Electricity Planned?

[Miloch]

Are there any plans for being able to actually have buildings wired up and electrical devices, such as refrigerators, working off the buildings electrical wiring?

[Zireael]

The assumption is that the power plants in the region stopped working the day the Cataclysm hit, so no electricity.

[Miloch]

That doesn’t mean no electricity. We’re already dealing with electricity. I’m just referring to setting up some form of power generations and connecting it to a houses’ wiring.
If you are thinking I mean the power grid in general then you are very much so mistaken.

[Telkoth]

You cant get refrigeration in your house. But with some fancy planning, and using construction together with vehicle construction, you can have a working stove and running water (kitchen unit), and a fully lit house (lots of headlights). Turn the lights on, and with enough batteries and solar panels hooked up you’ll probably never run out of power. If you build near water, put the wall on the shoreline, the stove unit next to the wall, and you can boil water straight away without having to carry it to the stove.
Alternatively install water tanks, use a steel jerrycan and water purifier to cleanse it. Dump it in to the vehicle, and theres your running water from the kitchen unit.

[Miloch]

These things I know, I was curious if Kevin and them were planning on having electricity in houses.

[John_Candlebury]

I think they have already said that you will be able to re power structures in the future

[i2amroy]

Yeah, there are plans to eventually have both power generators and NPC towns with working power. It’s a fair bit of work, however, so for the moment it’s on hold until someone wants to work on it and we have the infrastructure pieces in place that it depends on.

[Miloch]

Thanks for the reply Roy, that answered my question.

[system]

I will just use this thread to ask:
I already came across many suggetions of recharable batteries. Will they come soon?
Would be cool do have a UPS with colar cells and a storage battery so that it gets charged when in sunlight. This would finally make all those laser pistols, coil guns and charge rifles a decent alternative.

[Miloch]

A solar UPS. Not a horrible idea.

[youtoo]

electricity would be a fun mod. these are the kinds of things I think can get put into the game when the mod manager is done.

[i2amroy]

[quote=“Rookie, post:9, topic:3363”]I will just use this thread to ask:
I already came across many suggetions of recharable batteries. Will they come soon?
Would be cool do have a UPS with colar cells and a storage battery so that it gets charged when in sunlight. This would finally make all those laser pistols, coil guns and charge rifles a decent alternative.[/quote]
Before we get rechargeable batteries we’ll probably have normal batteries better modeled (so you can’t just create batteries out of thin air with a solar panel).

[Chiko]

Yeah, there are plans to eventually have both power generators and NPC towns with working power. It’s a fair bit of work, however, so for the moment it’s on hold until someone wants to work on it and we have the infrastructure pieces in place that it depends on.

That sounds awesome. We can still get electricity from vehicles but having something more “official” is definitely something good.

[Miloch]

I kinda saw the current batteries as regular chemical batteries. Once they are done the chemicals are expended and they are spend. Hence why you could create new ones.

[vultures]

I’d propose a very rudimentary solution for this; treat rooftiles as solar and wind collectors with hefty material and skill prerequisites, and wall-closed buildings as interconnectable sockets. Per every “power supply building” finished, a maptile-bound inventory item called “socket connector” is generated. The residence can make use of the following, related to PWR capacity of the supply:
[1] Lights (per-room) and a hotplate item,
[2] Refridgerator, Oven, Battery Charger, small appliances and [1],
[3] Advanced Tools, Elec. Fences, future improvements to suffice the [1] and [2].

I tend to think of it as of a bionics-inherited system, likewise. Maybe with masked quality range? How about coils that chain-malfunction after heavy winds and acid storms along with wind-blades and solar panels?

[Miloch]

I was thinking of a system where you have wires that a connect constructable ‘*’ and then you can also use this on existing walls to add wires interior to the wall. Most houses should always have this in all their walls (we’ll just say all as opposed to trying to figure out which do and don’t and why). Adding a power source to a building would form a power pool in this system. Any house without a powersource should remain inert and not requiring processor power. Trying to figure out loss of electricity over distance would over complicate things, so let’s not. Additional power sources would just be add-ons to the existing power system and add to the power pool. Power systems will be larger then vehicles’, but should by and large be simpler (code wise). The individual devices may be complex but the system should simply be a request and release for power. Though I do think we shouldn’t just be using the current engines as generators (you need to at least add the electricity generating part to it. :P) as the alternators used in cars are weak sauce for the power hungry appliances used in a building. Maybe take an existing engine and build the generator/add one? Did you know that some Humvees and many military vehicles have more powerful then standard alternators on them? My original job in the military had an entire shelter running on the back of a humvee and if the generator crapped out on us we’d run it off the humvee itself. Dunno if that’s all humvees or those specific humvees. When we start getting into this it may be worth looking into.
From my very basic understanding of electricity generation the combustion engine part uses it’s torque to spin a magnet around wrapped copper wire, pushing the electrons down the wire and causing current. From the lil I know this is repeated with most other forms of energy generations to include wind, hydro, and solar mirror. Current solar power technology is of course somewhat different is totally outside of my experience.

[youtoo]

i nominate miloch to make a mod.

[Miloch]

Nominate me to learn to code first.

[kevin.granade]

Fun fact, a generater should be relatively simple to make if you have a design handy, it’s not even all that hard, just very time consuming.
You’re going to have very poor efficiency, but I don’t think economising on fuel is going to be that big a deal, basically you just need a big axle, a big casing, some really huge magnets, and a crapton of wire. Portable generators should be totally fine, as would “permanent” larger generators.

I agree that existing building walls should just be assumed to have power plugs everywhere, also we’d differentiate a “shelter wall” that’s just a wall from a “house wall” or similar, that would include electrical hardware in the component cost, so you could build your own house out in the woods or something, and a recipe to retrofit cabling into an existing wall.
Appliances would check for an adjacent wall, then search around on the map for a connected generator or batteries, and pull power from that. I’m not too concerned about the precise mechanics, it’s not too hard.

The main thing holding it up is infrastrure-ish stuff, we need our framework that tracks activities that happen when the player isn’t around.

[Zireael]

Nominate me to learn to code first.

I know the feeling