Why is it so taboo to include fixed output temps in tooltips?

[BaloneyOs]

Is there a reason why this information is not available in-game? It's obviously an intended core behavior, so why hide this from new players? The 6/28 update suggested that they overhauled some tooltips but this information is still not there. Do the devs seriously think it's fun for players to "discover" fixed output temps? It'd be really disappointing if the purpose of hiding information is to artificially extend playtime.

[Sasza22]

It needs to be included. Only reason for not doing that i can think of is thinking about changing it. Release is just around the corner so it`s time they decide. If it stays make it obvious.

[Nightinggale]

It feels like it's a QOL type of mod in the making, which becomes a must have for everybody and people periodically comment "why isn't this in the base game?".

This topic made me sit down and actually write a proper bug report for a bug I noticed this weekend. It's a good thing I waited because noticing the bug and realizing the solution proposal didn't occur on the same day.

I wonder if this issue is part of why Klei seems to like fixed output temperatures.

 

[bobucles]

Quote

The Fix

Don't forget that some structures hold ingredients for many recipes at one time. For example the metal refinery can hold ingredients for smelting iron, copper, and even holds separate inventory slots of various temperature liquids. It wouldn't work to average out the heat of everything in a structure, only the ingredients involved in the recipe.

The metal refinery is capable of providing a direct kDTU change to a material's temperature. The aquatuner is capable of providing a fixed temperature change to a material's temperature. So the option of modifying outputs definitely exists in the game engine. It just needs to know what values to play with to make whatever arbitrary decision is needed.

It is a bit odd to have THREE different systems for modifying temperature. One system alters temperature directly, one system uses thermal units that behave on material properties, and one system uses a temperature number handed down from god. It seems kinda spaghetti tea bee 8.

[OxCD]

While we're talking about this, why for the oil well it is not mentionned that it outputs NG and how much ?

It's needed to visit oni DB if you wanna now it before the drama, and how much. Otherwise, you'll need the bad live experience first.

[Nightinggale]

5 hours ago, OxCD said:

While we're talking about this, why for the oil well it is not mentionned that it outputs NG and how much ?

It's needed to visit oni DB if you wanna now it before the drama, and how much. Otherwise, you'll need the bad live experience first.

That's a really good question. I started researching and you are right. All the natural gas stats are completely hidden for the player.

For those who wants to know the stats used for gas, here they are:

oilWellCap.gasTemperature = 573.15f;
oilWellCap.addGasRate = 0.0333333351f;
oilWellCap.maxGasPressure = 80.00001f;
oilWellCap.releaseGasRate = 0.444444478f;

Those are the numbers used by the game, but odds are they aren't written like that by Klei. It's likely 80, 1/300 and similarly written nice numbers. They then get the float rounding treatment, which is the same as the cause of why buildings sometimes lack a few micrograms.

[Yunru]

10 hours ago, Nightinggale said:

 

 

I can't be the only one that finds suggesting code to be... distasteful? Disrespectful?

It's like saying "you're a bunch of idiots, here, let me do it."

[Nightinggale]

4 minutes ago, Yunru said:

I can't be the only one that finds suggesting code to be... distasteful? Disrespectful?

It's like saying "you're a bunch of idiots, here, let me do it."

I assume everybody working for Klei are rather busy right now. As such I consider it helpful to write bug reports in a way, which allows minimal time to fix whatever issue I report. I'm sure they can figure it out on their own just fine if they didn't have time constrains.

[enragedcamel]

18 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

It needs to be included. Only reason for not doing that i can think of is thinking about changing it. Release is just around the corner so it`s time they decide. If it stays make it obvious.

It needs to change IMO.

[EnderCN]

If you just remove this with a mod the game will be just as broken as it is now.  Adding heat with these devices is just as important a negative as removing it is a positive.  It would certainly change how people do things but it wouldn't actually fix anything.

[Ambaire]

10 hours ago, Yunru said:

I can't be the only one that finds suggesting code to be... distasteful? Disrespectful?

It's like saying "you're a bunch of idiots, here, let me do it."

I don't see it any different than a modder making a really good mod and the devs incorporating the mod into the base game with the modder's permission.

[Yunru]

2 minutes ago, Ambaire said:

I don't see it any different than a modder making a really good mod and the devs incorporating the mod into the base game with the modder's permission.

