Minetest Forums

Proof of concept gears and axles mod



Very much a work-in-progress so only some decorative animated nodes for now. You will need to use the screwdriver to manipulate rotations, however, I do eventually plan to have intelligent placement along with support for mesecons, etc.

Much credit to the Watermill mod by AspireMint as I have adopted the same method of rotation and I’d hope these mods will also become compatible.

Download: Vesion 0.2

GithHub: gear3d

I would be interested to hear any ideas of possible applications or additional parts I could include.

Awesome!
Also what if this could be a whole new electrical mod?
generate electricity with gears/wind mills, or solar, or steam, and make electric furnaces and other machens.

Yay! I've been thinking about a mod like this for a while! Well, this saves me from having to do the work :)

Cool concept but..
your gears are turning the wrong directions relative to each other and it hurts

GreenDimond wrote:Cool concept but..
your gears are turning the wrong directions relative to each other and it hurts

Good point here.

The cube made of gears is impossible. There can be gears on four sides but not on all six. The reason is simple. When there are two gears next to each other, they all need to rotate to a different direction, one clockwise, one counter-clockwise. Gears can be never put into a triangle. Well, they can, but can't rotate at all, I've even tried it myself. Gears can be put only into cycles with even number of gears, because of the cw/ccw thing. And as you know, there are three gears at each vertex which make a circle with three gears. I see only one solution: Don't put any gears on top and bottom sides, so there will be only one circle with four gears, which is possible.

Stu Rock!!!

This is exactly what I was thinking. Stu, thanks for doing this. I didn't post on the other thread, after I had dug around more, but there is also a .b3d model in that mod, that is complete, but does is not animated, and does not rotate. But none of that matters.

I likes the look of the windmill fan, with the ribbed sails. Now to just make some mesecons, pipeworks, digilines, fluid_lib compatible mods, so instead of black box nodes that do all the work with no visual candy, we replace them by making simpler components that now enable more realistic machines.

Maybe offer both wood and metal versions, for those who might want a more modern look. And maybe a rotating cog/gear or simple gearbox (not the animated node, but something visual to show two cogs/gears interlinked and rotating, which would further enable componentization.

Downloading now, and will update you on more possible uses.

Shad

Oh, nice! This looks like it'd fit well with my long-term goal of recreating Dwarf Fortress in Minetest. :) In addition to rotating shafts, perhaps you could use chains or belts for long-distance energy transmission? The first factories of the industrial age had belt drives running from big central steam engines to operate all the machinery, something like that seems like it'd work with wind or water driven power sources too.

I wonder how you could make model animation of the windmill on the screenshot. Really is it possible now?

Good one stu! Modding season is now definitely in full motion!

Stu,

Is it possible to add an on_place callback to "stop" the gearboxes, and thus, also, any attached axles or fans? I see you have already mentioned mesecons support, so I assume on/off switch is already planned?

Shad

Very nice stu, I always enjoy your work.
This is quite the "proof of concept"

Thank you all for the encouraging feedback, I really was not expecting such a response for what is, for now, only a couple of clever 3d models :)

I would not normally make such an early state of development public, however, I thought that the more creative players might enjoy them in their worlds as pure decoration, for the time being.

Hume2 wrote:

GreenDimond wrote:Cool concept but..
your gears are turning the wrong directions relative to each other and it hurts

Good point here.

The cube made of gears is impossible. There can be gears on four sides but not on all six.

I can understand what you are getting at, if you had six opposing bevel gears all meshed together then nothing is going to move, correct! However, I’d like to imagine that the internals of the gear-box look something more like this:



With this model, the current animations are almost technically correct, except for the vertical shaft. The switching variety would have a second larger downward pointing gear that will reverse its direction when engaged. Naturally, you will be able to rotate these boxes to suit your requirements.

Note to the budding engineers, I know that the horizontal shafts would turn faster than the vertical, however, this is a voxel world and there needs to be some creative licence here. I do not wish to create a 'lag machine'.

FaceDeer wrote:Oh, nice! This looks like it'd fit well with my long-term goal of recreating Dwarf Fortress in Minetest. :) In addition to rotating shafts, perhaps you could use chains or belts for long-distance energy transmission?

Thanks, I really like the idea of chains, I can probably make that work using the same technique! I am also a very big fan of your work, btw.

ShadMOrdre wrote:Is it possible to add an on_place callback to "stop" the gearboxes, and thus, also, any attached axles or fans? I see you have already mentioned mesecons support, so I assume on/off switch is already planned?

Sure, It will have all of those things and some but don’t expect it all to happen soon, I am mostly just looking for ideas at the moment :)

I really like the idea of having the waterwheel as well. As for ideas, how about a pulley that can pull up or let down rope/chain? The rope or chain could be climbable, or perhaps pick things up. Also, will there be things like metal axles for more modern-looking machines?

