I'm just thinking what lamps ought to be used for. The only time I've seen this sort of thing is with mob grinders, when you need to go in and make changes without worrying about mobs spawning.
But if you use them as lightbulbs, and turn them off when you're not in the room, like a good little tree hugger, you'll come back to find all sorts of malicious malefactors lying in wait to tear you limb from limb and eat your juicy brains.
Mob-grinders and mob-traps are practical uses. Everything else is pure aesthetic unless you want to design a visual Morse-code device for a SMP server.
Pixels and rooms controlling mob spawning are the obvious uses. Actually using the lamps for lighting your house doesn't make too much sense in the end; you don't ever want mobs spawning inside of your luxurious mansion, do you? I'm sure some redstone entrepreneur will find a general use for them in a way that affects most players. That said, Ive always personally been fond of the idea of assembling a city- or some other structure such as a rail line- that can have it's 'power' be diverted or changed by the flick of an admin controlled level.
On my server we once ad a rail system that could have the powered rails switched off from a distance. We would mostly do this for RP reasons, but the simple mechanics of it intrigue me. I wouldn't mind doing something similar with these lamps. Imagine if in a Spawn City the street lights would turn on and off depending on whether the Sun is above or below the horizon.
Pixels and rooms controlling mob spawning are the obvious uses. Actually using the lamps for lighting your house doesn't make too much sense in the end; you don't ever want mobs spawning inside of your luxurious mansion, do you? I'm sure some redstone entrepreneur will find a general use for them in a way that affect most players. That said, Ive always personally been fond of the idea of assembling a city- or some other structure such as a railine- that can have it's 'power' be diverted or changed by the flick of an admin controlled level.
On my server we once ad a rail system that could have the powered rails switched off from a distance. We would mostly do this for RP reasons, but the simple mechanics of it intrigue me. I wouldn't mind doing something similar with these lamps. Imagine if in a Spawn City the street lights would turn on and off depending on whether the Sun is above or below the horizon.
Intriguing idea. Something like could work for that, although it wouldn't switch on and off exactly when the sun goes up or down (the video I just linked demonstrates that, of course). The other option would be to just set up a long-term timer that lasts the duration of a day, but the only practical design of that nature that I'm aware of uses dispensers, and so requires a lot of reloading for constant use.
As for the original poster's question, the answer to that is one of the first things I think about at the sign of any new update: custom maps. The ability to give and take away light from an area on demand is extremely useful. It could already be done before with pistons and lightstone, or even streams of lava, but this is much more elegant. Imagine things like a trap that would shut off all the lighting in a room, activating a bunch of spawners hidden in the floor or the walls. Or even something as purely atmospheric as flickering lights in an old building.
There are a lot of things that you could use the lamps for, just wait until 1.2 is stable and the community at large gets ahold of them. Then we gasp in awe at the ingeniousness.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thoughts? Suggestions? Random acts of petty fanboyish hatred?
They may only seem useful for mob spawn rooms, but it's just a matter of the fact that they have never existed before now that is why they don't seem useful.
In time, people will routinely be using them to light up / off areas of their homes.. or for light show effects.. you wait and see.
Can we actually make working streetlamps with the new light block? Don't we need to run redstone right to the block? Is there a way to have the fencepost/glowstone looking lamp with hidden redstone?
That is actually a very good idea. Not the dispenser one, but using some other clock and a counter to make flop switch every 10 minutes.
I'd be worried that a clock with a timer that long would cause a lot of lag on a server or, say, a laptop (which I use, unfortunately). The dispenser design exploits item despawn times; a dispenser spits out an item onto a pressure plate, which powers an inverter connected to another dispenser. After five minutes, the item despawns, the inverter goes back on, and a second item gets spat out onto another pressure plate, and so on and so in as long a chain as you need. Like I said, the biggest drawback is that you'd need to refill the dispensers with whatever junk item you were filling them with often enough to stop the thing from shutting down on you. For 10 minutes, you'd only need two dispensers, too, so the whole thing would take up considerable less space than a ten minute redstone clock, not to mention generate less lag.
