Done Streaming

I really should have updated or posted with the stream link.  Hopefully those who came here were redirected from somewhere with the actual link.

Edit:  I did. I'm just so tired I forgot doing it.

Thank you all who came for watching!  Was a really productive stream and was great talking to you all!

A lot of people were interested if I was going to stream again.  I wasn't planning on it originally, but knowing that people are interested I might plan a few more.

Follow my stream at twitch.tv/Itszuvalex to know when I go live.

End of Exam Celebratory Stream

Hey everyone.

I finish my exams for the year tomorrow!

To celebrate, I'll be livestreaming me attempting to polish off the remaining systems code for Femtocraft.

The stream will start at around 7:00 PM EST Wednesday 17th, and continue until whenever I feel like stopping.  I anticipate at least a 5 hour stream.  Feel free to hop in whenever you want and say hi!  I will be talking about what I'm doing and answering questions.  If I get enough done I may show what's there for those who haven't seen yet.

Looking forward to seeing some of you!

Why it's taking so long.

Hey everyone, long time no message.

Several recent Reddit posts have brought significantly more interest to Femtocraft. 

Unfortunately, I haven't been working on this nearly as much as I want to.  School right now consumes so much of my time that I can maybe eke out a day every couple of weeks to make a few changes, but nothing major.

However, that isn't to say that I'm giving up.  I know that Femtocraft will have a long run ahead of it if I can push it out, and that's definitely something I'm committed towards doing. 


If you want to stop in and say hi, I sit in the irc channel #Femtocraft on esper.net.  Feel free to come in and talk.  If you want to contribute, Femtocraft is open source.  I'm always happy to see more people interested in modding!

Power System

 

Tiers of Power

 

Femtocraft is all about tiers and encapsulation.  Each tier, once researched, exposes another layer underneath it.  This theme propogates into the power system as well.  Each tier of decomposition has an accompanying tier of power - Micro, Nano, and Femto.

Each power storage is a wrapper around the previous tier.  The picture shown above is the Nano-Cube, which is the Nano-tier power storage device.  At the core of this multi-block is the Micro-Cube.  When the Femto-Cube is built, it is a wrapper around the Nano-Cube.  In this way, the latest tiers of Femtocraft still require infrastructure and items from the previous tiers.

Server-Friendly

 

The power system of Femtocraft is not coded using an energy net, nor does it require any pathfinding algorithm of any kind.  Each Femtocraft power block simply pushes power to neighboring blocks with less power.  In layman's terms, power flows from where it is generated to where it is needed.

In programming terms, each power block is a node in a greedy distribution system, where every tick a portion of the node's power is distributed among neighboring nodes with less power.

What this means is that there are no computational bottlenecks.  Power can't get lost in the system because there is no path-finding algorithm to confuse.  Power producers don't need to determine a path to every potential consumer, which could potentially require traversing hundreds of blocks.  Instead, they simply push their power out to the wire, which then pushes it out to the next wire, etc.  Each block only ever needs to perform a certain amount of computation every tick, and the amount of computation is capped to the number of neighbors it has.

This does mean that power does not propagate instantly when a new machine is connected to the system.  I feel that this fits the theme of Femtocraft better, and isn't much of a problem in usability.

Liquid Distribution

 

The liquid distribution system uses a near-identical algorithm.  This will be covered more in the following posts about utility transportation implementations.