Do y'all think there would be any point in asking for a shorter delay block?

[Xavori]

I spent yesterday making counters and clocks and stopclocks just playing around with the logic system to see what it's limits are. And the biggest limit is that the shortest possible pulse is a full half second. In logic terms, that's forever.

That means the fastest counter I can reliably build can only take inputs once per full second. Doing any kind of computation where you are limited to one cycle per full second is horrible.

At the same time, there is no doubt at all that the game engine benefits greatly from having a full half second to update all the logic blocks. I've built Minecraft devices that could bring a server to its knees, but such devices simply cannot exist in StarMade.

Of course, the single worst server killer I ever built in Minecraft was my automatic chicken cannon. Nothing like covering an enemy city in tens of thousands of chickens to drive them crazy. And nothing like tens of thousands of chickens to bring a server to a crawl. It actually led to a chicken armistice agreement and one of the players building a chicken statue to commemorate the end of the Great Chicken War.

 

[Criss]

I wouldn't say it's out of the question. Minecraft deals with redstone to carry the signal and in turn the circuits in MC are larger than the same ones in SM.

 

[aceface]

hope there is added a shorter delay block.

 

[Xavori]

I wouldn't say it's out of the question. Minecraft deals with redstone to carry the signal and in turn the circuits in MC are larger than the same ones in SM.

There are pros and cons to both systems.

Like you said, in Minecraft you have to run redstone so it's usually necessary to make things bigger to account for the wiring. But Minecraft also processes redstone sequentially so its a lot easier to build circuits where you need things to happen in a specific order.

StarMade has a lot of pre-assembled gates (AND, OR, NOT) which is a huge plus, and with the connection system, you can arrange circuits pretty much however you want (gravity and area activation being the obvious exceptions). However, it processes blocks in batches which makes things like counters a serious pain in the butt.

Instead of just using a signal from your memory cell (say a piston-pushed block in Minecraft) and an input signal both into an AND to count, you have to add in enough delay that your input doesn't trigger multiple memory cell updates. Since the fastest pulse is a half second, that means a full second delay on allowing the next potential input signal.

It basically is making the gravity racetrack I'm building require a lot more logic blocks than my rail racetracks in Minecraft needed.