Proper Electricity!

[Graphical]

Would someone PLEASE, for the love of God, make a mod that fixes all the electricity-oriented gameplay?

Batteries disappearing after depletion is ridiculous.

Have AAs, AAAs, maybe even some lithium-ions (which seem most applicable!)

I’m one of those crazy mofos who likes the idea of being off the grid, so I’d like to make such a generator circuit in the game, NOT IN A CAR.

[ul][li]Have constructable solar panels, solar panel stands and windmills.[/li]
[li]Make battery stands stand-alone, so they dont need a car frame.[/li]
[li]Put in Multimeters for measuring battery charge[/li]
[li]Solar panels need charge controllers to automatically disconnect when the battery is full, as not to overcharge.[/li]
[li]Put in Inverters so we can use household appliances like the stove or a lamp (which I have not seen yet, please make also)[/li]
[li]Have lithium-ion, AA battery chargers![/li]
[li]If not anything else, just make the batteries stop disappearing.[/li][/ul]

PLEASE, seriously consider this!

[trelatyraelis]

It’d be a great addition.
We have generators lying around from the whales era that don’t do anything at all, plus someone in the game added power substations that are just there for show (transformers and other furniture you can’t use) and bionics as of now.

I don’t know how hard it’d be to actually work out though. You’d have to employ several full time good coders to do the job. Right now the only person with the means and the time is Coolthulu (praise Coolthulu) and he’s wroking on Z-levels.

[Coolthulhu]

[quote=“Graphical, post:1, topic:9935”]Batteries disappearing after depletion is ridiculous.

Have AAs, AAAs, maybe even some lithium-ions (which seem most applicable!)[/quote]

It would be done long ago because “liquid batteries” are a bit of a problem, but it isn’t exactly a small task. Currently batteries loaded into things aren’t even items, but “charges”.
This would probably be done some day, because it is requested often and would make many features way easier to implement, but no one promised to work on it in any nearby future.

Battery charges would be very easy to implement once batteries as proper items were implemented.

[quote=“Graphical, post:1, topic:9935”][ul][li]Have constructable solar panels, solar panel stands and windmills.[/li]
[li]Make battery stands stand-alone, so they dont need a car frame.[/li][/ul][/quote]

There could be a fake car frame part that forbids moving when constructed and allows attaching things to it without welding, but solar panels and batteries not using the vehicle system at all is unlikely to happen. It would require rewriting everything.

Inverters could work if someone implemented electrical cables for items. I tried doing that once, but failed because of the whole battery charge thing - the same problem that is making “item batteries” hard to implement.

As for all the other realism things: I don’t really see a reason to have this much electrical engineering in game.
Having to use a multimeter to check charge sounds very tedious. Unless it just “unlocked” the view of charges of all items carried in the inventory. Which would simply mean that everyone would haul that multimeter around, just to see charges of everything. Not much of a gameplay impact.
Charge controllers would probably spawn attached to solar cars anyway, meaning it would be just another part to install.

[trelatyraelis]

It would be done long ago because "liquid batteries" are a bit of a problem, but it isn't exactly a small task. Currently batteries loaded into things aren't even items, but "charges".

Liquid batteries are a relic of the old code and it'll take time before we can recycle them for something new. They're not that bad as of now if you stretch your imagination a little, even though the fact you can use potato batteries with tools is just crazy sometimes, but we'd end up complicating our life for very little. I agree that we should keep the vehicle system as the main way to go, mostly because that's what the code allows us to do. Maybe add a new item called makeshift battery (made by the survivor that will work only with certain items) and keep regular batteries found when disassembling/ unloading powered items? Could it technically work? Only thing people would complain about is that it would surely nerf the hell out of batteries, that's for sure.

The way I see it there are two ways are several ways around Electricity in DDA:

1. We remove generators altogether ( as it stands it’s just useless furniture lying there just because) remove working computer consoles, utility lights in refugeee camps , anything that needs electricity to run and we haven’t explained how and why it’s running on air. Of course that would be awful unless you can actually power them up by attaching a car battery to them, or something and even then it’d be tedious at best. I don’t like this idea but it technically makes sense.
2. We remove generators altogether (seriously, they don’t serve any purpose as of now) and we create an endgame NPC quest to power up your map. I can’t even imagine how we could do that, maybe have some high mechanics/electronics prerequisites and go around repairing large power substations and power substations. When you have repaired something like 3 large substations, all stoves act as a permanent fire source (without the light or warmth), fridges act as minifridges. Even if we actually work out a way to do this thing, which seems really complicated, and restrict these fake fire fields to the reality bubble, it’d probably slow the game.
3. We use generators as some kind of alchemical tool to turn gasoline into batteries. Fill a generator with gasoline or diesel and have it turn every gasoline unit into batteries, probably with a 1/2 ratio. Plutonium generators do the same but of course with plutonium cells and yielding way more batteries. This is technically more about generators than actual electricity though.
4. We feed generators gasoline or diesel and make them able to give some kind of “electricity” by powering up a map square, (it’s something like 24x 22, right?) like I suggested in point 2. It’s hackish, it’s not even that good mechanically, but it could work.It’d also give us a different lighting system than what we have now (floodlights or headlights attached to a solar panel or a makeshift generator) if we could add utility lights to our home. Plus it’d explain why refugee centers have working lights and why labs/evac centers still have working terminals, I’d probably either give labs a ton of gasoline to burn or just switching the regular generators you find there with a single plutonium one that lasts a long, long time.