I posted this in another thread, but I didn't get any response.
Does anyone more than me feel that lamps should be ON by default? It's great to be able to do
new lamp post designs with these, but as it is now we need to clutter them up with redstone torches or levers.
Yes, that means that they would be OFF when they receive power.
Yes, I very much agree. I stated before the snapshot's release that I hoped they were on by default; it just makes sense.
Mob-grinders and mob-traps are practical uses. Everything else is pure aesthetic unless you want to design a visual Morse-code device for a SMP server.
nah you could do a few more things.
for instance you have a server with a large structure and need to evacuate, you could use torches to illuminate the floor and lead towards an exit
I think they look pretty nice and was planning on using them for streetlamps, but they're only on if powered by redstone. I was hoping for the opposite, on when not powered, off when powered. That way you don't need redstone around to use these things as lights.
EDIT: Ninja'd by Spiriax
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I used to write original signatures, then I took an arrow to the knee.
These are coming along at just the right time. I was just in the process of finishing my latest mob tower design, and I wasn't looking forward to trying to find some slimes so i could make sticky pistons. Not to mention that the mechanism was not only very bulky, but noisy as well.
I've also got a design in the back of my mind for what I'm calling an artificial dungeon. My first prototypes ran into that familiar red-stone problem: redstone mechanisms are rather bulky. The dungeon would've much bigger than I would've liked in order to accommodate the redstone wiring and piston mechanisms needed to turn the lights on and off when I wanted them to. With these blocks, I might just try it again.
They've needed to add lamps forever... Now finally we can make powered lamps.
In technic pack I have white lights in my workshop that I can turn on and off with one lightswitch. I have lamp posts along roads etc. I have different colored lighting for my enchanting room like red light etc to make it spooky.
This is one small thing that needed to have been added like 6 months ago. It also should be allowed to be dyed different colors.
So what are y'all's ideas on how to use lamps?
On my server we once ad a rail system that could have the powered rails switched off from a distance. We would mostly do this for RP reasons, but the simple mechanics of it intrigue me. I wouldn't mind doing something similar with these lamps. Imagine if in a Spawn City the street lights would turn on and off depending on whether the Sun is above or below the horizon.
Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to.. :laugh.gif:
As for the original poster's question, the answer to that is one of the first things I think about at the sign of any new update: custom maps. The ability to give and take away light from an area on demand is extremely useful. It could already be done before with pistons and lightstone, or even streams of lava, but this is much more elegant. Imagine things like a trap that would shut off all the lighting in a room, activating a bunch of spawners hidden in the floor or the walls. Or even something as purely atmospheric as flickering lights in an old building.
In time, people will routinely be using them to light up / off areas of their homes.. or for light show effects.. you wait and see.
Yes, I very much agree. I stated before the snapshot's release that I hoped they were on by default; it just makes sense.
I'd go further and say that combining 1 of a certain block with 1 redstone creates a redstone version of that block.
Should work for most static blocks (cobble, wood, etc. Also steps, fenceposts).
nah you could do a few more things.
for instance you have a server with a large structure and need to evacuate, you could use torches to illuminate the floor and lead towards an exit
EDIT: Ninja'd by Spiriax
I used to write original signatures, then I took an arrow to the knee.
I've also got a design in the back of my mind for what I'm calling an artificial dungeon. My first prototypes ran into that familiar red-stone problem: redstone mechanisms are rather bulky. The dungeon would've much bigger than I would've liked in order to accommodate the redstone wiring and piston mechanisms needed to turn the lights on and off when I wanted them to. With these blocks, I might just try it again.
In technic pack I have white lights in my workshop that I can turn on and off with one lightswitch. I have lamp posts along roads etc. I have different colored lighting for my enchanting room like red light etc to make it spooky.
This is one small thing that needed to have been added like 6 months ago. It also should be allowed to be dyed different colors.
I really like the small delay from the set of redstone torches, makes it feel like rl.