[INACTIVE][MECH] DwarfForge v1.7 - Run Furnaces on Lava [1185]

Very good to hear. I had good results on my own server. I suspect I was creating objects regularly that were never being given the chance to be garbage collected. In hindsight, the way I did a couple of things was stupid, and hopefully I've eliminated that problem.

With the output chest... ask him if it is always the same chest that crashes his client, or does it seem random? If the former, he should break the chest block and re-place it. I know, earlier on in development, I ran into a number of bugs in my code that would cause such client crashes, even on an unmodded client. All known bugs related to that are fixed, so I wonder if he still has the remnants of an old bug (in which case replacing the chest should fix it), or if there is another bug to be found.

Thanks for the support! Will get it up as soon as I can.

Things do seem to be running much better now, my CPU spikes have gone and the system doesn't seem to get confused and lock up forcing a disconnect and reconnect to enable and disable the forge's! Memory usage has also stabilised for us.

Good news! Thanks for the report.

Okay! I just uploaded version 1.5 of DwarfForge that has the cpu/memory fixes and should work almost the same as in the past. It's possible that there are still bugs/annoyances... particularly when requiring fuel, which I have not tested as much. But give it a go, and report bugs! And quintuple-thanks to everyone who has already helped out by using and reporting in!

Couple more notes... Bukkit's new dev site seems to be where things will be moving for plugins. I've created the DwarfForge plugin page, and going forward, you should expect to see most updates/files there. (Once I've figured out how to manage it!) I'll continue to watch this thread as well, at least for now.

Finally, one new feature of the plugin is "immediate shutdown." What is this? It can happen in several ways:

1. You toggle the forge off manually... even though there is still fuel time remaining.
2. The forge cannot find any more smeltable items.
3. The forge runs out of fuel when fuel is required.
4. Others? My mind is squishy right now and I may be forgetting some situations.
5. Oh yeah... the item to be smelted cooks down to something different than what exists in the output slot (and the forge was unable to move existing output product elsewhere).

Anyway, in these cases, the forge shutdowns down automatically and immediately. Why did I do this? Primarily, it gives you a much better indication that the forge has nothing to do or has been stopped. Especially when manually stopping a forge when fuel was remaining... punching it gave no visual indication that anything had happened.

One disadvantage of this is that, if fuel time was remaining, you'll lose that time to the immediate shutdown. However, the good news is that I have a plan to deal with that, such that a future update will ensure no fuel is lost (nor excess gained through exploits).

Enjoy!

That's awesome news man!

I like that you've made it auto shutdown, that makes a lot more sense and like you say, it'll help make it more obvious when they have run out of things to do and need attention.

Can you make "auto shutdown" an option instead? I am running BuildCraft and have an automatic mining/smelting factory where the ore is extracted and automatically turned into ingots. I would like this process to be fully automatic instead of having to monitor for something to be present in the furnace before toggling it on. Either that or an "auto turn ON" feature when something is detected would be great. Thanks for your work.

Out of curiosity (and a desire to avoid needless cpu activity), how do you automatically refill the input chest?

I don't use an input chest directly. In BuildCraft, you connect a "wooden pipe" from the source block (a chest or a quarry, or may be something else) to a destination block (a furnace in this case). When you power that pipe with an engine, the material just runs continuously from source to destination for as long as the engine runs. In my case, the material is being fed from a quary, which removes all blocks from the ground; the blocks go through filters and certain types of blocks (gold ore, iron ore, sand etc...) get selected to go into these furnaces. The furnaces turn the ores into ingots and glass blocks. I then use another engine at each furnace to automatically draw the ingots out from the furnaces into their target chests further down the production line.

If you're interested, there's a video here that briefly shows this setup:



At the 2:25 mark, you'll see the quarry, and at about 3:30, you'll see a little more details on filtering and smelting.

When a standard furnace is used, as long as the furnace has fuel, it will turn itself on when a material to be cooked is present. Therefore, I just have to supply it with a large amount of fuel (through a chest), and the setup is "almost" automatic. One of the reasons why I'm going with DwrafForge is its speed. The conventional furnace takes too long to smelt and it sometimes cannot keep up with the flow of input material. I also noticed that with the latest version 1.5, I did not get the 1 second smelt time as specified in the config file. It's more like 3 seconds. Is 1 second a valid value to use in the config file, or is there an absolute minimum to be used?

Thanks

Okay... I see what you're doing. Are you running those on infinite lava or on fuel (and if fuel, placed in by hand or by those pipes)?

I guess this mostly answers it... so you just place a lava bucket or a big stack of coal in and let it go, yes?

Maybe if fuel is being required/used, I shouldn't do immediate shutdown (unless manually done). My goal here is to find something logical, if possible, without requiring options, though if an option proves the most appropriate, I will do that.

I take it you were getting 1 second pre-1.5? I'll take a look into this... something may have happened in the rewrite that is causing cook times to be extended unintentionally.

When using your plugin, I'm running on infinite lava.

Yes. Before your plugin, I've done both lava buckets and large stack of coal, fed from another chest into the furnace.

Thanks.

Yes. Before v1.5, I was getting very close to 1 second smelt time, but 1.5 seems to slow it down a little. Not too big a deal because as you see in the video, I have a feedback path where any overflow items from the furnace will become drops and get sucked into a set of pipes and re-route back into the furnace again (a buffer of sort)

Okay, thanks for all the comments, wiiNinjaOne... I have a full working day tomorrow, so I don't expect to be able to do anything until Monday, but I will try to get to doing something as soon as I can.

