Mechanisms and Power Generators

Discussion in 'Blocks and Crafting' started by darkshot, Mar 5, 2012.

  1. darkshot

    darkshot Void-Bound Voyager

    This is a total stab in the dark because I have no idea how far they have decided to implement mechanisms such as Redstone or Wiring, but these are some of my ideas.

    This game could use some kind of wiring system that lets you wire devices such as:

    • Doors (the Star Trek kind that go whoosh, and maybe stay shut for hostiles)
    • Lights and other simple devices.
    • Auto-Defense Turrets (to fight off hordes of penguins)
    • Artillery Cannons
    • Teleporters
    Basically any kind of placeable device that is either automatic or player triggered. But this is only part of the idea. The fundamental difference between this system and something like Terraria's wiring, is electrical current.

    In order to have more useful and interesting mechanisms we need wires that carry current rather than trigger pulses. And electrical current needs a power source! Power sources could come straight from the environment, such as:
    • Coal/wood furnace
    • Water wheel (hydroelectric)
    • Steam powered (if steam exists in the game)
    • Wind turbines
    • Solar panels
    • Lava powered (think geothermal)
    • Hamster wheel (or penguin powered, make your captured monsters useful! :p )
    • Powered by alien dark matter poop.
    You get the point though, any of these types of generators could be wired to your outpost to provide power for whatever devices you need. More advanced devices might consume more power, and thus would need more efficient generators to run.
    This would not be much more advanced than Terraria's wiring system, but would add a new layer to home/outpost building for more advanced players who want more than just a roof over their heads. It also adds new dynamics to defending your home, because someone could potentially destroy or disable your power generators and cripple your defenses, making it important to strategically place and defend your generators.
     
    Really, Baggizine, Chaosthe and 8 others like this.
  2. HellKnightX

    HellKnightX Void-Bound Voyager

    To compound your idea, I love the idea of having generators to power all our electronics. More to the point, a generator should have a tiny but easily readable screen on the front that shows how much power is available and is currently being used. Every device you have hooked into the generator draws a certain amount of power from it, so a large high-powered base will need either an enormous generator, or a handful of smaller ones. I would suggest that power output from generators follows a more logarithmic curve so that players will desire larger generators over clusters of small ones, though. Of course, players would have to research larger generators and they would be incredibly expensive, so the whole wiring system wouldn't be open to players right off the bat.

    On another note, the fuel system would be another good idea, with each resource providing a different amount of power based on its rarity. You may have already seen this thread, but having to collect fissile material to power nuclear devices would be fun and interesting.
     
    Really and rafeu like this.
  3. darkshot

    darkshot Void-Bound Voyager

    Those are great ideas, I like the idea of using fuels as well as renewable resources like solar.

    I believe devs have already confirmed oil is a liquid in the game, which would be an obvious fuel source for generators. Nuclear power is also a great idea, and having to provide fissile materials works well I think. The only thing that worries me about fuel powered generators is how quickly the fuel runs out. I'm not sure it would be fun for the player to constantly be worried about their outpost running out of fuel and constantly hunting for fuel when they could be exploring the universe.

    For example if you find a planet that has oceans of oil all over the place, you would be pretty much set for power, but transporting the oil to your homeworld to power other things will be a massive hassle (presumably). This is why I'd lean more towards renewable power sources that are self sufficient and don't need constant maintenance (unless damaged).

    The advantage to having many different forms of energy collection is that no matter how many crazy different worlds you find, there could always be at least one kind of power source available, whether it is oil oceans, volcanic activity, or even just a hot sun for solar.
     
  4. HellKnightX

    HellKnightX Void-Bound Voyager

    Presumably, the rare materials would have a long lifetime, so you wouldn't need very much to power something for a long time. I would also suggest that the higher grade generators are more efficient with their fuel and consume it more slowly while providing more power than the lower-tier generators.
     
