QoL = Quality of Life?

[RonEmpire]

Well if you ask me,  a QoL feature that would be useful is adding in a drop off vent for shipping - removing the need to create this  3 sec gimmick drop arm just to remove items out of a receptacle and dropping it to the floor.
 

I mean really guys,   You have to setup a sweeper arm, a second storage container or a loader designed to be "not filled" so you can trick the arm to fill it - and then a bunch of automated gates set to turn on and off the arm so it drops the item in mid air. to fall to the ground.  
Too many ridiculous things involved that lags the game when you have say 20 of these setup.  Not to mention they also glitch and sometimes fill the container or sometime catch the item they are dropping mid air only repeat the drop.

Quality of Life means things that we use often that can just simply be achieved with a simple solution for the user.  A  "VENT" drop shoot hooked up the to rails could be this QoL addition.

We have liquid and gas vents that let you drop gas or liquid out of a pipe.     I don't see why we don't have a simple Vent that you can just drop off items to the floor.

Please vote up if you agree. Thanks.



I saw somebody even made a mod just to fill a container to empty the container and people suggesting a rigged drop off arm like I mentioned above as the solution.   This is not a satisfying solution.  Something this simple should be provided by the developers.   This is just a common basic functionality.

 

 

[Edit:  Thank You Klei for making this feature a part of QoL MK3!!]

 

[FenrirZeroZero]

Yeah. Thats one of the Reason i play modded. 

Cairath made an mod named "Rail utils" that have a Dropoff and shutoffs and even a filter.

 

[Cairath]

Yup! For only $0.00 you can have this big red arrow showing your silly sweeper where to drop off its junk!

[crypticorb]

I would love to have a "shipping vent". I typically have to use a complicated automation loop hooked up to a shipping arm to pile up food or hazardous materials in a safe space. It looks like this:

Spoiler

Typically very annoying and complex to set up, but could be solved with a simple shipping dropoff. I'd be perfectly happy piling up coal next to a generator, or with the new changes to solid gasses to ship frozen oxygen or hydrogen (if possible), and deal with it upon arrival.

 

In addition to a shipping dropoff, I would LOVE to have a shipping filter. I've created incredibly laggy and intricate shipping filters before, but they are power and CPU intensive.

[Christophlette]

45 minutes ago, crypticorb said:

I would love to have a "shipping vent". I typically have to use a complicated automation loop hooked up to a shipping arm to pile up food or hazardous materials in a safe space. It looks like this:

  Reveal hidden contents

Typically very annoying and complex to set up, but could be solved with a simple shipping dropoff. I'd be perfectly happy piling up coal next to a generator, or with the new changes to solid gasses to ship frozen oxygen or hydrogen (if possible), and deal with it upon arrival.

 

In addition to a shipping dropoff, I would LOVE to have a shipping filter. I've created incredibly laggy and intricate shipping filters before, but they are power and CPU intensive.

You are clearly explaining a case where you could use ration boxes or fridges instead of dropping food on the floor. It's just because you want to drop the food on the floor but the game does not want you to do that specifically. 

The only thing that would really require a shipping vent is dropping eggs. Because they need not to be in a compactor to hatch. But I agree, the egg case really needs that egg dropper and not the over complicated solution we have now. 

[crypticorb]

2 hours ago, Christophlette said:

You are clearly explaining a case where you could use ration boxes or fridges instead of dropping food on the floor. It's just because you want to drop the food on the floor but the game does not want you to do that specifically. 

The only thing that would really require a shipping vent is dropping eggs. Because they need not to be in a compactor to hatch. But I agree, the egg case really needs that egg dropper and not the over complicated solution we have now. 

Ration boxes and fridges take up a HUGE amount of space, easily 30x what a single food compactor like what I posted above can do. I typically let my food production run far ahead of what I need, and stockpile massive amounts of food and ingredients. Storing all that requires either a large quantity of fridges or some means of dropping it into a chlorine immersed space to pile up on the floor.

Fridges take a load of power to run as well, unless you're willing to work with a sealed chlorine/CO2 chamber, which is awkward.

Late-game (1000+ cycles) I'll typically run into issues with all my storage compactors taking up excessive amounts of space, and it takes a long time for dupes to run around getting materials. Eventually I end up putting it all into one small room in a pile on the floor. Recent changes made items on the floor, such as 50+ stacks of igneous rock, take up far less CPU power to just sit there.