That’s just a few ideas. Of course I know very little of how the code works with these things so please tell me if all these things I just said are impossible to implement.

On a side note, when are we going to be able to actually use muscle-powered generators that stay in their place while generating power pedaling? Last time I checked there was no way to create a standing bicycle generator, you’d have to move around to generate power. That’s really awkward when you’re underground.

[jaked122]

How do you want the electricity to be carried? I mean, wooden wall’s aren’t known for their ability to conduct electricity[sup]citation needed[/sup], so we’re going to have to figure out a way to include wiring information into the map, which might prove a problem, or not, I haven’t looked into it enough to know for sure.

In any case, I want it to work with pre-existing refrigerators.

Regardless, I’ll take a look at it and see if I can do anything about it or not.

[karlnp]

Kevin disparages the idea in the sticky.

[jaked122]

Kevin disparages the idea in the sticky.

I think that he’s talking about restarting a power station. Which does seem a bit of a stretch for a single person to do.

What I believe is being talked about here is wiring up say, a single house to solar panels/batteries/generators and getting some of these appliances working again.

However it doesn’t appear to be something that I could produce without writing additional code into the game, which makes this a rather invasive mod. I’ll try to see if it would be okay with other developers first.

Besides, how else am I supposed to introduce the fun of hooking up electrical transformers built on nails to a strong power supply to the players?

[karlnp]

It’d be an interesting challenge to research the EE skills necessary to do EE without proper tools & materials. Want a good soldering iron? Tough, you have this crappy knockoff that doesn’t even heat up properly. Especially since you can fake printing PCBs with Sharpies and an acetone bath.

But beyond my skills, sadly.

[kevin.granade]

The medium-term plan is to have pieces of furniture that you can wire up with jumper cables (or possibly more civilized equivalents) to distribute power, all hooked up eventually to either a generator (another furniture piece) or a vehicle with one built in.
Possibly NPC enclaves could have power wired up as well, though I haven’t thought through hw that would work in detail.

[vipches]

Good idea, mabye sometime later we can even use those thing rechange the CBM power.

[jaked122]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:9, topic:9935”]The medium-term plan is to have pieces of furniture that you can wire up with jumper cables (or possibly more civilized equivalents) to distribute power, all hooked up eventually to either a generator (another furniture piece) or a vehicle with one built in.
Possibly NPC enclaves could have power wired up as well, though I haven’t thought through hw that would work in detail.[/quote]

How about instead of jumper cables, if the power generation is built next to a wall in a pre-cataclysm structure, it can provide power along its periphery? I mean, the wiring is still there, unless that sneaky, sneaky blob stole the copper to make our lives slightly less convenient.

Of course, this is exactly what that sneaky sneaky blob would do, so I can see that being the case.

[quote=“karlnp, post:8, topic:9935”]It’d be an interesting challenge to research the EE skills necessary to do EE without proper tools & materials. Want a good soldering iron? Tough, you have this crappy knockoff that doesn’t even heat up properly. Especially since you can fake printing PCBs with Sharpies and an acetone bath.

But beyond my skills, sadly.[/quote]

Just so long as I don’t need to take the fields and waves class to implement it in a game.

[Coolthulhu]

How about instead of jumper cables, if the power generation is built next to a wall in a pre-cataclysm structure, it can provide power along its periphery?

With jumper cables it’s much easier, because all the information is in place already: the cable stores information about both endpoints.

To include structures, a new layer of information would have to be added to find all the connected entities. Then there would be problems with part of map getting unloaded, which could break the connection. Or even map loading order affecting what is connected and what isn’t depending on from which direction does player approach.

[voskhod]

I wanna say one thing, just one thing.

Electric fences.

Kevin plz

[kevin.granade]

How about instead of jumper cables, if the power generation is built next to a wall in a pre-cataclysm structure, it can provide power along its periphery? I mean, the wiring is still there, unless that sneaky, sneaky blob stole the copper to make our lives slightly less convenient.

Coolthulu covered the technical problem, but the realism problem with this is that ALL the other copper wiring is still there too, so you’d have current going all over the place and most likely shorting out somewhere, then you wonder why your generator isn’t enough to power a single lightbulb…

[jaked122]

[quote=“jaked122, post:11, topic:9935”]How about instead of jumper cables, if the power generation is built next to a wall in a pre-cataclysm structure, it can provide power along its periphery? I mean, the wiring is still there, unless that sneaky, sneaky blob stole the copper to make our lives slightly less convenient.

Coolthulu covered the technical problem, but the realism problem with this is that ALL the other copper wiring is still there too, so you’d have current going all over the place and most likely shorting out somewhere, then you wonder why your generator isn’t enough to power a single lightbulb…[/quote]
Eh. I imagine that it wouldn’t be too hard to justify, I mean, the grid had cut out, hadn’t it? I mean, in the design document thread everyone is talking about how all the technology has been screwed up over the course of five days, but I was assuming that you might (in the course of hooking up the house to the generator) removed the connections to the grid, which would be simple in real life.

Either way, I was simply imagining running a depth first search across a wall and seeing if it connects to current sources or consumers. Of course, this is not a very efficient setup, so it should probably happen with jumper cables then.

In any case, I think it might be possible without adding additional metadata, but this will result in reduced performance because it will have to be periodically rechecked to ensure that a hulk hasn’t decided that the wall was an affront to its existence.