I wouldnt know how to call it better, nor would i know how to search for that..
I'll try to quickly give you my setup and explain my problem. Maybe its my fault, but im pretty sure theres something wrong.
The idea is to have water running inside the system and the backup pumpstack, a little higher, to get rid of excess water.
Now when i let the floodgate open, I could imagine the internal pumpstack working against the pressure of the river (they meet at the same point) and therefor being inefficient or unable to get rid of water, letting the water in the cistern slowly rise. I dont know how that works in such a case. Maybe its just increasing the pressure inside the system.
Anyways, what happens is this;
the second the bottom level of the cistern gets to 7/7, the waterfall seems to get "solid" (i shit you not), clogging the floorgrates and the dining room fills halfway up or so.
the bottom level of the cistern stays at 7/7 and all the nice and empty z levels above never get filled and the backup pumpstack never kicks in.
now you could say "maybe you pumping so much in, it cant drain through the floor".
well i thought of that. dug away half the floor. same effect. the water fills the dining room level before it fills the cistern. Am I doing something wrong? For the life of me i couldnt tell what it is.
I mean, it just LOOKS like im simply pumping a lot more water in than those few holes in the ground can cover... but... I really made a 5x10 hole for 4 single tiles that pour water (all fed from the SAME one tile wide tunnel) and tried it again. as soon as the cistern bottom hits 7/7 it fills the dining room. (yes both pumps are running at full force all year.)
Now why for heavens sake does this evil thing know, WHICH floor to flood to piss me off ?
i guess i can upload the save, as soon as i find out how to do that.
edit:
now that i think of it, if I manually control the water level so the bottom of the cistern doesnt fill, it works. but even when i SLOWLY add water to the system, the cistern never fills above it's lowest level, but the dining room gets irrigated for good.
and yet another edit:
i just dug out some more floor, and now it seems to work as intended. but BOY that is a big hole in the floor now any way to get that full with grates?
I'm not sure if this is supposed to work this way, I mean its hard for me to visualize pressure, in that example, but to me it seems it gets a bit off when a SINGLE tile of the waterfall hits the ground. the way the water spreads in that case is just a bit wrong.
its the same with water dropping on a river; hit ONLY the river, and it gets destroyed. hit ONE floor tile ( even in the middle of the stream) and you get a circular shape of wet across the valley.
[ June 14, 2008: Message edited by: Puck ]