  5. T-Bone Biggins

    T-Bone Biggins Phantasmal Quasar

    This is one thing missing in Minecraft, power. Laying down wiring in 2d sucks, but give a generator a simple radius it can work in so we don't have to worry about micro-engineering an electrical grid. There should be multiple grades or tiers of power sources.

    Tier 1 - Solar power or raw fuels like wood or coal to power a steam turbine. Enough juice for survival shelters and minimal equipment.

    Tier 2 - Geothermal and refined fuels. Both require minor infrastructure, the geothermal needs to be found and built to and fuels need refining equipment.

    Tier 3 - Fission/Fusion. Both produce similar amounts of power output for high-end equipment. Fission is simpler, requiring only the reactor and the fissionable material to place in the reactor, but it's rare to find and expensive to trade for. Fusion on the other hand, require large amounts of infrastructure in place for the various fuel sources, example deuterium refining. The reactor is more complex and expensive, and it requires a fairly large amount of power for initial start-up. But once everything is in place, the Fusion plant uses cheap and common materials and makes a large amount of power out of it, being quite efficient.

    Tier 4 - Anti-Matter. Very dangerous stuff. Requires elaborate equipment to keep the anti-matter from touching matter. It needs to be sealed in a vacuum and kept in place via magnets all around it. A special anti-matter condenser makes it from what appears thin air, but requires much energy to run. It is made very slowly and at great cost, and is in fact more expensive to make per Gw/hour than tier-3 power sources so it's not as efficient. But anti-matter is the most compact form of energy available. A chunk that fits in your hand can power a massive base longer than your astronaut would be alive, and with ample amounts of power too. Useful for extremely high and short-term power requirements and powerful weaponry, also as fuel for robots and vehicles since it requires almost no storage space and lasts so long with high output. Cost per Gw/Hour and slow production speed are the limitations to anti-matter.
     
  6. darkshot

    darkshot Void-Bound Voyager

    In regards to actually laying wiring in 2D, yes it is a major pain, and hopefully we could get multiple colors of wires that don't intersect like some games do (*cough* terraria reference again).

    However, for power generators or other devices I was thinking the wiring could be automatic, through UI magic. Through some wiring menu, you could potentially click on the generator, and then click on what you want to wire it too, and it automatically lay down a path of wire between the two points. This would save lots of time and hassle. If wire is an item that you have to place block by block, then maybe it will take the appropriate amount out of your inventory when you use this shortcut. But I don't see why wire can't be free in this game, with only a limit on the distance between devices. (They could force you to buy repeaters to extend the distance but theres probably no need to get that detailed, honestly)
     
  7. T-Bone Biggins

    T-Bone Biggins Phantasmal Quasar

    Like the repeater idea. To make it simpler, a generator has a simple circle radius that it can give power across. No wiring in 2d, that gets messy with complicated bases. Just have a transparent circle showing the radius of the generator and explain the wiring is in the walls and floors where we can't see it, because 2d games just don't mix with wiring well. In fact Minecraft didn't either, a simple GPU showing a 124x124 pixel monochrome screen (made of stone and torches) was bigger than a football field.

    The repeater comes in as a way to extend the power. If the repeater has the radius of a generator in range it will transport power across the repeater's own power distance radius but at a 10% decrease in power output.
     
  8. darkshot

    darkshot Void-Bound Voyager

    Fair enough. But this would only work for power source wires... Signal wires are another story, I don't see how you could wire triggering devices to mechanisms without some kind of wire, whether it is hidden or not. It could be as simple as clicking the 2 objects and saying they are connected with an invisible line, but that removes a lot of the fun of wiring up multiple things to a single trigger and taking advantage of electrical logic. To be honest i kind of enjoyed Terraria's 2d wiring system, it was just missing critical things such as multiple layers of wires that don't cross each other, and single block logic gates. (true logic gates would require an on/off state on the wire, rather than one time pulses like the current system)

    I haven't used Minecraft's Redstone before, but its probably just as difficult to use, considering the Redstone blocks are in the physical world rather than in a background layer.
     
