10
votes
What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Been working on another mod for Cataclysm in private. This time, the goal is to leverage the existing systems in order to provide a more realistic, grounded experience with electronics and energy supply.
Currently Cataclysm relies on an abstract system where there are only four kinds of batteries (ultralight, light, medium, and heavy), each has a neat cutoff of power supply (e.g. 100 units, 500 units, 1000 units), and measures all electrical supply in kJ (so even the light battery provides 100kJ of energy, and the disposable variant goes up to 300kJ).
All of which, as far as my research suggests, is ridiculous.
I'm no electrical engineer. My physics classes have been superficial more often than not. Everything I'm learning about the way batteries work comes directly from the research.
Basically:
Batteries are significantly less capacious than the game suggests: in the absolute best conditions, disregarding voltage falloff at the end of charge and other conditions that you couldn't disregard in reality, a rechargable Energizer AAA battery gives away 3,456J, or ~3.5kJ. (I'm using Energizer stats wherever possible 'cause they've provided me with the best specs of all the battery documentation for specific models I've seen so far. Duracell doesn't even give specs on the battery model page.)
That's not a lot compared to in-game batteries, but real-life devices also take significantly less charge, bringing the overall experience somewhat in-line with what the game portrays. Meanwhile, each device has its own draw, which affects how much actual energy a battery can supply: the same battery @ 50mAh can provide 100% of its energy at a given voltage, while @ 200mAh it can barely provide half of that. (Roughly speaking; each battery is different, but the approximation is good enough.)
All of which means that in the real world, batteries are subject to all sorts of different charge modelling. Temperature affects energy supply. Voltage affects energy supply. Power drain affects energy supply.
There's also a lot of different battery types, though only a handful of popular ones, including a surprising amount of different coin cells (aka button cells), some of which (I still can't believe my math is right about this) provide more raw joules of energy than an AAA battery (CR2477, which is apparently also ridiculously large for a coin battery).
So, what I'm trying to do is bring all of that into the game while balancing it against features I can't implement without digging into the engine directly (which is under supervision of the developers alone), in C++. So, no drain/efficiency, therefore I'm providing with the absolute ideal joule-based energy values. This should provide enough insight into what I'm aiming to achieve, as well as provide a decent approximation of the concept, as far as gameplay is concerned. Ideally, I'd seek to implement power drain per tool, but so far, the best I can do is simulate it by having one tool draw XmAh (in J equivalent, given standard voltage) more than another.
What I'm looking into right now, after dealing with smaller batteries (coins, AAA, AA), is ways to handle portable devices in a meaningful way (because there's no idea of power grids in the game right now), as well as car/motorcycle batteries.
My lease ends at the end of this month so I have been monitoring rental prices around me for a few weeks to see what will be available. I finally found the place I am going to move to so I decided to go ahead and submit the application and deposit to lock it in, despite the price not being as desirable as I would like.
Right now I pay ~$2400 for a 2 bedroom/1 bathroom that is ~850 sq feet. The new place that I am moving to is $3060 for 2 bedroom/2 bathroom at ~1350 sq feet. While my price is going up, I think I am getting quite a few more benefits that make up for it, such as :
Walking Distance To:
It is an east facing apartment so I will be happy to watch the sun rise in the morning. I am on the top floor so I won't have any sound coming from above. Its not courtyard facing so when I look out over my new balcony, I won't see any neighbors and no one will be able to see me. My only concern is that we will have to adapt to new soundscape in this more commercial area of town.
My current apartment is extremely noisy with landscaping occurring 4/5 days during the week, anda leaf blower that is guaranteed to start at 8:00 AM. We have a population of Canadian Geese that are territorial and poop EVERYWHERE. And I have had a bike stolen, and items stolen from my car overnight. The biggest benefit of the current unit has been proximity to a local bike/pedestrian trail that spans 30+ miles. Rather than walking to this trail in my current unit, I will need to bike a little over a mile to get to the trail at the new unit. I also have put quite a few holes in the wall as I have mounted a TV, projector screen, and projector. Needless to say, there will be quite a few trips to the hardware store to get the holes patched and covered.