Electricity Needs Overhaul

[vonVile]

The way Fun Pimps designed electricity is trash. Its overly complex where you have to connect lines a very specific way or it just doesn't work. That's just dumb. It shouldn't matter how you connect the lines in what order. Just simplify it where the game recognizes the source (Battery Bank) and follows the line flow to what ever the end points are. Its that easy.

[Phasmata]

I mean, that's like, your opinion, man. Personally, all I can say about 7dtd electricity is:
It's not BAD.
I'm pretty sure I've seen or experienced better.
I wish I could power something from two different sources and/or switch something on/off/open/closed from more than one switch.
If all other things are equal, I'll choose complex/realistic over simplistic/limited.

[Capt. W. Schwartz]

I mean, it is an Alpha Game. Every new version showcases a newly improved/overhauled system.

The current system (pun not intended) is just a placeholder.

[Vang]

It beats ARK Survival Evoled's electrical system all to Hell, I can tell you that. It's been awhile but other than the lack of electrical objects, it also beats Fallout 4's system too.

That said, I agree that wiring should not have a polarity, and I also think it should be possible to wire battery banks up in series, or even parallel, so that multiple banks can provide battery backup. Failing that, maybe bigger battery banks?

[Trooper Bri]

Series or parallel assumes voltage, which doesn't occur in 7D2D.

[Vang]

Okay, I obviously shouldn't have used jargon. What I meant to say is have it so that you can plug a series of battery banks into a power network and without an active generator or solar bank, they all discharge their power into the network in a nice, orderly fashion until all the batteries in the battery banks are depleted of charge. Savy?

[Trooper Bri]

I get it, but since you can power a battery bank with a solar array, and control usage with timers, why would you deplete your batteries?
You have to run around trying to maintain a large network of batteries versus smaller solar/battery powered circuits that require zero maintenance. Or just use generators that only need to be refueled.

And technically you can power items with multiple switches. Just gotta play around your options. Electricity isn't perfect in 7D2D, but works for what I need it to do.

[Phasmata]

Originally posted by Trooper Bri:

And technically you can power items with multiple switches. Just gotta play around your options. Electricity isn't perfect in 7D2D, but works for what I need it to do.

Money where your mouth is time. Powered 3x2 door. Want to have a switch inside and a switch outside. Want both switches to have the power to open/close the door on their own. How do you do it? The game only allows one wire to be connected to the door. Actually, as far as I know, the game only allows one wire to be going TO an object regardless of what it is.

The only way I've found to be able to open our gate from either side is to put a hole in the wall next to it where a single switch is mounted that can be reached from either side of the wall. I read that the game passes signals from switches through other switches if wired in series, but that is exactly NOT what happened. When I wired two switches in series, both would have to be on for the doors to open. If either one was off, the door remained closed.

[CoinSpin]

Originally posted by Vang:

That said, I agree that wiring should not have a polarity, and I also think it should be possible to wire battery banks up in series, or even parallel, so that multiple banks can provide battery backup. Failing that, maybe bigger battery banks?

I wire up battery banks in series all the time, (solar panel -> battery bank -> battery bank -> relay). When the sun comes out, the solar is humming batteries charge, everything runs normally. When the sun goes down, life goes on under battery power. I always over-engineer my power grid, so I never really deplete the last battery bank in line. I'm assuming that if it ever died, the next bank upstream would start draining, but now I'm wondering if they would actually work as intended! heh.

I would agree, though, that the electrical setup needs a little finesse - some thoughts I've had over the years:

1) Allow multiple inputs to a grid (solars, generators, etc.)
Could be done with "aggregator" relay to combine power sources.

2) Allow generator to be timed - set "activate" and "deactivate" time of day
Intent is solar during day, at sundown generator kicks on, off at sunrise, no batteries needed

3) New basic relays with logic, 2 varieties: AND, OR
AND - pull power through if all inputs are active
OR - pull power through from any input active (could be aggregator from #1 above)

[Druuna]

It's now possible to use two switches at one door, but there is a detail which must be taken into consideration: You have to use trigger plates as relays. What does that mean?