For mesecons support, I think most people are thinking about the gears powering the mesecons, but what you could have a mesecons motor that powers the gears as well? So you could have a motor that powers a axle that powers a generator which powers the motor ;-P

stu wrote: I can understand what you are getting at, if you had six opposing bevel gears all meshed together then nothing is going to move, correct! However, I’d like to imagine that the internals of the gear-box look something more like this:



With this model, the current animations are almost technically correct, except for the vertical shaft. The switching variety would have a second larger downward pointing gear that will reverse its direction when engaged. Naturally, you will be able to rotate these boxes to suit your requirements.

Note to the budding engineers, I know that the horizontal shafts would turn faster than the vertical, however, this is a voxel world and there needs to be some creative licence here. I do not wish to create a 'lag machine'.

I see, this really works. There should be something evident which denotes that there's something different and all six faces aren't the same. Currently, you have to watch all six faces and look which way they are rotating. It should be clear on the first sight which faces refer to which wheels.

Hume2 wrote: I see, this really works. There should be something evident which denotes that there's something different and all six faces aren't the same. Currently, you have to watch all six faces and look which way they are rotating. It should be clear on the first sight which faces refer to which wheels.

I have now changed the gearbox textures so that you can see better what's going on and only put the 'cross' at the top, there is only so much you can do with 16x16 pixels.

There is also now a new spur gear for your enjoyment :)

Wow, that is amazing. I know AspireMint would love if I something like this were added to JT2. The idea of wind becoming a fundamental game mechanic opens up a lot of possibilities for game design.

sorcerykid wrote:Wow, that is amazing. I know AspireMint would love if I something like this were added to JT2. The idea of wind becoming a fundamental game mechanic opens up a lot of possibilities for game design.

Thanks, I really like the look of some of the stuff you have been doing lately, too!

I have added a few more bits and pieces for creative builders to enjoy, however, these are still mere decorations for now.

Note that some (if not all) of the node names have now changed, sorry if it breaks any builds but this is still very WIP. Hopefully the new naming convention I have chosen should not need to change again, although I can give no guarantees on that.

To be honest, I don’t yet have any concrete plan on how best to implement this, only some very vague ideas so I would welcome any discussion and/or collaboration on that aspect, if anyone is interested.

I guess you need some way of calculating the energy being transported. Lately, both elepower and tubelib have delved into that sort of thing with their libs IIRC. Just show them the first post GIF and they should be begging to join. =D~

I'd love to see this developed into its own machine and automation mod, it'd be a welcome change from the standard digital logic that is so common right now.

benrob0329 wrote:I'd love to see this developed into its own machine and automation mod, it'd be a welcome change from the standard digital logic that is so common right now.

Exactly! Medieval ftw!

texmex wrote:

benrob0329 wrote:I'd love to see this developed into its own machine and automation mod, it'd be a welcome change from the standard digital logic that is so common right now.

Exactly! Medieval ftw!

I must say that I agree with you both from a player's perspective but would also like to explore the early industrial revolution, too.

I am not quite sure just how compatible this can be with other mods as I would like this to be as server friendly as possible. Currently the animations are entirely client-side so there is zero impact on the server, the only downside of using nodes for this is that every node in the system must be swapped for every stoppage or change in direction. However, with some clever use of the LVM, I am sure all of that is also doable.

With the latest screenshot stu, I believe you may have pushed Minetest out of puberty :D
I really have to find some time to play with this, I have not even had time to fire up anything MT/MTG related the last couple months

Wait, what about steampunk? I mean heck, the mod is even called "gears and axles" :P

There are already so many automation mods catering to the cyberpunk aesthetic. Steampunk would be an excellent alternative for games that are set within a pre-industrial civilization (such as the Victorian or late Medieval ages) but could benefit from machinery. Just an idea!

This mod is turning out wonderfully, but, although it bypasses server-side lag with entities, it induces client-side lag due to the sheer number of polygons there are, even though they are invisible. Placing down just a few belts and gears causes noticeable framerate drop, and placing a lot causes framerates >=10 for me.

Of course, it's nothing that can really be fixed, and this mod is still really cool. Keep up the nice work!

stu,

Again, amazing work here. The motion alone gives life to an otherwise static world.

One thing I've noticed is that the chain and the 90degree gears animations are a little out of synch. If you make a square chain, with 4 sprockets at the corners, you should see what I mean.

As for the backend mechanics, I think a simple pass through logic would work. What I mean here is, instead of trying to implement the depth of elepower or tubelib, simply provide an on/off kind of logic. I component A is connected to component B, and B is on, then A is on. A right click on a break switch to either allow the sail to turn in the wind or to stop it, and everything connected in between then is either on or off.

Mods implementing this logic only would need to know if the machine is on or off to then do their own work. Kinda as simple as the mesecons light switch, without all the mesecons overhead.

Shad

PS. When do we get to see the plane available?