I love redstone and when I got my first few pieces of dust ingame I was hooked. Very soon after I was trying to build things that clearly were too large and complex to be feasible. The modders got to work and now redstone is incredibly powerful. Logging on to see the new pistons was exactly the same experience. The idea of pistons are excellent, but they are clunky, hard to use effectively and any large scale projects are pretty useless the way they are set up. Major problems with Pistons that need to be addressed: Sticky Pistons will not "stick" to blocks unless they're powered. That means that trying to create a line of pistons that pull/push each other will never work as intended. Power has to be supplied to each individual piston block, which means that trying to create any array of more than two blocks adjacent becomes near impossible to fit wire into. Moving blocks will not move your character if you are standing on them. So, if you created a moving floor or something to that effect, your character would stay static on the moving blocks. The way I envision this mod would be possibly that the user places a piston and right clicks on it to access it's options. Options are then either edited through a pop up window (if possible), if not, through a chat interface. Options would include: Piston Launches Blocks - y/n Launch Power - 1-50 (block distance of launch) Block Sticks - y/n Sticky Depth - 1-50 (How many blocks away from the front will attach to the piston) Piston Transfers Power - Up/Down/N/E/S/W (This piston will transfer power between it and other adjacent pistons) Power On Delay - 1s-60s Power Off Delay - 1s-60s (This will allow a complex sequence of pistons to fire and retract at timed intervals) Piston Speed 1-50 Make These Options Default y/n Save/Export/Import Setup tl;dr - New pistons kinda suck, we need more options for them and I have no modding experience. Thanks!
How about this: chains of pistons (sticky or not) should behave like one long piston. Specifically, if a piston is pushing another piston that's facing in the same direction, they should extend and retract in unison. What do you mean? You can create solid piston walls already. You can't activate them individually, but that's a limitation of redstone and not of pistons. The configurable options you mentioned are complex and probably unnecessary. A delayed piston, for instance, is essentially a piston with a repeater delay chain. 'Launches blocks,' like the original piston mod did with sand and gravel, can be a server-wide or world-wide configuration. In addition, any UI changes require a client mod. Overall, I think the lack of long pistons (for greater displacement) is the biggest issue. Once Bukkit has a piston API, I'll try writing a plugin to implement some of these improvements.
i agree if you could transfer power between piston's then i could have a retractable castle coming from the ground
I dont know if you guys know this but jeb made an exception to repeaters to allow for walls or lines of pistons. the dust no longer has to point into the repeater meaning you can have a line of repeaters facing into a line of pistons with a 1 single line of dust behind the repeaters. and it will power all the pistons changing the delay on the repeaters allows for timing.