[RonEmpire]

I don't see anything wrong with dumping all  your crap on to the floor instead of making a 100 storage bins and filling it up.

I actually manually create a huge central pile of crap  with about 6-8 storage bins  set on sweep only.  And whenever I notice my guys being Idle, it's a signal that the bins are full. So I go in and just manually empty them all and then reset their check boxes and copy settings to all 8 bins.   I go sweep up more crap so the idle guys have something to do.   Managing 8 bins and keeping it small saves a lot of space for sure.   I used to have a central area that uses the  AutoSweeper gimmick drop arm trick - I stopped using this  after noticing it glitches a lot and rails get backed up for no reason at all.  The arm sometimes stops working for whatever reason. Bug most likely since reload fixes it. But point is its just buggy and really not reliable.  The fact that I'm manually doing this- a feature that automates this to me is considered a Quality of Life improvement.

Maybe devs should make the storage bin hold more items. Increase the capacity.  Or introduce a bigger storage bin (more advanced one that uses advance materials?)  Or allow some automation to allow them to self empty based on some conditions like being full or an input signal that tells them to empty. I wouldn't mind having a way to automate emptying the bins.  I see somebody made a mod for that.  A quality of life feature for emptying bins maybe?

 

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

1 hour ago, RonEmpire said:

I don't see anything wrong with dumping all  your crap on to the floor instead of making a 100 storage bins and filling it up.

On 2/14/2019 at 6:59 PM, RonEmpire said:

Something this simple should be provided by the developers.   This is just a common basic functionality.

It's not a common basic functionality for me. I can see nothing but wrong.

[RonEmpire]

3 hours ago, R9MX4 said:

It's not a common basic functionality for me. I can see nothing but wrong.

Should be.  And why would it be wrong?    Resources currently can be filled into a storage been and emptied manually.   You technically could just even leave all the resources on the floor but that would obviously lag the game incredibly because of the path finding issue.    And of course it can also be done with tricking sweeper arm as mentioned in my opening post.

The point of this QoL suggestion is to reduce silly gimmick sweeper arm and automations that trick it to drop it to the ground, which is extra lag/load on the game as is already.   

Automating storing eggs or removing eggs from shipping arm is already an issue.   This was pointed out above in this thread.

And  your solution to the problems mentioned would be?


Another alternative to the "VENT" dump idea.   Would be if a Storage Bin is missing a foundation then the content of the storage bin should be emptied or fall out.    I mean technically this should be true in the real world -  if you have no foundation for a container the container should just fall to the ground rather than float in mid air. - the container should just break or flip over and stuff falls out.   This would allow us to place a storage bin over a horizontal mechanical door that can be automated with the smart storage- with a full signal going to the door to open it

[LaShomb]

Call it a hopper. It can store a configurable amount of items, then with automation signal it switches between filling and dropping mode.

I could picture some cool systems that use it. Like auto dropping a bunch of ice into a volcano when a dup steps onto a pressure plate if it's too hot for them.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

Klei should stop you from infinitely stack debris instead of making storage bin more useless.

[RonEmpire]

14 hours ago, R9MX4 said:

Klei should stop you from infinitely stack debris instead of making storage bin more useless.

I wouldn't say storage bins are useless.   They're a means for you to tell the dupes where to put stuff.   Even if the infinite stacking is on the floor.  You still would need storage bin to designate what and where to store stuff.

Its like in any other game, you need to assign/designate an area to put stuff.   Storage bins serve this purpose.   Do we need 1000 storage bins though?  NO.   But a few here and there is what I feel is the intended purpose to assign/allocate where things go.

If it was up to me,  I would just program in a "Room" for storage.     And the bins are just a programming checkbox for the room and dupes would all go to the storage bin and place the stuff on the floor where the bin is.   Conditions of the room would be a "room" of course of a certain height and width min cell.   And must include a storage bin.  Once you have a storage room designated, anything programmed in the storage bin can be checked and dupes will drop them off at the storage bin spot.  

Just like   critter drop off.

 

The only other quality of life use for Storage bins that I can think of is adding in Temp. requirements. (mean store stuff that fits in a certain temp. range only).  And adding in temperature regulated content, where you can store stuff in it and set a temp for it to change the content's temp.  This would require power of course.    This can help us control what materials and temp.  the dupes uses.  Currently, there is NO way for us to actually control what material is used for building.     An example, I'm trying to build floors inside an ice biome to preserve or maintain the natural sleet wheat on an ice or snow,  and the dupes fetches some hot granite which causes the heat to rub off on the block next to it.    But it would be nice if the dupe fetched a COLD granite instead.    Now this would be a Qualify of Life feature.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

2 hours ago, RonEmpire said:

An example, I'm trying to build floors inside an ice biome to preserve or maintain the natural sleet wheat on an ice or snow,  and the dupes fetches some hot granite which causes the heat to rub off on the block next to it.    But it would be nice if the dupe fetched a COLD granite instead. 

