrasz]

I still don't have batteries to test with batteries, but the conduit is still not working without batteries. It doesn't work in vehicle or in armor. It's flashing no fuel whether or not I'm in my power supply area. It does not provide power to anything whether or not I have an alternate power source also in the armor. When I am in the power supply area and have the mouse cursor over the electric pole to show its supply area, it shows a blue cross at my feet. I also noticed sometimes when I have removed the conduit, the blue cross still shows at my feet while inside supply area.

Ok, that is not expected behavior The "cross" is the same as the 4 corner brackets of any item that registers in a power area, just with area zero. Means that a powered item is there.
The blue cross should always show if you have powered armor equipped. I don't bother to remove/add the dummy (and probably should)

Sanity check: Are you sure the network has power to provide? I doubt this is the problem, but best to check.

Batteries no longer should matter. Its a generator now, hence the fuel flashing icon. Provides to everything.

Do you have other mods enabled? Might have an odd interference.

...
Was the mod added to a existing game? Or updated from a way older version of the mod, say, one without conduits? Might have failed Migration AGAIN......

[thereaverofdarkness]

Sanity check: Are you sure the network has power to provide? I doubt this is the problem, but best to check.

Batteries no longer should matter. Its a generator now, hence the fuel flashing icon. Provides to everything.

Do you have other mods enabled? Might have an odd interference.

...
Was the mod added to a existing game? Or updated from a way older version of the mod, say, one without conduits? Might have failed Migration AGAIN......

The network has plenty of power.

I have other mods enabled, but I don't think they change how the electric networks function. The closest I can think is Realistic Power by Kenira. Here's my mod list:

stuff

most recent mod install - 5/4/2018
ReStack 0.3.12
steinios unlasting oil 0.16.2
KS Power 0.2.4
FlammableOils 0.2.0
VisionRadar 0.0.6
Advanced Radar 0.16.2
Modular Armor 16.1.2
concrete and stone 016_0.2.5
VehicleGridReduced 0.2.1
FiniteWater 0.0.3

4/30/2018
LJD Vehicles A16 0.16.2

2/11/2018
RealisticPower 1.0.4

2/9/2018
LightCone 0.0.1
air filtering 0.6.0
No Respawn Gun 1.16.0
alien biomes hr terrain 0.3.1
alien biomes 0.3.8
LR Turret 0.16.0
Geothermal 1.0.72
vtk-cannon-turret 1.3.1
HardcoreStart 1.16.0
TrainRebalance 1.0.0
InserterFuelLeech 0.2.1

12/19/2017
Warehousing 0.1.0
TreeSaplings 0.2.2
VehicleSnap 1.16.0
DayNightExtender 1.1.13

I did add to an existing game. It's not a very old game, it was created in 0.16.x. But I did have 2 vehicles with equipment grids placed in the game when I installed the mod, however I did not have modular armor researched yet. I am currently using modular armor and have not researched any ranks of power armor. I also finally got my water train running and made batteries. It makes no difference with batteries, it still doesn't work.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I experience a game crash on death, which it says is related to the power armor or modules. I'm using the first tier shields, solar panels, batteries, and actuators. It's not a big problem since I died at that point, but I figured I'd mention it.

Also, could you post the energy transfer rate of the batteries? I can't find that info anywhere on the UI or mod page.

[Ranakastrasz]

Batteries have always been "if not instantanious, extraordinarily rapid"... Or in plain english, able to charge/discharge in 0.1 seconds. I just kept the ratio.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I discovered that the conduit works only when Realistic Power mod is off. I don't understand why this would be the case, however. Realistic Power does not (afaik) alter the way power works, only the amount of power you get from sources, or the amount you can store in accumulators.

viewtopic.php?f=190&t=39165&p=363058#p363058

edit: Kenira got it fixed

[thereaverofdarkness]

Comments on balance:

Now that I've had a chance to try all of the generators (tier 1 and 2 anyway), I feel I have enough experience to comment on the balance of the generators.

Firstly, I feel that the solar panels are too powerful compared to the others. With the fairly large storage that batteries have, unless the player had a mod that made nights very long, the brief time that the solar panels don't work would not strongly affect their overall efficacy. I am currently playing with 60x day length, so the dark period is almost three hours, with the full dark of night lasting nearly an hour. With no other generators installed, I can run my batteries out at night but they last for a pretty substantial fraction of it as long as I'm not in combat getting my shields charged. Actuators don't drain the batteries that much if I have a good actuator to battery ratio and am not running back and forth all the time.

The burner generator is very lackluster considering how late it is unlocked, and how expensive it is to make. It generates the same power per space as the solar panels. If I were doing a lot of combat at night I might want it, but in practice I'll do my hunting in the day and stay in base where my lights are at night, meaning I'll be using conduits instead. Even if I did want to do combat at night, I'd want to rely on something more powerful than this generator. If it were the only source of power I had, I'd probably sit in base charging my batteries, then swap the generators for shields before going into combat. That would work better than relying on that pitiful output to charge my shields. I also felt the efficiency is in practice too low. I agree it should be lower than the burner generator structure (25%), but while using Realistic Power (which has reduced fuel values), I had 3 stacks of solid fuel go out in just a few minutes, and it didn't even charge my batteries halfway. So I might increase the efficiency as well.