The first time i did it wrong too when I connected the output of a camera to a relay and then to a another camera and then to a door. It didn't worked. But it worked without the relay. That was annoying because I didn't wanted the line directly connected.

Solution: replace the relay with a 1x1 trigger plate (or more of them if the line should go around some corners) which will never trigger but leads the right signal through it.

[Vang]

Originally posted by CoinSpin:

I wire up battery banks in series all the time, (solar panel -> battery bank -> battery bank -> relay). When the sun comes out, the solar is humming batteries charge, everything runs normally. When the sun goes down, life goes on under battery power. I always over-engineer my power grid, so I never really deplete the last battery bank in line. I'm assuming that if it ever died, the next bank upstream would start draining, but now I'm wondering if they would actually work as intended! heh.

<snip>

I can say from experience that they do not. Ended up forgetting to refill my generator in a game and the first Battery Bank in the line depleted and then the whole network shut down, leaving two other banks with fully charged batteries sitting there doing nothing.

[Kauldric]

Wow dude, it’s not ‘trash’. I’m sure adding combiners has complexities which is why they didn’t add them or at least not yet.

For example if you add multiple inputs then you can have short circuits. I bet that makes electricity system way more complex/work so it got cut

[Jolly]

I do wish we could cook with ovens and brew teas/coffee in coffee pot, maybe add rot to foods and could use a fridge

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by Jolly:

I do wish we could cook with ovens and brew teas/coffee in coffee pot, maybe add rot to foods and could use a fridge

Adding food decaying mechanics to food would necessitate food being unstackable; The game has no way of assigning different values to items in a stack. Not to mention that I don't think it's currently possible to make anything 'decay' like that inside an inventory; the players or otherwise. The functionality just isn't there for an item to change without being 'Used' by a player.

The oven and coffee pot are totally possible though.

[Jolly]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Originally posted by Jolly:

I do wish we could cook with ovens and brew teas/coffee in coffee pot, maybe add rot to foods and could use a fridge

Adding food decaying mechanics to food would necessitate food being unstackable; The game has no way of assigning different values to items in a stack. Not to mention that I don't think it's currently possible to make anything 'decay' like that inside an inventory; the players or otherwise. The functionality just isn't there for an item to change without being 'Used' by a player.

The oven and coffee pot are totally possible though.

Easily made tho, any stack would have a value of a decay rate, such as, loses 1 "freshness" every X seconds, anything that goes into a stack, of lets say raw meat, with the lowest "freshness" changes the stack with the most freshness to the least, as if contaminated. To prevent players from "removing" stacks just before harvesting more (exploitingly avoiding fresh meat going into old stacks), every time it leaves from 1 inventory to another (or ground) its "freshness" goes down by a lot unless that "stack" is put into an Ice Chest block (built by player) with Snow in it or a Powered Fridge. Snow would get used up for each stack of perishable foods and the decay rate of "X seconds" goes way up as long as perishable-stacks-decay-rate can "remove" a snow from the same inventory (you see where I'm going with that).

That decay rate should take a lot of hours (like 8 or more irl hours without Ice/Fridge) for the meat to be spoiled imo. When you cook it, it's decay rate changes to freshly cooked, etc

[De Espirit]

Most of the electrical devices rely on sensors to work, and for that alone it's necessary to wire everything in a specific order. You don't put the carriage before the horse, and you don't put the automated death turret before the sensor that tells it if, when, and what to shoot. There is a necessary order of operations at work.

The alternate then is to have the mesh network of cables connecting all the devices like you said, with the downside that these things won't know how to set themselves up to make your master home defense system. You would have to manually configure each and every single device to know which devices to work with, in what order to do things, and which ones to ignore. Not only would that be a chore but it would add a lot of unnecessary calculations in the game that gets worse with each device you add to it.

The current tree network of [Power] > [Triggers] > [Devices] solves both issues. I wouldn't expect mesh networks until the game is in the Beta phase, and even then it's a "maybe" at best.

As for the issue of using multiple power supplies on one network, or controlling something with multiple sensors, well that can be solved with logic gates, which may very well come in a future update and I look forward to it as well.