Why can batteries NOT be daisy chained?

[Razorfish]

it just does not make sense........

You have a gen.. that charges a bank of batteries.

Then you connect another battery bank to it.
and they BOTH charge from the gen or the second (the charge shows on the gen))

now if you connect a gun (15w), to the last battery bank & it shows the gun load at the gen
You off hte gen and it correctly transfers to the first battery banks.

now if this battery bank discharges. the gun load DOES NOT transfer to the battery it is actually connected to.

but if you disconnect the first battery from the first, it now correctly works!!!


now if you remove the gun and add a 3rd battery bank, you can charge all 3 battery banks..
connect a gun & it stops working as soon as the first battery bank is empty, even though the two others are completely full!!!

this is not how electricity works.., charging some items but not others..

[Crater Creator]

There are deliberate limitations to keep the calculations simple. Most notably, you can’t have multiple inputs. However, I can’t think of a reason for what you describe, if I’m understanding your setup correctly. You may be experiencing a bug.

[Aestrea]

The battery only works when there is no previous input to it that produces power, including other batteries. You can technically hook everything up to one generator or solar bank but you need to limit them by using timed relays to shut down some power distribution if your base uses over 300 power during the day.

[Remnar]

How are calculations not simple when it's just addition? Battery 1 charge + Batter 2 charge... etc.. Each battery could determine if a cable is connected and if that cable is connected to another battery allowing you read that batteries contents and so on and so forth. I maybe not be a software engineer or a dev; but damit if I can use my common sense to solve an issue so can you. Or are you going to tell me it's not possible because your code is nothing but a jumbled up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess of hacks and other peoples code?

[DerFinneAT]

Originally posted by Remnar:

I maybe not be a software engineer or a dev;

Yes, that shows.

And the best way to handle lack of information is beeing aggressive and accuse others of beeing of limited mental capacity.

Originally posted by Remnar:

How are calculations not simple when it's just addition? Battery 1 charge + Batter 2 charge... etc.. Each battery could determine if a cable is connected and if that cable is connected to another battery allowing you read that batteries contents and so on and so forth. I maybe not be a software engineer or a dev; but damit if I can use my common sense to solve an issue so can you. Or are you going to tell me it's not possible because your code is nothing but a jumbled up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess of hacks and other peoples code?

Great. That describes the most simple case of a tree, where both or multiple batteries are directly at the root.

Now alkow multiple inputs per node in general, and it doesn't take much to come up with a tree, where the various batteries end up in various places in potential different subnets (switches and sensors anyone?) in the tree.
Now not only will your "algorithm" fail miserably, but if you follow your "common sense" approach, the only thing you achieclve is introducing cpu-load, and therefore lag, but not a really working calculation.

It is not like it is an unsolvable problem.
It is just one the doesn't really scale well, and doesn't test well.
And making it work, and work well and efficient is a far cry effort from what you describe in your rant-post.

[Crater Creator]

Originally posted by Remnar:

How are calculations not simple when it's just addition? Battery 1 charge + Batter 2 charge... etc.. Each battery could determine if a cable is connected and if that cable is connected to another battery allowing you read that batteries contents and so on and so forth. I maybe not be a software engineer or a dev; but damit if I can use my common sense to solve an issue so can you. Or are you going to tell me it's not possible because your code is nothing but a jumbled up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess of hacks and other peoples code?

The OP's example does sound simple. As I said, I can't think of a reason for why it wouldn't work, and it may in fact be a bug. If it bothers you, I'd encourage you to follow the steps for filing a bug report.

I was pointing out that there are multiple reasons it wouldn't make sense. One is because there's a bug. The other is because the electronics in this game are a simulation. Like all simulations (like structural integrity or water physics for instance), it is deliberately designed to be simpler than real life. The developers choose what is important enough to simulate, and to what degree of fidelity.

If switches and wires were executed totally faithfully, aka if they 'just made sense,' then the game would allow effectively limitless complexity a la Minecraft's redstone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHCSSscy4BI
Going down this rabbit hole is too nerdy for a lot of people, but in a nutshell you can use this to build everything up to a fully functional computer within the game. Except with increased complexity comes decreased performance. So either the devs spend time optimizing the heck out of electronics, or they make the call that this won't be a game that focuses on building computers. In which case they build in artificial limits that may seem arbitrary to the layperson, but removes the possibility of the game having to perform in crazy scenarios.

