Factory Complex Calculator: StandAlone v2.0.4.5 18Jun07: now supports 'Ashley's Fabs'

[ouch]

well I was playing with the simulator again and it said you would need 255000 energy cells to keep it from stalling. that's roughly 1518 crystals worth. (which is just over the 1328 storage) but if you remove the mine the usage just about gets cut in half. and this is what is going to be powered in the second stage of the complex startup. once that gets going crystals start getting made and the intitial crystal stock will slowly drop till the mine is full and then finally fill up itself.

I wanted to try to find out just how many crystals would be needed to fill up the mine. So started a new project and added the mine and spp. but when I run the simulation, even if I set the sale button to none it still sells them so the stock never gets full... perhaps a bug?

anyway I added a crystal fab but set the bofu resource to none so no crystals were actually made. it said around 655 crystals would fill it up in less than 3 hours. in 3 hours a crystal fab would make 360 crystals. so roughly 300 crystals would need to be imported for that to fill up.

we know just the silicon mine and crystal fab will use 72% of the energy cells when they start. (looking at the energy cell usage per hour)

so we take the 1518 crystals multiply that by 72% (because the mine and crystal plant won't be powered yet) and we get 1093 crystals. so we subtract that from 1518 and get 518 crystals and when we add the 300 that the mine will need in conjunction with the crystal produceing crystals. and we will need a little less than 818 to jump start this complex. which is 700 less than if we used the crystal equivlent worth of energy cells.

and 700 crystals is 117600 energy cells. which even at 12 credits is 1,411,200 credits that we saved simply by useing crystals to start this complex.

anyway it's all very confusing and it's starting to give me a headache.

You know what? someone should make a complex simulator to make building complexes easier... lol

[Deleted User]

I know just the person to make one

even if I set the sale button to none it still sells them so the stock never gets full... perhaps a bug?

That's because the ore is a/the product & in the sim ,I assume if you're not selling the product
then you're using it yourself (eg gun-products used for equiping a fleet with guns etc).

I wouldn't get too bogged-down in all the fine details, you'll end up spending more time
fiddling with perfect design than actually building the complex in-game --- all those lost profitssss hours.

Anyway cheers for the discussion, I'll bear in mind the things you've pointed out....

[ouch]

well to be fair if we were going to use it for our own stuff we could use your new feature and set the selling price to 0.

but yeah, I know, I get a bit carried away when calculating my profitssss.

but if you don't plan a perfect complex you will never be the number one profit producer in the xuniverse. And "if your not first, your last"...

[Detritis Max]

Hi Dave,

I was wondering if you have had chance to look at whats happening under Vista yet with the disappearing dropdown boxes.

i have managed to get it working by either running it under Windows XP (SP2) compatability or under administrative rights but it still bugs out every once in awhile forcing me to restart my pc to get it working again.

Regards,

Detrits

[Deleted User]

Sorry, no further info on this atm.
Maybe I'll change the grid mechanism at some point to a more 'modern' one that'll be less fritzy with Vista.
Still s'nice to know that it works (mostly) in compatability mode.

[exogenesis]

Just to let anyone who's interested that the links in the first post were down, & are now back up.

[Jakesnake5]

I'd like to know how you converted Merroc's xls to standalone.

I myself have a xls sheet, that would benefit from such a conversion (Open Office can't handle it )

Programming isn't a big issue for me. Just need the knowledge to get going.

[exogenesis]

Sorry to disappoint, but it was a write-from-scratch program,
based on Merroc's idea (& now has gone a little further).
The basis is :
http://www.Exogenesis.co.uk/CalculateFactoryValues.txt
(asteroid yield/production formulae in there were attributed to Merroc,
whereas since then I've seen the original which is by jlehtone - sorry about that).

Depending on what exactly your xls contains & how 'active' it is (ie would it be better/faster as program),
it may be worth having a go at making a standalone?
I'm willing to help if I can.

[Jakesnake5]

What it is, is a slightly more complicated version of a xls that was created by members of the XFP mod.

Ship Calculator

Mine, besides being more complicated, also tracks a much larger built in data base.

Unfortunately, interactive sheets like this don't work in Open Office. Which people who don't want to buy MS Office/Excel use.