A temperature clamp happens when you construct a building. Your floors will be no hotter than 45C or colder than 15C.

 

2 hours ago, RonEmpire said:

Even if the infinite stacking is on the floor.  You still would need storage bin to designate what and where to store stuff.

So you mean the usefulness of storage bin is designating the place for infinite stacking, instead of storing material? It's called storage bin, not rubbish dumping point.

[Christophlette]

4 hours ago, RonEmpire said:

I wouldn't say storage bins are useless.   They're a means for you to tell the dupes where to put stuff.   Even if the infinite stacking is on the floor.  You still would need storage bin to designate what and where to store stuff.

Storage bins are for storing as their name suggest. Not for pointing where to drop the resources. Unless it was named "resources drop-off" but it's not the case.

The point is that it doesn't matter what you're trying to do when storing things. You are not using the appropriate way to store materials. And it's ok, you can do it so why not ? I totally agree with that. But you can't claim that a "resources vent" is needed and is logical because you use the game the way it's not intended.

BUT you can claim that a "resource vent" is needed because the game wants us to move the eggs from the ranches and we can't drop them again on the floor without a over-complicated way of doing it. (e.g. automated gates to disconnect an automated arm). So yes, in that regard we can claim a "resource vent" is needed.

In regard of the way you're storing resources : Would it not be easier to have better comapctors ? Like 2x2 that stores 100t and 4x3 (or 4x4) that stores 500t or 1000t ? That way you would have bulk storing with huge compactors in an area. And small storing spaces with tiny compactors to provide resources to specific points.

Everything is a matter of point of view. When you use an unconventional way of doing things that devs probably didn't consider, you can't really ask new ways to deal with it unless devs plan to add it as a regular way of playing the game.

PS : I remember reading somewhere that when you pile up too many of the same resource at the same spot, when it exceeds a certain amount it starts to disappear. Maybe it's not the case anymore but watch out.

PS 2 : In your signature : 

public bool Isreplybugtracker()
{    if (player.Helpless==true && player.Blacklist==false);
    {    return true;    }
    else
    {    player.Blacklist=true;
        return false;    }
}

You should pass the player as an argument in your method as the player is the actual context, it changes everytime. And maybe it's only in Java and associated languages but methods never start with a capital and words after the first have a capital. So :

public bool isReplyBugtracker(Player player)

seems more right to me. I could be wrong depending on the language though.

Edit : And never put a ; at the line of a if. It doesn't compile when you write it this way.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

13 minutes ago, Christophlette said:

In your signature

It's my signature. Anyway, thanks for your correction.

13 minutes ago, Christophlette said:

public bool isReplyBugtracker(Player player)

I once thought about it. But if I pass Player player, will the following sentence work?

player.Blacklist=true;

I guess I should pass a pointer in C language, but I have already forgotten how to write it.

13 minutes ago, Christophlette said:

I remember reading somewhere that when you pile up too many of the same resource at the same spot, when it exceeds a certain amount it starts to disappear. Maybe it's not the case anymore but watch out.

Klei claimed they have fixed it, if i remember correctly.

[Christophlette]

7 minutes ago, R9MX4 said:

It's my signature. Anyway, thanks for your correction.

My bad. I wrote a bit too fast. Sorry !

 

7 minutes ago, R9MX4 said:

I once thought about it. But if I pass Player player, will the following sentence work?

player.Blacklist=true;

I guess I should pass a pointer in C language, but I have already forgotten how to write it.

Exactly. In C you'll have to pass a pointer if you want the reference to be updated. And yes it would work.

You can pass a struct of a class. It only depends on the type of Player. So if Player is a class. Then passing "Player player" will work. If it's a struct, the player won't be changed after the method.

[RonEmpire]

Just wanted to say THANK YOU Klei.  for taking in this "Dropper" on to the floor idea.   And even including a shut off value.  


Now this is a truly awesome  QoL update.    <gloating> about having debris on the floor. 

 

[Yunru]

Now all we need is a way to hot rack beds and tables and we're golden.