That's why we can't have multiple inputs, and it's possible that's why a load apparently only draws power from some power sources in a daisy chain. Or there could be a bug. I don't know.

[Remnar]

The point of my post is, if you don't want to add a feature into a game, just say that you don't want to. That is more acceptable an answer than a lame excuse, which a lot of devs use. I think the lamest one I heard, for reason why something was crap or can't be fixed or implemented, was "we don't have the funding".

[Remnar]

I also been thinking of a daisy chain solution that is a more simple than trying to get it to work battery to battery. If you have a container to put the batteries in, that container could contain the code to daisy chain the output. For example, You put in 10 batteries into the container, add the wires however you want. The container uses arrays, math, and logic to figure out if the batteries are hooked up (properly) then does the math (which can get complicated if you do it smart using a recursive algorithm to determine adjacency and if they batteries are hooked up), and spits out the result in a variable and probably a out port on the container.

[MoistGamer]

Electricity intricacies in this game are rudiemntary at best, and that's probably all they need to be. Wires will be hidden in the next update, which is a nice QOL feature.

I'd take fancier electrical wiring and routing options as well but its not on any pain-point list for me personally, and I feel like they probably arent going to change it much beyond what's already in there.

I'd love more than four freaking lighting options though. Five/6 if you count the dastardly spotlight that doesnt look great indoors, and the lantern which is great for outdoors/garage but not aesthetically pleasing as part of the indoor wired house.

[Reeva!]

Originally posted by MoistGamer:

Electricity intricacies in this game are rudiemntary at best, and that's probably all they need to be. Wires will be hidden in the next update, which is a nice QOL feature.

I'd take fancier electrical wiring and routing options as well but its not on any pain-point list for me personally, and I feel like they probably arent going to change it much beyond what's already in there.

I'd love more than four freaking lighting options though. Five/6 if you count the dastardly spotlight that doesnt look great indoors, and the lantern which is great for outdoors/garage but not aesthetically pleasing as part of the indoor wired house.

Valheim actually did a decent job at giving decorum a purpose. The more decor you had near your bed, the more Comfort you would have, Comfort sets how long the Rested bonus will last. The point of the Rested bonus is that your health regen and exp gain was increased by 50%, while your stamina regen was doubled. The more comfort you had, the longer you'd benefit from those buffs.

In a singleplayer game that hardly has any use for decor, it was a nice touch to incentivize creativity whilst also making it useful. You always want your rested bonus in Valheim, it makes the game much easier than it would otherwise be.

[Tahnval]

Here's an idea that I think would make electricity better for players who do building (which is a non-trivial proportion of 7DTD players) without adding much complexity to the way the game does electricity, i.e. without requiring the devs to assign a lot of person-time to give players more options with electricity and to optimising how the game handles electricity.

A control box that has a single power output and several power inputs. All electrical devices could continue to use the very limited and extremely simplified way the game currently handles electricity. The only change would be the addition of a single item that takes multiple power inputs and has a single power output. I think that's the simplest (conceptually) way to fix the shortcoming that seems to be most annoying to players - the inability to use more than one power source.

That would make it possible for players to do two of the things with electricity that keep coming up as something more than a few players want to be able to do. Firstly, have backup power generation, e.g. solar during the day and batteries at night (and maybe an ICE generator that kicks in if the batteries are discharged). Secondly, have a simple grid rather than having to have seperate generation and connection for different parts of the system because the power draw exceeds the 180W maximum of a solar power bank (and even that's assuming the players has 6 level 6 solar cells).

[Razorfish]

it's not rocket science to program basic laws of physics....
I'm not asking for the batteries to exactly follow the physics for parallel or series wiring...
but if i string 3 battery banks together in parallel and they damned well charge fully from a single generator, then i expect them to have the same characteristics on a discharge cycle.

1. as long as there is an input to the battery bank ,that does not exceed the output it should charge.
2. when there is no input & an output it should discharge.
3. it should power any downstream load that is within spec. whilst it has a charge.

but you cannot have the physics having non parallel mirror laws, that is to say it behaved differently on charging, than on discharging.

what is the point of having 3 battery banks in parallel, then the one farthest away from the load empties FIRST (correct)...
BUT once the farthest one way is empty.. the other two are totally useless , even if they are fully charged!!!!!!

you can see each pack here, the SMG is with zero charge in the battery 1

after adding in a very small charge in battery 1, it works again.

even with battery 2 fully capable of powering hte whole system..

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