Power 2.0: Factories charge progress indicator, and self-powering

[nightwalker_007]

EDIT: Looks like the factories powered off the power 2.0 system are bugged in 200.123 a this time...
EDIT 2: Well geez... turns out asteroids generate a small amount of power like ships cores do... no need for a power beam anymore! Awesome!

This is specific to the new power system, which is playable now in the 0.200 dev build.

For those that aren't playing with the new dev build: Factories, like weapon blocks, need to charge to a point before they can produce anything. This means that yes, you can have 100 factories,and one power block, but it will take a long time to build anything (actually, one factory, and one power block takes a VERY long time to build anything, but that's another story and a balancing issue Schine need to fix).

Weapons show a charge indication in the action bar, there is no such indication on factories beside the hit text that flashes above them each tick. Factory blocks need a way for the player to see their charge status, either in the factory inventory GUI, or on the factory block it's self as a form of animation. As an added bonus, we can get rid of the floating "insufficient power (xxx/xxx)" floaty-text when using the new power system.

Also, it would be good if at least the basic factory generates a small charge, maybe 1 power unit every tick. at one tick per 5 seconds, and 250 power charge units for production, it would take about 21 minutes to make a single power generating block in the new power system if you have no other means of generating power--I think that's fair enough for balancing purposes and would make survival no-gear start scenarios a real possibility. This also would be very easy to add to the game with the new power system since that tick event is already happening--all it would need to do is add a "thisblock.storedpower++" line to the basic factory tick loop .

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Cool, thanks for posting nightwalker_007 . This is really useful for people who haven't had a chance to play with the new power yet.

Originally, we would use the portable charging/healing beam you can carry to spark up factories. Surely this would be the same to charge a factory in the new power scenario.

 

[nightwalker_007]

Originally, we would use the portable charging/healing beam you can carry to spark up factories. Surely this would be the same to charge a factory in the new power scenario.

Actually, it would take a lot longer without a power beam. The power beam can fully charge a factory block in seconds. Having the ability for the basic factory to trickle-charge eliminates the need for a power beam, unless you had a crew powering your derelict ship (I has a start scenario idea i was going to use a python script to help with, basically it would require you to use the power beam on your ship because your ship's reactor would blow up within seconds of you spawning with your new ship--of course, the new capacitor-less power system makes such a start not feasible--I don't want to put a bunch of code into something that will be depreciated and dropped next year).

Ultimately what I want to see is a gravity-well or asteroid field start start: crashed burnt-out ship on the surface, no starting gear (maybe a laser, heal beam, and helmet).

 

[Ryuusei]

Ultimately what I want to see is a gravity-well or asteroid field start start: crashed burnt-out ship on the surface, no starting gear (maybe a laser, heal beam, and helmet).

That almost sounds like how No Man's Sky starts out.

 

[nightwalker_007]

You know.. if the basic factory had that 1 power unit/tick trickle charge (and 21 minutes to make a block without external power), we could completely do-away with the power beam. Nobody really uses it except for early game anyway. It would free up an item ID for something else far more useful.

...in fact, the power beam in the power 2.0 system is very over-powered. The charge rate is much higher than a 16-block power array on an asteroid (without stabilizers--those can't be placed yet due to a bug). 1 unit of power means a lot more in the new system than the old one.

 

[nightwalker_007]

looks like factories powered off the new power system are bugged in the dev build... so pretty much you can ignore this thread... but I think my idea for removing the need for the power supply beam would be awesome.

 

[Snowtiger256]

I tested the factories this morning, and they do work, albeit slowly (took me about an hour to produce TEN blocks of Grey Hull, because the basic factory had to charge up to 500 power in between production cycles, and it was trickle-charging from the new power systems). This is probably due to the fact that the coding for factories still uses the old power system coding, so the factories are not receiving enough power to function as efficiently as they did in the old system.

I'm expecting that this, and a plethora of other power issues will be remedied, once the devs have had time to update the coding to work with the new system.

 

[nightwalker_007]

The bug is the factories are pulling from the wrong power source. They're pulling from the 500-unit power storage capacity of an asteroid, and not the power generating capacity of the new reactor units. I posted a bug T2644 about that this morning. It looks like asteroids generate their own power, like ships cores do, just very slowly... looks like that solves my long-standing power-supply-beam gripe :P

So basically, your factories were being powered off of the asteroids innate power generating capacity. Cool eh? Not so cool that it's not working with the new power system though.

 

[Snowtiger256]

I don't think that was the case in my test build. I built my factories on a station, powered by the new reactor setup. Even with 42k regen worth of reactors I could only get the factory to run on a trickle charge, and taking a lot of time to produce blocks.

In the old system a regen of 42k would have run a decent starter factory setup as a whole, not just one factory block. That point is moot though, because the new power setup relies on a different scale of power entirely. Just goes to how much of a gap there is between the old system and the new.