Should house have innate wiring that we could plug a generator into?

[TheZoneWizard]

Segmented building and each needing to be using a generator on it own? Reality bubble may bite you there as well.

[Adam_Dobry]

Maybe give each appliance a small backup power storage which last for just enough to get everything else in the bubble? Or make a backup powercell appliance which stores little power and provides it only to appliances on its tile?

[TheZoneWizard]

You gave me an idea for programming it a little easier. Everything runs off a car battery or something similar to a power source in a modular way. So that when the player character moves away. The objects are stamped with a time. The player character moves back to where the reality bubble is active with these objects and compares each object that enters the reality bubble with the the time stamp. The difference in time will be the gauge in how much energy units are consumed.

[TheKobold]

What if a terrain item was buildable that would permenately load a chunck of map at a minimum level. Some thing like minecraft having spawn point constantly active.

[mlangsdorf]

The vehicles as buildings solution is simpler from a programming perspective.

[munbeam]

I doubt I have the expertise to understand the difficulties. Not enough experience adding to established code to wrap my head around it.

The outlets of a building can be nodes in a tree. The tree represent an electrical system that can update outside of the bubble but only gets activated when part of the tree, an outlet, is in the bubble. Flipping the tree to active is as simple as using quick find to find the tree root of the outlet and turning it on. Even if smaller trees representing subsystems were used it should not take too long to find the root. As long as it does not go too deep. Assuming the wiring does not have separate circuits might make it even simpler. Separating a subtree to a new tree, due to outlet destruction, can be quick as well. It means creating two or three separate trees that now run on their own, and checking their nodes to see if at least one is in the bubble. Outlets do nothing beside representing a union so I assume it would simply slow the map loading in a bit.

The tree keeps track of the producers and consumers in the system. Those could also be a separate tree added to the outlets through quick union. They would probably need to be aware of which outlet they are on but adding to root is faster. If an outlet gets destroyed find its root, separate outlet trees, and make what was connected to the outlet it’s own tree again. Each producer adds to the tree’s total energy and each consumer reduces it. Since the tree handles the update of them, the difficulty of it might be in saving and loading data that comes from outside the bubble.

[kevin.granade]

the difficulty of it might be in saving and loading data that comes from outside the bubble.

You got it, stitching the parts together isn’t hard at all, the problem is managing interactions with components that are not loaded. This has already been solved for vehicles.

[TheKobold]

Is anyone working on converting building into vehicles?

[Hof1993]

All I want is the ability to jumper cable a battery to flood lights. And light a whole room.

[TheZoneWizard]

Would my idea for use of a time stamp help?
(posted a few comments up)

[TheZoneWizard]

That reminds me of irl off the grid living hobo style. No offense, but assuming your info is accurate. Isn’t that pretty much how most folks do it up in Barrow?

[Mantar]

You can more-or-less do that right now. On the one hand, a heavy-duty flashlight + car battery mod can be set down to light a room. On the other hand, you can build a one-tile “vehicle” with a car battery, a set of electronic controls, and either aisle lights (flashlight) or a floodlight to make a lamp. The aisle lights option will give you about ~8-9 hours of light before you have to replace the battery. Plus it’s fun to drag it to where you need it. I haven’t tried the floodlight, but I can imagine you’d get a couple of hours where it would light a massive area.

[Hof1993]

More or less we have a town generator and whatnot but lots tend to daisy chain lines together.

[TheZoneWizard]

Ya know I’ve been playing this a while now and I have never figured out how to start scratch a “vehicle”. Is that under the construction menu? 0_o

[dpwb]

Yes, and yes to avoid the 20 character minimum reply limit.

[TheZoneWizard]

Thanks. Funny. Years of this game and I never once used that menu lol xD

[VIVIT]

I think I’ve come up with an idea for how to make this work. Let me know if
there’s something I’m not realizing.

From reading this thread it seems like the biggest problem has to do with the
limitations of the reality bubble: to model current flowing through a circuit,
all segments of the wires in the circuit need to be accounted for, but it’s
not feasible to load into the bubble every tile containing a segment of wire.
But that’s assuming we have to check every single tile the wire just to see if
current can pass through it. We actually have two options: check every tile,
or have the information ready ahead of time. If all segments of a length of
wire are intact, the wire is intact. The full circuit map with every segment
of wire is just a subdivision of the topology graph of the circuit itself,
which only counts nodes on the network and intact connections between those
nodes. We can load the topology of the electrical installation into
the reality bubble all at once.

If a segment of wire gets severed, or if something causes a short circuit, or
if some other disturbance happens to the circuit while the relevant part of
the circuit is loaded into the bubble, we can just update the topology
graph accordingly. Heck, we could even black-box off the parts of the topology
graph that we know for certain won’t be changed because they’re all outside the
reality bubble. We can just operate on subdivisions of subgraphs of the
topology graph.

Basically what I’m wondering is, why not represent electrical circuits the way
electrical engineers do in their schematics?

[kevin.granade]

Because Should house have inate wiring that we could plug a generator into?

[VIVIT]

Wow, munbeam’s suggestion was almost exactly the same as mine, haha

[Kryxx]

There is also the thing that cars use DC voltage, and a house is AC.
But a car engine alternator isn’t the right type of power so that’s a flat out issue there.

A wiring panel would need to have a proper hook up to take the power and put it into the panel. This is not standard and would take a very experienced electrician to do it right to make sure you didn’t have issues. I can think of any number of them.

The typical kind you get at the store isn’t going to provide enough power, average house is 200+AMP service or so in the US. Depending on size. The Home Depot/etc generator usually has a few plugs you can then plug some items into.
Then who is going to install it? It’s a jury rig job. Service panels are not designed with this type of hook up. You might be able to do it, but it would require a huge generator. 20 amp service can handle a 1500W microwave. $200-300 generator gives about 3000W after startup which is 50% load they run at. There’s usually 4 plugs for the 20 amp. One big one for like a welder or dryer.

my father is a Master Electrician for 30ish years. I helped him for many summers, weekends, in my early teens into 20’s. I’ve pulled more wire and hooked up more devices (plugs/lights/switches, fans etc) than I ever care to again. You have to know what you are doing messing with an electrical panel or there’s going to be major issues. The wrong gauge wire causes problems, improperly connected plugs/switches. Wire being niched, or the hole in the stud the wire goes thru is too close to the sheetrock side and a screw hits it. (within 1 1/2" you need to protect with a metal plate, or a sheetrock screw could intercept the wire. If the load line isn’t tightened enough in the panel the panel can get hot and that’ll start to melt the wires… I’ve seen that melted mess… fun 3 days re-wiring a whole panel and running more home runs thru an existing house due to melted wires) It didn’t start a fire… just got hot enough to almost do it. That person was soooo lucky. Basically the electrician didn’t tighten a lot of it down enough. My father thought it was prob a new journeyman and the master electrician didn’t double check the work enough. House wasn’t more than six months old. We only ripped up a walls to get stuff pulled, luckily most of it was run thru the attic.

Electrical codes are a bitch, but there for a good reason. Bad wiring causes fires.