Electric Blocks v2.0.0

🎉 The 2021-2022 Senior Capstone year has come to a close! 🎉

With the 2.0 release of Electric Blocks comes many quality-of-life improvements and feature additions, as a culmination of ~9 months' worth of work by Greyson Biggs, Ryan Buckel, and Samuel Frederickson as part of the 2021-22 Senior Capstone course at the University of Idaho.

Several things have changed, so we recommend you read our updated website. The most important change for end-users is that the HWYLA mod is now required for EB to run. You can find HWYLA here. As well, because Electric Blocks still uses Minecraft 1.15.2, if you're hosting a multiplayer server, it is vulnerable to the extremely dangerous Log4j exploit. More about that and how to fix it here.

We highly encourage feature requests and bug reports in the discussion and issues pages. This is quite helpful for future teams. Thanks for using Electric Blocks!

Notes and changes:

• New textures for all blocks and items! For blocks, yellow borders indicate power blocks, and blue corners indicate multimeter interactivity.
• Added functionality to the Battery block. Refer to PandaPower documentation for how this works.
• Added the Electric Furnace. It smelts and cooks items! This behaves differently than the vanilla Minecraft furnace - you'll have to exit in and out of the Electric Furnace inventory menu for it to (instantly) smelt/cook items.
• Added three levels of Multimeter - Intro, Intermediate, and Advanced. Intro shows basic voltage and active power values, Intermediate starts adding reactive power, and Advanced shows everything.
• Added HWYLA as a dependency, with plug-in functionality for said mod. You can now hover over blocks to see their service status, inputs, and outputs, and can enable/disable the display of each of these in the HWYLA plug-in settings menu. You must have HWYLA installed for Electric Blocks to work now.
• Added an orientation map. Download below, or find it in the /saves/ folder in the source.
• Minor audiovisual tweaks and bugfixes.
• The Doks site has been updated. New installation procedures, project documentation, a handoff document for the next team, and edits for readability have been pushed.

Electric Blocks v1.0.0 Beta SNAPSHOT

Snapshot of the latest development build against commit 1afa45b

Electric Blocks v1.0.0 Beta

🚀🥳🎈🎉We've finally here! 🎉🎈🥳🚀

It has been a long journey to get here, but we are finally able to present our first official release of Electric Blocks. I've finally gotten around to doing some testing so hopefully this release goes well. If not, feel free to file issue reports for anything you run into. A lot of changes and many long hours spent pouring over documentation, source code, and research have culminated in this. So enjoy!

Notes:

• Added textures to lamp block.
• Added texture to bus block. This block still doesn't do anything since we've been using embedded buses for pretty much all parts of this project, but we will work on adding this functionality in the future.
• Added documentation in the code for a lot of functions. There's still a lot of work to be done in this regards, but now we have comments.
• Added the option "logJSONRequests" to the server configuration. This is mostly useful for debugging purposes, but can also be informative for server admins to see what kind of power flow studies are being performed.
• Added battery block. It doesn't currently do anything yet 🤷‍♂️, but hopefully it will in the future. It has a texture though 😄
• Added single phase transformer block. The addition of this block is pretty huge. It is definitely worth a try. It also has a texture. The transformer GUI uses a scrollable menu so that you can go through all of the inputs and results. This was no small feat to make work either.
• Fixed server crashes on multiplayer. This involved writing a whole new network interface between client and server. I did test this now though and it's totally working. You can now run these simulations on a multiplayer server and the results will update!
• Fixed a bug where Electric Block info wouldn't be updated when a player joined the server.
• Fixed a bug where messages sent to player from client side GUI would not appear.
• Fixed quite a lot of other bugs. Too many to bother listing, but you can check out our issue history if you're interested.
• Added a lot of little optimizations and corner case detection to prevent crashes in weird situations.

Electric Blocks v0.2 Alpha

Early preview of Electric Blocks.

Includes the following blocks: lamp, generator, external grid, bus, and single phase load

Notes:

• EB is now configurable through a file called electricblocks-server.toml which is automatically generated and defaults to http://127.0.0.1:1127/api. This means you can now run the EBPP server on any other networked machine! I haven't tested this yet, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.
• EB no longer crashes if EBPP isn't reachable, but the electric blocks won't work and will be zero'd out if you try to make a simulation request.
• EB will now update the simulation if you break a block. You can disable this behavior in the electricblocks-server.toml config file.
• The only block with in game behavior is still the lamp block.
• The multimeter item was added! With this item in hand you can left click on an electric block to toggle it on or off. If you right click, a fancy new GUI will pop up which allows you to modify the settings of that block. Try it for yourself!
• Reactive power information is now available for most blocks ⚡
• Players are now notified if a network is unable to converge. The simulation is zero'd out if this occurs.
• Generator block no longer starts with slack set to true. Slack is not currently configurable in the Multimeter menus, but is changeable using the /data command in minecraft. You can find more info here: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Commands/data

Electric Blocks v0.1 Alpha

Early preview of Electric Blocks.

Includes the following blocks: lamp, generator, external grid, and bus.

Notes:

• EBPP must be running and accessible on localhost at port 1127. Game will crash if EBPP is not accessible.
• The only block with in game behavior is the lamp block. Try connecting it to an external grid block with wire to turn it on.
• The only way to get information about blocks is to read their tile entity information. You can use the command "/data get block " to get the block information. You can find more info here: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Commands/data
• Generator block starts off with "inService" set to false and "slack" set to true. This behavior will likely change in future versions, but you cannot use a generator that is a slack bus to power anything.