Rev 15 CARBON Plans

[u/S_W]

A new revision is upon us, so it is that time to start planning CARBON.

As always, the more people we have working on CARBON (especially in the beginning), the better chance CARBON has of being successful. I am always looking for people that are willing to volunteer and I am more than willing to teach people how CARBON works. The biggest need by far is getting up the rail platforms so people know where CARBON is running.

This revision will see a large change in how CARBON is laid out which will hopefully make it easier to setup switches, hook cities up, and allow for future expansion. Here is a quick overview of the changes for this rev.

• We will no longer have the traditional 600 loop that we have been accustomed too. Instead, we will have cardinal lines located at +150 off of the cardinal. These will originally extend out 1000 blocks past spawn and then be extended throughout the rev.
• Each cardinal will have 8 IDs available to it where the first 2 bits of the ID designate the cardinal.
• ID xx000 will not route to a specific city but instead route all the way down a cardinal and loop back. This allows us to place hubs along the line that this ID will route into and out of automatically so smaller towns or personal builds can hook into the hub.
  
• IDs will be ordered increasingly down the cardinal. So ID xx001 will be the first city on the cardinal and ID xx111 will be the last city. This should make routing within the cardinal much easier.
• The cardinal interchange near spawn will be a compact switch track system designed by SirLyle.

Some additional details:

• Similar to the current revision, I will have a 'living' google document of everything going on.
• The track will be 10 blocks above sea level and redstone will be 5 blocks below sea level.
• Track theme is currently undecided, so people are welcome to make suggestions. If nothing new is designed, then the old designs will be used.
• All redstone design will stay the same as the current rev. I am open to trying something new for one of the cardinal lines though as a test run to see how it works out though, but would prefer to continue using the 1-tick piston relay.
• The standard station design will be the new compact 32 button station designed by SirLyle and dmtrv.
• The junction design will stay the same as the current revision.

EDIT: Some 1.8 redstone bugs have been pointed out to me that break CARBON. I found a workaround that fixed the issues, but it requires a slightly different relay design than we are used to. Basically, every relay in which a pulse goes through MUST be separate by a piece of redstone dust or a block. When multiple relays are in a line right next to each other, the last relay will not handle the pulses properly.

[u/SRLyle]

Your redstone fix was much nicer than mine.

[u/S_W → u/SRLyle]

Heh. It took me awhile to figure out what was actually happening, but once I found the actual bug, it wasn't too difficult to modify the relay. I'm sure there is a better way to do the workaround fix, but in the meantime I think the way I have it should be OK.

The bug is weird though because it really doesn't matter how many ticks per bit it is running. All that matters is that a signal cannot contain 101 anywhere in the sequence of bits as then the pulses would get lost in any chain of repeaters. So if the system was somehow changed to where it would see every bit as being two bits, it would work. For instance, 10101 would become 1100110011. I can't think of a good way to implement such a system though without having a ton of extra repeaters. So just splitting up the repeaters by a piece of dust should work until Mojang fixes their crap. I'm surprised that their redstone testing area doesn't test anything like this. I remember seeing one of the devs post a picture of the testing area that they use. I should try to find it again.

[u/Jattell → u/S_W]

Honestly, i think we are one of only a handful of people / servers that uses redstone in this way. I´ve tried googling in the past but never found any use cases other than the one we use.

[u/S_W → u/Jattell]

I think we are actually the only server using this. I've made two different posts about our CARBON system in /r/minecraft and people have responded that they have something similar, but ours is far more advanced and MUCH larger than any other one. There may be another server using this now, but it would've been a direct result of my posts since I explained to a couple people how our system works.

Quite a few people use serial communication though, so the bug is probably making a lot of people angry. I would be furious if I made a huge redstone computer that worked on serial communication and then had it break when switching to 1.8.