Overhauls the power network to use the game's built-in fluid system in an attempt to make electricity more realistic. Adds working transformers for high power transmission, and creates various new and interesting power distribution challenges. Similar to the mods Flow Network and High Voltage, but significantly different by being the first mod that uses no on-tick power calculations. This means the UPS impact should be minimal for non-gigantic bases.
Mods introducing new content into the game.
Hello!
Unfortunately it doesn't look good at all and completely breaks the mechanics Fluidic Power is built on, and with the current information I will not attempt to update it to Factorio 2.0. This is kind of ironic because another 2.0 feature probably would've made FP usable in much bigger bases!
There is two things about Fluidic Power that I designed it around:
- Different voltages (still possible in 2.0)
- Flow of electricity is sumulated between poles (not possible, or at least not easily).
Let's ignore different voltages and transformers for a moment. Basically, if Fluidic Power is simply ported to 2.0, then it will function almost exactly the same as vanilla electricity. Vanilla electricity simulates your whole network as a single node that all machines can push/pull from. Then FP changed it using fluid mechanics which simulates the flow between a network of nodes. And now in 2.0, that's also optimized away to just be pushing/pulling from a single node.
Of course, it's still possible if you try hard enough. The bad option is to control it all through scripting like the old Flow Network mod, which is very UPS intensive. A possible better way is still to abuse fluids, but to achieve it now it's waaaaay more complicated. Now you need to replace every copper connection with pumps in both directions to still get some sense of flow-between-poles, wheras previously I didn't need anything special. Previously I did this, but now you'd need something like this (still needs generators instead of actual poles) :
This raises the complexity from the modding side significantly.
- You can't have multiple pipe-things on one tile, meaning this will all have to be placed on a separate hidden surface.
- Every time you place a pole you'd have to do all the complicated tricks I already do, and then place two pumps on the hidden surface for every copper wire. And update it every time a connection is changed, blueprint placed, something dies, etc. This is a lot of work with a lot of edge cases to handle.
- The pumps will always be pumping, meaning the flow of fluids will probably be even less intuitive. Does it even work in big scale? And how UPS intensive would it be?
You could also just do a simple port with the known limitations, just to use the different voltages and transformers, which would still work. For me, that's still a lot of work and hacking for such a small addition in gameplay. Personally, if I wanted different voltages in 2.0 I would rather use Power Overload, which is much more performant and easy-to-use.
I honestly don't see myself delving into this. I don't have as much time as I used to, and don't have the motivation to do the dozens of hours of grueling work just to get a functioning prototype. Not even to say polishing it for gameplay, and maintaining it. If another modder wants to take over I would help where I can, and might even give them writing access to this mod-page so that it can continue with this this name.
As for now, I really liked the mod that I built. I think it was cool. Even though it didn't get many downloads at all XD.
And as for you 0n0w1c, I know you're doing a Fluidic Power K2 run and have a possible issue. I'll still add the high voltage interface (unless you're going to stop playing), but that might likely be my last update of this mod :)