The conduit is a little weak, but really only in comparison to the solar panels. I think it is in a good spot and the solar panels actually need to be nerfed. Once I finally got the conduit working, I quickly found it was nice to slip into any leftover gaps in my equipment, and even just 2-3 of them could charge my batteries faster than they got depleted while running around working on my base. They're pretty good for a starter generator.

The tier 2 solar panel isn't enough of an upgrade to justify its larger size. That monster is difficult to fit into earlier ranks of armor, so I often find myself fully capable of producing them yet I simply prefer the tier 1 variant. I like that it's a small bonus because that's more realistic for solar panels, but maybe it could be increased a bit, or the size made easier to use. Perhaps a 2x4 would be nice, instead of 3x5. Or maybe make the 1x3 the tier 2 and make tier 1 a 1x1. I feel like solar panels would be a great thing to stick into extra gaps you have, and it's frustrating having gaps that I have nothing good to put into.

The tier 2 conduit looks strong yet very large. I haven't unlocked it yet but I'm skeptical I'd actually want to use it. It has an excellent power rating per square, but I don't need that much power in my base and it's not going to work very well in combat, not only because it's a conduit but also because of how much space it takes up. But I might be able to make it work for turret creeping as an early version of the fission generator. Or maybe I'd plug it in to charge the batteries really fast and then remove it. I wouldn't say it's a bad module, just perhaps a bit redundant and likely to not get used much. I wouldn't mind using the tier 1 conduit up into the end game.

The fission generator is brilliant! I haven't unlocked it yet but I think it'll definitely see use in my upper ranks of power armor. I can't yet comment on its power or fuel efficiency, so maybe I'll make another comment after I have started playing with it. I suspect I might disagree with the efficiency--low is definitely good, but 5% might be too low.

- - - - - - - - - -

Here I will suggest new values for the generators:

Burner Generator tier 1 - unlocked earlier, with the other modules
2x2, 100kW, 15% efficiency

Burner Generator tier 2 - unlock and price up where yours is currently
2x3, 240kW, 15% efficiency - need more tall shapes, too many wide shapes


Semi-Conducting Conduit tier 2 - possible side-grade to the super-conducting conduit
1x2, 120kW

Super-Conducting Conduit - change to maintain 25% rate in combat, gives it a combat purpose to justify its large size
At 25% rate in combat, it's still worse per square than the tier 1 burner generator while you're in combat, but it has the advantage that it doesn't burn fuel at low efficiency, and can be useful in a situation where you are frequently going between power grid and combat, such as when trying to build defenses at the fringe of a biter base, or if you are getting a lot of attacks and don't have all your turrets set up yet.


Idea 1 for solar panels - original size
Solar Panel tier 1
3x1, 45kW (15kW/sq)

Solar Panel tier 2
5x3, 330kW (22kW/sq)

Idea 2 for solar panels - smaller panels
Solar Panel tier 1
1x1, 12kW

Solar Panel tier 2
2x2, 64kW (16kW/sq)

Solar Panel tier 3?
4x2, 160kW (20kW/sq)

- - - - - - - - - -

As for the other modules, I haven't used a lot of them, but the shields, exoskeletons, and night vision visor all seem well balanced. The tier 1 shields at first look too weak to be worth using until you realize that what they provide is regeneration rate. Tier 2 shields are great for getting more shield hit points, but due to their lower efficiency there is some purpose for using tier 1 shields. I'm generally happy to use tier 2, however. The tiny actuators are great for slipping into early modular armor, but I managed to squeeze two exoskeletons into my power armor mk 1 and still have room for shields, batteries, conduits, night vision, and the large solar panel. It doesn't have much shield strength but it's not really for combat.

I do feel that the grid size increases too much over the course of time. The 5x5 modular armor is so small it really makes you have to choose what's important to you. The upgrade to 7x7 gives me a lot more freedom. I know it won't be much with bigger high-tier modules, but it's pretty comfortable already at the low end. Modular armor mk 2's 10x10 grid seems larger than anything should have. Here's the grid sizes I would suggest: 5x5, 7x7, 8x8, 9x9, 10x10. This actually shrinks Mk II grid size, which is good because it was really too large. 8x8 easily fits a fission generator or two plus enough shields and personal defense modules to become a walking tank. Can't fit your exoskeletons and roboports in there at the same time? That's the point of making choices.


I'd like to end on two module suggestions, though I don't know if either one is possible to make.

Tier 2 Night Vision Visor
The idea would be to make the tier 1 version only partially light the night, while tier 2 is higher tech, larger, and costs more power but gives full-luminosity night vision. Perhaps it is also less de-saturated, so you can see colors more easily with night vision. Some players might want the more expensive module, others might feel satisfied with the tier 1. My main purpose for suggesting this is that the night vision visor seems too easy for how strong it is.

All-Terrain Actuator
Like the exoskeleton, however instead of increasing your speed by a percentage of its net value, this module would increase it by a percentage of its base value. The result is that it's less effective on fast terrain and more effective on slow terrain. Players who spend a lot of time in their paved base or who build roads between bases would prefer the exoskeleton. Players like myself who are playing on rail world and finding themselves constantly bogged down by sand or snow would prefer the ATA.