It's... Unsolicited. If a mod is incorporated, the designers wanted to include it. Just shoving code at a designer feels... I dunno, rude? They've made no indication they want coding or fix suggestions, but you assume they'll want your advice.

[BaloneyOs]

15 hours ago, OxCD said:

While we're talking about this, why for the oil well it is not mentionned that it outputs NG and how much ?

It's needed to visit oni DB if you wanna now it before the drama, and how much. Otherwise, you'll need the bad live experience first.

Stuff like this is why I believe that they just want people to waste time finding these things out. People testing things out in debug mode and wanting to restart your base because you found out about fixed output temps both lead to more playtime in the short run.

Looking at the new patch notes:

Quote

- Tree Branches take much longer to grow old and self-harvest
- Reduced Gas Range input to 100g/s
- The output temperatures of the Ethanol Distillery and Rust Deoxydizer have been brought in line with their utility

I love how they don't even bother telling us what the output temps are changed to but have no problem showing numerical changes for existing information. I'm pretty convinced that they want people to initially fail at planning (obviously core aspect of the game) due to lack of info. Withholding information is more or less how they make Don't Starve challenging but that philosophy feels rather asinine for this game. 

A similar complaint is that the game doesn't seem to tell you what materials you need for some buildings. Pretty sure I'm not the only one who at one point researched some techs only to find out that they need refined metals or plastic to be built.

[Nightinggale]

7 minutes ago, Yunru said:

They've made no indication they want coding or fix suggestions, but you assume they'll want your advice.

They do not look very offended to me. You do have a point though because bug reports are for precisely that: bugs. It shouldn't be abused to push design decisions or new contents into the game. That's what the suggestion subforum and mods are for.

 

[Cairath]

It's not like they can be rude to players publicly. I share @Yunru's feelings, if someone kept throwing code for easy fixes like that I'd find it at least belittling or trying too hard to stand out, but hey, just my opinion. 

On the actual topic, I do feel like tooltips are nicer, but could be even nicer. My biggest gripe is that in the building menu you have a nice summary of input and output rates and it's nowhere to be found in the tooltips of an actual built object, so I end up having to find it in the menu anyway

[bobucles]

There's no need to tell other people how to feel about XYZ. There's already more than enough drama in the world.

People providing feedback is good. People providing code as a proof of concept is even better. That shows a high level of passion for the game and it's a GOOD THING.

[BaloneyOs]

When a company sells their game like two years prior to its release I'd wager they're plenty open to being scrutinized. The day they become offended by constructive criticism is probably the day they start failing as a company. It's not like they can just cherry pick what criticisms they receive.

[Nightinggale]

Looks like I have to explain my thinking because apparently constructive feedback can be evil

Yes it's trivial to fix the offset bug when you look at the correct line, but there is more to this than just changing a number. However that's the wrong way of looking at it. Klei once stated they read all bug reports and then they figure out which bug reports to work on first based on an estimate of how important it is as well as expected time to fix.

This means somebody at Klei opens the bug report and wants to make a quick evaluation. It has a description of the bug when experienced ingame. However it also has the line from the source code and a comment about the offset being off by one. This means even without switching away from the browser, it is already confirmed to most likely be a really quick fix.

My comment also includes the class and method where the bug is. You might say that's trivial, but if you listen to this livestream at 12:29, Nana has problems remembering that the building is called Molecular Forge. That's because internally the building is called SupermaterialRefinery. This means in some cases the name the player writes and the name to look up in the source code are completely different. I added the internal name to the bug report, meaning there is no "remembering internal vs external name" delay.

Yes an off by one in an offset is a trivial bug to fix when you look at the source code. I never claimed otherwise. However by adding one line of text and one line of source code, whoever has to judge the time it takes to fix the bug will have a much easier task because all the needed information is available directly in the browser.

Also I would like to add that the main reason why I looked it up in the source code is because I wanted to know how it went wrong. Considering the type of mods I make, I might run into the same issue at some point. I just had the feeling that it would happen, be caused by something unexpected and then I would go "why didn't I look at the before and after code of Klei's fix".

Once I had the issue staring me in the face, I figured I might as well add it to the bug report, but apparently the forum can turn that into an issue.

[Yunru]

7 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

[snip]

I have no issue with any of that, it's just more information on the bug.

