Thanks for the feedback!
Ok just from looking through the raws I can see there are things I would have done differently. The Alluvial Sand reactions for starters.
Lots of different types of stones are made from SiO2 (aka Quartz), sand is SiO2 (or Feldspar), glass is made from SiO2. Any source of SiO2 can be turned into glass, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_glass (though this is a type of crystal glass, if the lead wasn't included it would make normal glass). It would be much better to make a Reaction Class:Quartz and use it in your existing reactions (and possibly add some for lead or titanium based crystal glass, though for that one I'd recommend the product being rock crystals), it would be a bit more work to add the reaction class to the main SiO2 stones (flint, chert, quartzite, obsidian, some sandstone, some felsite, some rhyolite, some basalt, some granite, many of the ornamental gems, the list goes on as it is one of the two most common minerals on the planet).
I agree with what you said, but that wasn't my purpose here. Sand (as it is currently implemented) is a rather broken resource. ONE single tile of sand provides an INFINITE quantity of, practically everything. BUT, on the maps where you have none, sometimes you REALLY need it (like for moody dwarves and un-drowned nobles). Alluvial sand is a means to have just a few items of glass on maps where no "sand" is present, and even allows for the resource to be gained through trade. You can create the most commonly needed items: raw green glass, raw clear glass, and clear glass vials. From raw glass you can cut glass gems and build windows. This is a gameplay mod more than a realism mod, and the MMO overall does contain both types.
Your suggestion could certainly be implemented, and would allow for conversion of various stone resources into glass, which would have advantages (like getting rid of stone!). The down side is that you can't convert stone to raw glass, and then raw glass to much of anything else. A reaction has to be written for EACH end product (as far as glass is concerned), and you can't just convert (maybe in '10) stone into a filled sandbag. It is a bit of a pain.
What is magerkohle? Presumably some type of burnable stone (along with about a dozen others but I can't find a listing for it on Wikipedia, Google suggests it is just the German word for coal).
As mentioned in the documentation, Magerkohle is something Deej put into his Soil Is Fun mod. I removed a number of his coal/fuel types, since they were so numerous they were crowding out each other and making fuel scarcity meaningless. I left Magerkohle in because I thought the name was kinda cool and it fit in the hierarchy of mineral fuels as a sort of super-coal. The various underground fuel sources require different quantities of resources and fuel to produce MORE fuel, as described in detail in the docs.
The reaction to turn Flay Ash to Bricks has BAR:NO_SUBTYPE:METAL:FLYASH as both a reagent and a product, presumably that is a cut and paste editing error.
Actually, this is not an error. Since this is a FUEL reaction, there is an ash product. Unfortunately, due to limitations of the engine, I couldn't arrange things quite right. Flyash (coal ash) is created by all reactions in the MMO that require a fuel input. This is incorrect on two counts. 1. Reactions that use CHARCOAL as a fuel source should produce wood ash, and 2. Magma smelter reactions, that consume no fuel, should also produce no ash. Unfortunately, I can't control things that accurately - I tried testing different reaction sets for coke and charcoal, but it didn't work properly. Hopefully things will work better in '10!
I mostly agree with the removal of the reactions to create alloys straight from ores but there are some exceptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamine_brass, Arsenic Bronze (some theoretical ideas regarding the melting/boiling points, not that it is in DF) and any alloy coming from an ore where both alloying metals are present.
This was done for two reasons. First, I wanted to simplify the reactions list, and it seemed pretty silly to have half the smelting reactions listed twice, once for the ore and once for the bar. Second, this was a gameplay change. Some of the ore-to-alloy reactions cheated by producing more than they should. In addition, it really makes a lot more sense to be alloying from bars of (presumably) known purity than from a highly-variable source like ore. I mean yes, dwarves have an intuitive feel for these things, but still.
I also wanted to lengthen the production cycle just a bit. Smelting, alloying, and forging are complex, dirty, and time-consuming processes, and DF made them a bit too easy for me. Adding in the waste system (that you suggested!) also helps. Now you have to spend time cleaning up the mess that all that heavy industry produces, but I put in some additional reactions to help turn that mess into something actually fairly useful (and based on real science).
One additional thing I tried to do in this mod was make it POSSIBLE (if not comfortable) to get a game going on an aquifer soil site. Soil layers should now have a small but useful quantity of the essential resources (fuel, stone, ore, sand) and with the ability to burn bones and skulls, flux. You couldn't make a LOT of steel, but you can make it.
It's quite possible that folks will disagree with my design decisions, and that's cool. If you like what I did but not HOW I did it, feel free to take it and re-work it for your own use. That's how I ended up with this mod in the first place.
Rochndil, happy to discuss the details...
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Topic: [Beta-Relz] MMO - Metals and Minerals Overhaul (Read 31250 times)