Thanks for the update.

My comments are merely suggestions. Please don't feel obligated to complete it in any kind of time frame. I know this is just a hobby for most everyone; so take care of business first. I'm thankful enough that there are people like yourself who make Minecraft more enjoyable for us "users".

I recently started a new multiplayer server where I used a "Vanilla Minecraft world" that we had already started on and ported it to buckkit. I am having trouble getting your plugin to work with the newest bukkit server software. At server startup Java reported n0 errors.
My plugins installed and working now:
DeathNotifier
Duels
Hookshot
LivingBuilding
MonsterTamer(not sure havent tested)
MultiArrow
PermissionsBukkit
ScubaKit
teslacoil

Here is the config that is generated on a new start up:


DwarfForge:
stack-limit:
vertical: 3
horizontal: 4
cooking-time:
default: 9.25
fuel:
allow-crafted-items: false
require: false
Permissions:
if-available:
enable: false
if-disabled:
ops-only: false
Any suggestions would be helpful as I am at a loss since im somewhat new with bukkit. If server info or anything else is needed I would gladdy do so.
Perhaps im not activating the forge right: I use a bucket of lava and place in a block, then i placed the furnace on top of the lava and tried activating it by punching and nothing happened.

@conkerisking : Can you paste here the section of your server log the lines prefixed with [DwarfForge] ?

21:57:17 [INFO] [DwarfForge] Restored 0 active Forges.
21:57:17 [INFO] [DwarfForge] Permissions plugin disabled; ops only? false
21:57:17 [INFO] [DwarfForge] Version 1.4.2 enabled.

Is this what you wanted? I guess it says 0 active forges. Do i need to use a command to activate the forge or something?

No, the plugin has no commands. The active forges are those that were running when the server shutdown/restarted. It's a file in the plugin's directory and when the plugin starts up, it restarts those that were active (i.e. running) before.

You are on recommended build 1060? I haven't tested that one yet... It *should* work, but maybe there is some issue. I'll try to update soon and see if I run into any problems.

Another thing to try, if you can, would be to use ONLY the DwarfForge plugin. I can understand this being difficult if you have a regular presence of players, but whatever other data you can gather can help me try to identify the problem.

Yea im on 1060 and just tried the plugin by itself unfortunately no luck there either. =/ I really like the idea of this plugin hopefully we can get this resolved!

We're running it ok on 1060.

Do you have a chest on the left and right with something to smelt in the left chest? I've noticed that since the update (I assume part of the 'auto off' feature) that they wont turn on unless they have something to smelt.

Duh. I'm stupid. What khamseen just said. ^^^

Put something in your input chest. Or, if you're not using an input chest, put something to cook/smelt in the input slot in the furnace. Then try punching it.

.....

I should get some time later this afternoon to reevaluate the 'auto off' feature... too smart for its own good?

Haha, yes perhaps it's a little too intelligent, perhaps it should turn on but then if it hasn't had anything to smelt for maybe thirty seconds or something, it turns off again?

Dx how could I forget that lol.. It works now Thanks guys! Great Plugin! Keep up the great work!

It's an easy mistake to make. Glad it's working for you now.

Okay, here's the plan. Currently, the forge will auto-shutdown in the following situations:

1. The forge is manually toggled off.
2. It is no longer a valid forge (e.g. lava was removed beneath it).
3. Smelting cannot continue because the output slot is blocked.
4. Smelting cannot continue because no smeltable item is available. (Or nothing compatible with a blocked output slot.)
5. Smelting cannot continue because required fuel is not available. (Looking at the code, this is probably a bit buggy... I think I missed some cases.)

Anyway, my thoughts on these.

For #1 (manual operation), the primary issue is that when fuel is required and the user punches it off, the previous version looked like nothing happened. Instead, it will shut down immediately rather than allowing the current fuel cycle to finish. (There is a possibility in a future update to preserve the fractional fuel loss from early shutdown.)

For #2 (no longer a Forge, whatever the cause)... if it had been relying on lava, it will shutdown immediately. If it was using fuel, it will operate in typical furnace (i.e. non-Forge) fashion.

For #3 and #4, if it has been using lava, it will continue to burn without end, restoring previous functionality. If it was using fuel, I may do something like #1... still debating this one. It may depend on what I have to do to recognize a status change after the last fuel item starts burning.

For #5, similar to #3 and #4... the only difference is that "fuel is not available" is never an issue when using lava.

Okay... Try this: version 1.5.1

Sounds good man, shall give it a whirl when I get back home.

Just wanted to say that this is a fantastic plugin, both my players and myself are pumped to use it.

An amusing story for you: I went to show it off to one of them last night, only when I punched the forge, it wouldn't turn on. I kept punching it over and over again while saying to him "Damn, looks like the plugin doesn't work. I'll have to report the error."

...Then he put some items to smelt in it, punched it, and it magically started smelting. I had read this whole thread too so I had known about this. So there was an error all right, it was just between my chair and my keyboard. /facepalm

Thanks! Glad to see so many people enjoying it. Of course, I can't take all credit: my inspiration was Dwarf Fortress.

Oh, the old PEBKAC error. Well, to be fair, after review, I think the original behavior was better (for the most part). The other option would be to send a message to the player indicating exactly why it was not starting up, but in the end I think 1.5.1 behavior will be best (sans any bugs found).

Thank you. It works perfectly for me with this version. The smelt time is blazing fast as well.

Oh yeah, that was a bug I introduced in 1.5. Found and fixed it while fixing the auto-off issues.