It's design decisions and suggestions I dislike (like "I think this would be the perfect balance between meeting the player's expectations vs performance and coding difficulty.").

[Nightinggale]

8 minutes ago, Yunru said:

It's design decisions and suggestions I dislike (like "I think this would be the perfect balance between meeting the player's expectations vs performance and coding difficulty.").

There are two parts to that bug report. First part is the issue. However looking a the changes in the patch today, I kind of suspect Klei have made the design decision to intentionally not to use the "apply input" code. This means while the bug is in the code, it isn't unlocked unless a mod enables the code in question. Needless to say this will most likely strongly affect their will to do anything about the problem and the bug report is likely meaningless by now. In fact if I haven't already posted it, I wouldn't have done so after today's changelog.

The bug is if you have a water sieve where output has input temperature, using sand at 1500 C will give the same temperature as with sand of -200 C. I think we can agree that's a bug if it is supposed to apply input temperature.

The second part is "what do I actually want Klei to do about this?". Just another "water sieve shouldn't output 40 C water" bug report/suggestion wouldn't change anything. Looking at the source code in question doesn't scream for an obvious answer, which delivers a proper solution where thermal capacity is used correctly. In fact I didn't find a solution right away and I moved on. I had a realization about a decent solution the following day.

I explained this part as a solution proposal. Like any other proposal it's non-binding and can be freely rejected. It is however strongly linked to the bug itself and as such belongs in the bug report. As any other proposal for finishing a half implemented feature, it can't avoid touching the realm of design decisions. The bug report of the wood burning generator is also partly about design. I wrote (0,1) as a proposed solution. Maybe Klei preferred (0,0) or (1,1) as the source of smoke. Either would be equally valid technically and it's purely a design question, hence why the (0,1) was a proposal, not a "it should be this".

[Nightinggale]

After this lengthy talk for and against providing code or coding designs to Klei, the end result is that Klei just accepted/fixed the bug report, which started the whole debate.

 

[melquiades]

@Nightinggale Keep doing the things you do, don't pay attention to people's easily offended ego. They can take a look on how Rimworld did things:

https://ludeon.com/mantis/view.php?id=3605

I would be overjoyed if someone could pinpoint an error, and suggest a fix right away.

[DemainaNyx]

On 7/3/2019 at 1:55 AM, OxCD said:

While we're talking about this, why for the oil well it is not mentionned that it outputs NG and how much ?

It's needed to visit oni DB if you wanna now it before the drama, and how much. Otherwise, you'll need the bad live experience first.

I wish that if a machine output an element, it mentioned if it was through a pipe or just exhausted.  The coal and petrol generator just exhausts CO2, but the nat gas generators output it through a pipe.  Makes no sense.  They are all generators with the same output element, why is one piped out and another exhausted?

I feel like there are many of these little things that need to be mentioned, but they've been focusing on bigger issues instead of these small quality of life thing.

[Yunru]

6 minutes ago, DemainaNyx said:

The coal and petrol generator just exhausts CO2, but the nat gas generators output it through a pipe.  Makes no sense.  They are all generators with the same output element, why is one piped out and another exhausted?

From a programming viewpoint it kinda does.

Why have the hassle of turning outputs into paired variables when you can just have two different sorts of output?

[Nightinggale]

43 minutes ago, DemainaNyx said:

I wish that if a machine output an element, it mentioned if it was through a pipe or just exhausted.  The coal and petrol generator just exhausts CO2, but the nat gas generators output it through a pipe.  Makes no sense.  They are all generators with the same output element, why is one piped out and another exhausted?

I completely agree. The database text should contain what is piped and what isn't.

36 minutes ago, Yunru said:

43 minutes ago, DemainaNyx said:

Makes no sense.  They are all generators with the same output element, why is one piped out and another exhausted?

From a programming viewpoint it kinda does.

Why have the hassle of turning outputs into paired variables when you can just have two different sorts of output?

Actually this can't be explained with programming. It's purely design. By not adding a pipe, the generator can work without having researched gas pipes, which might actually be important for the coal generator. I have no good explanation for the oil generator other than Klei wanted it like that.

EDIT: actually now that I think about it, in theory it is possible to build an oil based power system without having invented gas pipes, particularly now that it can be run on ethanol. Natural gas however relies on gas pipes for input, meaning unlike the other generators, that one already relies on gas pipes.