sugestion: add a controller block / gui

[skaviouz]

Premise

I noticed that you mentioned that all your solars hold their own charge, and you can have them level out their internal buffers between each other (essentially not requiring individual cables) [if not disabled in configs: B:BalanceEnergy=false]

Idea(s)

1. a controller unit, essential for arrays larger than different solars. I think this wouldn't work, as people could just make long strips of 14 solars....edit: Noticed that you actually can't have more than 8 already, given the transfer rate cap for each tier.
2. Only way to setup an array [if the aforementioned config setting was disabled] with out individual cables. This would be cool.
3. This controller could reduce lag by transferring all energy produced from solars straight into this unit, essentially making the solars not transfer energy to eachother, and not holding their own internal charge.
   • Controllers have an internal registry that is checked once every 5 seconds, and scales up an additional 5 seconds for each solar up to (2?) minute intervals.
   • The array could be rechecked each time any part of the network was unloaded, and when the controller is loaded.
   • And of course a button in the GUI that "force checks" and can only be done once per minute or when there is a change in the network.
   • Controller produced the sum of all components
   • Max Internal buffer of 500M RF (sum of all solars that give energy to this controller), if someone needed more, they can make their own battery array.
   • Transfer rate would be the sum of all the solars.

     Problems:

   • Who needs more than 5, 4k rf/t solars? (20k rf/t) which is the max transferrate for the best conduit from EIO, well that's not your problem now is it?

     Solution:

   • Have special conduit that can transfer energy from the controller to any connected conduit. You wouldn't want people using this conduit for ever day purposes, and only if they needed it, so you could make the recipe expensive imho; like 2 gold ingots, 4 iron ingots, 2 glass, and a diamond (as an example).

Hope you like the ideas, I also know you could just make 10 more tiers and there be no point in a controller... Even if the controller only tells the info of the network, that would be cool.

But anyways, thought of the original idea while playing on a ModSauce server. Oh, and congrats on making it into the ModSauce Pack; and congrats on being selected over your competitor 'Solar Expansion'.

[Nauktis]

Oh god, it is only by reading your post that I realized my mod is in the ModSauce pack. That's nice :) I already had some thoughts on something similar to the controller you propose. I even had crazy ideas like an organic controller that naturally grows and expands the array over time. The tricky part I see is to check the integrity of the array in an efficient way. I'll continue to think about it. Thanks for taking the time to well describe the feature ;)

[NullMagic]

I'd like to note that the Capacitor Banks from Ender IO can have a much higher input/output than 20000, and you can easily take advantage of this by putting the solar panels on top, and the Tesseracts from TE have no upper power transfer limit, so you can use them to wirelessly transfer any amount of power from a capacitor bank up to it's limit to any machine. if you combine this with the ability to paint capacitors to look like any block you can build most of the frame of your structures out of capacitors creating some extremely powerful input and output ranges. I and a friend often do this in order to power our ender quarry (Extra Utilities) and even with 200k+ RF per tic we still manage to drain our capacitor, so you can definitely need, and use, more than 5 4k rf solars :P