realism vs gameplay in a sciency game

[Morse]

So, you're doing a game about a space colony trying to achieve a close cycle, and you decided to make the biggest problem the oxygen. On one hand, the oxygen would be the least of the problems in a sealed colony (IRL, the biggest would be the energy and heat dissipation), but on the other hand, everything and everyone seems to disintegrate matter into nonexistence, starting from dupes, who produce ~70 times less CO2 than they inhale O2.

CO2 filter consumes CO2 into nonexistence (well, almost), water filter eats sand in the strangest fashion, hydrogen generator converts H2 directly into energy. Even the coal generator! How exactly does the coal generator work? I demand to know, what mechanism, besides magic, allows to convert coal directly to electricity. Yes, I know, gameplay has it's limitations, but in this case you already have the piping and temperature and everything, it looks like such a missed opportunity. The boiler burns coal, produces CO2 and converts water into steam with the temperature of several hundreds degree. The turbine intakes steam, outputs hot water and produces electricity based on the input steam temperature (which may be less if the pipe is long). Here, instant science!

Anyway, I hope with more content comes more science . The martian (the book, not the movie) raised my expectations for the hard sci-fi quite substantially.

Oh, and great game, by the way

[Kasuha]

4 minutes ago, Morse said:

So, you're doing a game about a space colony trying to achieve a close cycle, and you decided to make the biggest problem the oxygen.

I haven't noticed yet. Oxygen is pretty easy to come by in the game. The thing I'm always battling is heat. Of course there's the exploit and there are ice carrots but neither of the two looks like it's meant to stay the way it is.

7 minutes ago, Morse said:

I demand to know, what mechanism, besides magic, allows to convert coal directly to electricity.

Game Physics^TM.

Besides, the fact that Coal and Hydrogen generators don't require oxygen is part of the fact that oxygen is not the main problem in the game.

The game is not here to teach players physics. It's more like if you know something about real world physics, then something of that may turn useful in the game. Or it may decieve into false belief that if you do something, you'll get what you expect.

On serious note, the game could not possibly work towards sustainable ending (i.e. avoiding thermal death) if it was sticking to scientific principles. It needs some "magic", at least some eternal energy sources and some eternal heat sinks. 

[Morse]

29 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

On serious note, the game could not possibly work towards sustainable ending (i.e. avoiding thermal death) if it was sticking to scientific principles. It needs some "magic", at least some eternal energy sources and some eternal heat sinks. 

Totally agree. But as I said: magic coal generator seems such a missed opportunity for free science. They'll need to lengthen the production chains at some point anyway to keep things interesting, and steam seems the obvious choice.

As for magic, there are plants and animals with very "magicky" properties. And it made me thinking: that would be really nice if all the "magic" stuff would be delegated to the alien life-forms, while keeping the player-built structures more sciency, and thus unsustainable on their own. And to get what we need we'd have to domesticate (or at least capture) several species that all need different conditions to thrive, and bam! we have an interesting logistics to solve.

[Masterpintsman]

2 hours ago, Morse said:

it looks like such a missed opportunity. The boiler burns coal, produces CO2 and converts water into steam with the temperature of several hundreds degree. The turbine intakes steam, outputs hot water and produces electricity based on the input steam temperature (which may be less if the pipe is long). Here, instant science!

I want this (boiler -> steam -> turbine -> energy).

Would make so much more sense than the current coal burner...

[Kasuha]

12 minutes ago, Masterpintsman said:

I want this (boiler -> steam -> turbine -> energy).

Would make so much more sense than the current coal burner...

It already is inside either of the generators, how else would you expect it to produce electricity through burning? It's just not shown explicitly and does not require further assembly.

With lack of pressure in pipes, systems based on pressure don't make much sense.

[Morse]

13 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

With lack of pressure in pipes, systems based on pressure don't make much sense.

Pressure can be substituted with temperature, no problem there.

And merging several devices together is not the best way to keep things interesting, because longer production chains are needed for that.

[Kasuha]

8 minutes ago, Morse said:

Pressure can be substituted with temperature, no problem there.

That's a "more broken physics" request from a person that was asking for scientific approach

13 minutes ago, Morse said:

And merging several devices together is not the best way to keep things interesting, because longer production chains are needed for that.

Perhaps, but I'm not sure that a steam production chain is particulatly exciting. Steam produced by geysers is too close to condensation to be safe to transport through pipes (and heating it up further requires bug abuse) and as a result we would only get two devices that can only be chained together, providing functionality of single device that's already in the game.

A boiler or distilling device would be nice, especially if it could be used to turn polluted water into clean water without spending materials that are limited by extent of the map. But regarding production chains, I think the door is open in the direction of refining metals. I don't think we're going to build wires from gold amalgam or iron ore forever.

[Morse]

38 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

That's a "more broken physics" request from a person that was asking for scientific approach

That's a compromise. High temperature and high pressure are more or less interchangeable in both physics and game mech.

39 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

Steam produced by geysers is too close to condensation to be safe to transport through pipes (and heating it up further requires bug abuse) and as a result we would only get two devices that can only be chained together, providing functionality of single device that's already in the game.

First of all, I do hope geysers would be axed from the game. The organism fabricating tons of heated water out of nowhere is too powerful a magic for me to stomach

As for uses, it's not a problem to come up with the uses, if the steam will be ever decided upon. Some chemical processes may involve steam, decontamination processes (if we'll ever need it), maybe even cooking (steamed mud, yummy ).

[Kasuha]

39 minutes ago, Morse said:

First of all, I do hope geysers would be axed from the game.

Geysers are the branch on which the whole game is sitting. I don't think it's going to happen.

[The Flying Fox]

10 hours ago, Kasuha said:

Geysers are the branch on which the whole game is sitting. I don't think it's going to happen.

Right, before the Thermal update, in order to survive for a long period of time and not use a lot of water, people were filling bases with polluted oxygen from Morb pits.  Water was a precious and limited resource, once you used it up, it was gone.  

 

That certainly wasn't fun either.

[Palpetinus]

First off, stirling engines are a thing. There's your coal generator. 

Second, the game is in its barest state right now. Knowing Klei and having been involved in the entire development progress of Don't Starve, I can safely say that maybe 10% of the game is done right now and nothing that's currently in the game will stay the way it is.

[Morse]

On ‎10‎/‎05‎/‎2017 at 9:24 AM, Palpetinus said:

First off, stirling engines are a thing. There's your coal generator.

While I was thinking on this, I came up with a suggestion for the future fuel-less generator: a generator that produces energy based on the temperature difference between two mediums. Just like the stirling engine, or a peltier element (which you may know as a seebeck generator depending on your country :) ).

The generator would take two liquid inputs (water, presumably) with different temperatures, and output the liquid with the temperature equals to the mean of the two inputs. It will generate the energy directly proportional to the temperature difference.

[Masterpintsman]

1 hour ago, Morse said:

It will generate the energy directly proportional to the temperature difference.

As long as it produces less energy than it costs to artificially create the temperature differential (by whatever means) this would be nice.

[Palpetinus]

On 5/13/2017 at 0:17 PM, Masterpintsman said:

As long as it produces less energy than it costs to artificially create the temperature differential (by whatever means) this would be nice.

I think that would beat the point a little. You'd just copy the same thing twenty times and there you go infinite power.

It should be done with geysers and wheezeworts or biomes.

[Masterpintsman]

Stirling, peltier, whatnot all work through equalising a temperature differential.

Spamming them or not should not make a difference on the absolute amount of power they're able to extract from a given state.

But given that ice carrots exists...