OpenComputers II

OpenComputers II

OpenComputers II is a spiritual successor to OpenComputers. It carries some of the core ideas with it, such as configurability and sandboxing. However, there are also many changes, such as the mod using emulated "real-world" hardware.

The core of computers in this mod is an emulated RISC-V architecture. This allows running Linux and using it much like you'd use it normally. For example, networking uses an emulated network card and regular ethernet frames, so different Linux computers can communicate just as you'd expect.

Work in Progress

While the mod has been in development for some time now, it should still be considered to be in early development. There may still be severe bugs that went undiscovered. The mod is also very light on features at this point in time, at least when compared to OpenComputers. As such, please report any issues you encounter while using the mod, and stay tuned for more content in the future.

Overview

The mod provides stationary computers and mobile robots. While computers can connect to other in-world devices via bus cables and extension cards, robots can move through the world and interact with it via installed modules. Computers can communicate with each other using network cards and cables.

To get started with the mod, it is strongly recommended to craft The Computerists Handbook, an in-game manual item with information on all the blocks, how to build your first computer and so on.

By default, computers and robots consume energy (RF/Forge Energy), so it is recommended to play this mod in combination with some other mod that provides energy generation.

Operation

The default operating system used by the mod is Linux. It comes with a list of well-known utilities, such as the text-editors vi and nano. For those curious, buildroot is used to create the kernel and root filesystem images.

To enable easy scripting, Lua is also included. Many of the Minecraft specific devices, such as inventories, the Redstone Interface Block and general mod-interoperability use a high-level API that is intended to be used through Lua. This eases both adding integrations with other mods, as well as using these APIs when scripting in the game.

Here's an example snippet that sends a redstone signal through a Redstone Interface Device: require("devices"):find("redstone"):setRedstoneOutput("up", 15)

Modularity

Computers and robots can be configured using various device items. Shared device types include memory (RAM), firmware and hard drives. Computers furthermore allow installation of extension cards, such as the Network Interface Card, whereas robots allow installation of modules, such as the Block Operations Module, which enables robots to break and place blocks.