OCB Electricity Wind Power Mod - 7 Days to Die Addon

Adding new power class and block for a modern windmill that produces energy day and night by wind power. Although wind is unpredictable, it still runs at around 50% capacity most of the time. Highly advices to be used with a battery bank.

You need to disable EAC to use this mod!

First release, not yet tested very well!

This Mod is part of my bigger electricity overhaul, but should also work on its own. Also works in multi-player, but due to custom resources each client needs to have the mod installed too.

Important note

Wind speed is not linked to biome weather (yet), as I didn't see any way to get local weather per x/z position, specially if running as a dedicated server. For now the wind speed and direction is interpolated via perlin noise, which should be good enough. But it can mean that in edge cases your biome weather is extremely windy but the windmills are running very slowly. At least we also simulate a generic wind direction, which is IMO something the original game hasn't yet included.

Create custom windmill models

For the first release I really just re-used an existing model for Xyth. It may not be the most beautiful and detailed model, but worked nicely to get the basics up and running. Now it would be cool to see some other windmill models, like from old farms etc. This mod should have everything one needs to create news model and export it as a unity3d resource.

You should already be familiar how to export unity3d resources, otherwise you will need to get familiar with this step first (ToDo: link docs etc.).

Custom windmill script

In order to animate the windmill, we use a custom unity script. This encapsulates the behavior for the animation nicely from the rest of the code. You can simply import the script in unity and then assign it to your model and configure the necessary items there.

Importing the custom script

You find the plugin stub under UnityPlugins/ElectricityWindPower.dll in this repo. This is only a stub for unity and doesn't contain any of the behavior (so you will not see anything if you click play in the unity editor). Don't worry, as the actual behavior will be loaded from the main plugin dll ElectricityWindPower.dll when the game is loading.

Create a folder in unity assets named Plugins (name must exactly match, as unity will treat it as a special folder due to its name).
Drag and Drop the UnityPlugins/ElectricityWindPower.dll into it

Windmill prefab structure

The prefab you need to create has only a few requirements and even those are just recommendations. It can have two joints that we rotate around. You probably want to nest these two so the rotations are added. In my example I rotate the housing into the wind, and the rotor rotates according to the wind speed.

Configure the windmill script

It doesn't really matter to which node you attach the windmill script, but I suggest to keep it close to the root (the code will actually look into all children to find a reference during runtime).

Housing: Choose which object to rotate into the wind
Housing Axis: Actual rotation vector that is applied to it
Rotor: Choose which object to rotate according to wind speed
Rotor Axis: Actual rotation vector that is applied to it
Audio Loop: A audio source that is playing when enabled
Audio Swoosh: A audio source representing a single "swoosh"
Swoosh Offset: Degrees after which the audio is played
Swoosh Interval: How many degrees to wait until next swoosh
Swoosh Delay: Time offset to delay the playing of the audio
Swoosh Pitch: Pitch dampening factor (keep or tinker with it)

Additional unity properties

Make sure to add colliders and tags where needed. For completeness I've included screenshots for all unity object properties:

Tip: Applying prefab changes

If you change something on an existing prefab, you need to update that prefab first, before you can export it again. You can do that by clicking on the inspector for the prefab to Override stuff:

Create new block

If you're not familiar how to create new blocks, please make yourself familiar with that topic first. It boils down to something like:

<block name="MyNewWindMill">
  <property name="Extends" value="ocbElectricityModernWindmill"/>
  <property name="Model" value="#@modfolder:Resources/MyWindMill.unity3d?MyPrefab" />
</block>

Changelog

Version 0.1.1

Change script to make rotation axes configurable
Change script to take in audio from unity plugin option

Version 0.1.0

Initial working version

Compatibility

I've developed and tested this Mod against version a20.b238

crw72 / ElectricityWindPower