Making it stand alone would make it much more widely available to those who can't use it.

My data base page is mostly directly derived from the TShips file. And you know how fun THAT can be to read.

[exogenesis]

Well, I read your original thread & had a look at the sheet in Excel,
nice clean design

Read the description 1st page, and I'm still a little unsure what the objective is: Is it:
1 for balancing a newly designed ship
2 just browsing the data
3 designing a ship spec from scratch#
4 all of these ?

I'm a bit confused what the standard/averaged/variants sections are for.

Perhap PM's (or your original thread) would be a better place for this discussion, cos although I
understand your original question about making a standalone, there's very little relation to this thread's topic....

Also I think making a program standalone of this as it is would be a bit overkill,
unless there was a more flexible content - eg reading the Tships direct from X3
(with filtering - like the XModelsVeiwer does), or perhaps more
intensive 'balancing' functions (eg like Cycrows ShipCreator).
Maybe you've got further development ideas?

[Dimich (UA)]

Hallo all. I live in Ukraine, therefore not very well I speak on English. Prompt please, as to me to contact with the
Dave Toome . The point is that I work above translation of the given program on Russian. Would like to specify some details. How to me to find him, or prompt him internet adress or the ICQ number Beforehand thank you

[Jakesnake5]

Dimich. David Toom is now Exogenesis I think.

[exogenesis]

Jakesnake5, you're right, this is now me
btw did you go any further with your standalone xls project?

Dimich (UA), I'll be happy to help you in any way I can,
you're welcome to have the source code if you think it'll help you
(it's a Microsoft DevStudio 2003 MFC-application project).
PM me if we need to go into the code details.

[blackfire83]

Hi there,

Love this utility. Some nights it seems I spend more time playing with the Complex Calculator than I do actually playing X3!

Anyway, I had one problem. When I go to the "Options" menu, the "Toggle Ashley's Fabs Mod (all open complexes)" button is grayed out and I cannot select it. The rest of the program is perfectly functional. Am I doing something wrong?

-blackfire83

Edit: Never mind! I found the buttons on the toolbar! Just curious now what the one in the menu is for...

[exogenesis]

Well spotted - I hadn't noticed that, it's not meant to be grayed out, doh .

As you found, it's not really that important, it was meant for
when you've got many complexes open you can toggle them
AshleyFabs on/off all together so you could see which factories
are Ashley-specific (the names turn red).
But there's no real need -
I guess if you're using Ashley you've designed the complex with that in mind.

Don't forget the 'run simulation' part is only a guide,
in-game there may be certain subtle differences,
so the sooner you get your complexes up & running in-game, the better

[Tiit_Helimut]

Is it me or does this program have problems on Windows Vista? When using the program, even running it under windows XP (SP2) compatibility, I can't edit the buy/sell goods options and occassionally the arrows for the drop down menus in each cell disappear.

If it is Vista imcompatibility, will an update be out soon?

Thanks

[exogenesis]

The drop menus have previously been reported to be a bit squiffy with Vista,
me not having Vista installed (anymore) doesn't help the likelyhood of a Vista fix any time soon
- I'll get there at some point, bit snowed under at the moment

[somalezulus]

I use WinXP+SP2. I play X3 since the month I entered this forum. Same month, if I recall it right, installed your wonderful software. Don't know how would I have managed without it, Dave/Exogenesis.
But I was never able to save from it. Anytime I closed the application, it gave me an error message. So I started using PrntScrn to capture a picture and paste it instead of saving. Two days ago, just closed the current window (complex) and not the main application. It asked me as usual if I want to save and I clicked "yes". But there was no more error message and it actually saved my work! Since then, it worked perfectly! Was this a bug? Now my copy of Factory Complex Calculator works perfect, but I wonder if there still are more users having the same problem.

[exogenesis]

Not heard of that problem before,
must have been a bit of a pain having no saved file,
glad it works now though.

[Tiit_Helimut]

Don't worry about the Vista problem. I temporarily solved by uninstalling it then reinstalling, the problem only seems to occur occassionally but not all the time.

Thanks for the great program though, it saves hours of working it out by hand