  9. T-Bone Biggins

    T-Bone Biggins Phantasmal Quasar

    Three words that you would enjoy: Gmod Wire Mod. I think this is the closest to what you are looking for, as the wires can be visible or invisible but they have no physical presence, ie no collision models. They can be seen for illustration and reference or hidden for the sake that a Gmod Spacebuild ship fully wired on all controls for fuel and doors is an ugly sight to behold.
     
  10. Xploding_Cherry

    Xploding_Cherry Subatomic Cosmonaut

    Great, just the thing I don't understand in any game...
    Even though, I do agree there should be something like this in the game. Teleporters, advanced doors, ect. will really fit in with the futuristic space theme. The power sources would be a great feature, one reason because of the oil as mentioned before.
     
  11. Woodledude

    Woodledude Subatomic Cosmonaut

    I'm not sure you can make a futuristic sciencey game that's a sandbox without SOME kind of logic to control doors and more. Here's my addition to this wishlist: Control panels. The wiring should be compact and workable enough to fit more than four wires into a single console-type control unit, so I can open and close all of the hundreds of doors in my enormous complex without having to walk halfway across the freaking thing to do it. Also, password protection, anyone? Most sensible way to differentiate enemy from ally in multiplayer, in my opinion.
     
  12. Greatgreen

    Greatgreen Tentacle Wrangler

    A suggestion I wanted to plop down somewhere: floodlights. This game already has a great tech demo demonstrating the directional light capabilities of the engine. It would be great to be able to illuminate massive chunks of open space around your base. The added design benefit of this is that if motion sensors are added, as triggers for other devices, they would not be able to work in low-light.

    A friend and I had an idea (it was actually for Minecraft, but it's similar) that we could make a container object in which to perform wiring logic and other compact operations. The container would be able to accept redstone input from any side, do the operations, and pump the output out the other. For the control panels, it would be great if they could be contextual based on what they are attached to. For example, a door would have several options such as: always locked, locked at night, always unlocked; except for: me, allies, passives (non-hostile), no exceptions.
     
    nomotog likes this.
  13. Alpha_Squad

    Alpha_Squad Cosmic Narwhal

    There already has been a thread about power generators: http://forums.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/electricity-generation.3695/
    However, on topic, to reduce wiring needs of objects that need electricity there is an ingeniously simple method used by creeper world. In essence, as long as generators/relays (more on this later) are within a distance between to things that require power they automatically connect. The purpose of relays is that they can connect to other relays at a much farther distance than any other equipment, allowing for long distance energy needs to be met.
     
  14. darkshot

    darkshot Void-Bound Voyager

    Lol relax, did you see the date on this thread? I started it like 3 weeks ago, that thread is only a few days old. I'm not trying to claim this idea as my own, I'm just saying this thread is not new and its just a place to get some ideas into the community.

    Anyways, the thread you linked mostly reiterates the same things mentioned in this thread, but he took the time to sprite them which is pretty cool, I think he did a good job. And just for the record, it doesn't matter to me if wires are placed manually or automatically wired to devices in range, that's a detail that doesn't really affect the issue at hand. Its simply a "quality of life" feature, rather than a gameplay mechanic.

    I like the idea of control panels opening a GUI that is different depending on the device its connected to, this will allow for less clutter but greater depth in functionality.
     
  15. Alexblex

    Alexblex Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    I must say this looks neat I would love to evil penguins to power my generators.
     
  16. Vapor Horologium Corpus

    Vapor Horologium Corpus Weight of the Sky

    would definitely like the idea of auto open doors or like escalators and elevators or even have moving floors for the lazy in you
     
  17. Kilo

    Kilo Pangalactic Porcupine

    I like this, just because now I can be my inner Gadgetry and Tech Engineer and design wtf complex base layouts and maintain and monitor them. FOR SCIENCE! 8 D
     
  18. Dorsidwarf

    Dorsidwarf Subatomic Cosmonaut

    I can probbably do basic spriting for some of these things. Do you want me to have a go?
     

Share This Page