Summarising Cooling Methods Post Fixed Output Temps

[Lurve]

8 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Sure, but it can be a fast process, if they code it to be.

Yes, but they'd have to code it.  It would be more realistic and much easier to make a new machine, slap on the telescope's space detection code and add some coolant tubes.  If they want to make it complicated to use, they could make it require brine or chlorine, so we'd need a carefully regulated heat exchanger as well.

7 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Actually I am not really taking offense. But that comparison is a good way to get punched when you make it to an engineer and since you know that, you obviously meant to insult. Not good.

It's only an insult because you're taking it as one.  Objecting that things are being built to spec instead of having creatively usable side effects is an artist's objection.  This comes as news to a lot of engineers, but there is art in engineering.  Without it, it's just craftsmanship.

 

[DonDegow]

Does the steam turbine now outputs water > 95C depending on steam temperature input?

It would make it actually way more power productive but deletes heat way slower...

If not then, why the discrepancy with other fixed outputs?

[goboking]

24 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

Well, Troxism made a very good job on that summary but I find most of the solutions not fun.

As long as you recognize the difference between "I don't like those solutions" and "there are no solutions" we can have a productive discussion. 

[Yunru]

1 minute ago, DonDegow said:

If not then, why the discrepancy with other fixed outputs?

Untested (personally), but because the Steam Turbine is designed to delete heat, the others aren't.

[Nightinggale]

If we go back to the original topic, my main concern here isn't about the water sieve specifically. It's heat deletion or rather heat management. The water sieve change is just the last drop of a series of changes lately.

The main issue I see is new players starting a new game. They grow food, the plants get too hot and they starve to death. They do that one or a few times and then there is a bad review because the game is too difficult.

What the game needs is early, mid and late game temperature management and it has to be new player usable. Yes the water sieve cooling is actually horrible design because it's not intuitive (see video). It used to heat up the base during early game and new players gets confused where the heat comes from. This haven't changed. Likewise using it to delete heat isn't intuitive. It got removed, which arguably is a good thing. The heating part should be removed too.

The problem is then what? What should the player do instead? There is a plant with a description, which says it deletes heat. New players understand that the air around that plant will get colder. Nice, it can stay in the game (from a new player understanding of the game).

There is an ice machine. It creates ice. Melting ice cools down the area. New players understand that too. Aquatuner. Cools liquid and heats up itself. A heat exchanger. That's an easy to understand concept too. It moves heat, but still it's intuitive and understandable.

 

The problem is that the understandable cooling techs got nerfed. Players will then encounter geyser and suffer the heat death because the the intuitive cooling approaches are too weak.

There is only two really valid options left and those are venting into space and the steam turbine. Those are both very late game solutions in the eyes of new players and for experienced players they are much later than the water sieve.

People talk about "just don't produce heat", but that's not a solution because it doesn't deal with the issue of geysers. It's also certainly not a solution on hot maps where you need to cool because the map itself will slowly heat up the base regardless of what you do.

Arguing "you use the wrong strategy. Do as I do (or plan to do)" isn't a valid argument when it's about making the game friendly towards new players.

 

This isn't about me. I can always just make a mod (and I really might depending on what Klei does). It's about a balanced game for new players. If the game turns new player repulsive, the reviews will be bad, Klei will fail to sell as they should and the community will slowly (or fast) die out.

 

The entire video is interesting for game design, but here I set it to start at lesson 4, which fits this topic.

 

[mathmanican]

35 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

And if a device does "magic" (compared to a more or less arbitrary reference system), so what? As long as it does that magic reliably and you can depend on it, there is no reason not to use it.

Bingo. Add liquid duplication to the cooling options. The ice maker essentially creates a 100% increases in mass at 0C water when coupled with rails. Its very over powered. It's reliable. 

[Darkin Coaled]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

Lots of words....

As an engineer I must object. Your prof is right, if it works you should use it, even if it's counter-intuitive and looks just plain wrong. But what you're doing is not engineering with what you have, matching bits to other bits to achieve the desired results. You're moaning that the bits you were given before have morphed into other bits and you want your old toys back.

No. You do not get to quote a wise man and then go on bitching. You're an engineer..? ENGINEER THINGS.

[camelot]

23 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

So "cooling metal volcanoes" is as far as your understanding of "cooling liquids" goes? No other possible applications you can think of?

This question is pointless because for difficult tasks like cooling volcanoes and liquid hydrogen/oxygen, you'll always combine worts with radiators/turbines or/and destroy liquid methods. And it's not the main point of this post.

Before the update, the most sensical thing might be to cool water for berries and cool steam geysers with 5-6 worts. Right now, it's very difficult to even get worts in some worlds. So it feels kinda lack a way to cool things in mid game, before you can build turbines

[Xuhybrid]

In my opinion, all this change does is reduce the viable options and delivers none as a replacement. It also makes the game even less intuitive than it already was. Why does it only obey heat transfer in one direction? At least if it's magically ignoring heat in both directions, that makes more logical sense. A sustainable colony ends up creating a lot of heat and making use of geysers provides a lot of heat to deal with. You'd think adding in that extra challenge to mid and late game wouldn't prompt nerfs on two early game cooling options. To me it feels like you have multiple people making changes at Klei without communicating with each other.

Either your machine is magic and it has a fixed temperature output or it doesn't. What is this half and half bull----?

[JonnyMonroe]

5 minutes ago, camelot said:

This question is pointless because for difficult tasks like cooling volcanoes and liquid hydrogen/oxygen, you'll always combine worts with radiators/turbines or/and destroy liquid methods. And it's not the main point of this post.

Before the update, the most sensical thing might be to cool water for berries and cool steam geysers with 5-6 worts. Right now, it's very difficult to even get worts in some worlds. So it feels kinda lack a way to cool things in mid game, before you can build turbines

Find an ocean biome or a large pool of water in a slime or ice biome, build an aquatuner in it and run p water through as a coolant. Bam. A sufficiently large body will take literally hundreds of cycles before heat becomes an issue and if you still don't have a turbine by then just swap to another water body. Assuming you set a bypass on the aquatuner it won't even need to run that often as early and mid game bases simply don't generate enough heat to warrant it.

[Risu]

18 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

What the game needs is early, mid and late game temperature management and it has to be new player usable. Yes the water sieve cooling is actually horrible design because it's not intuitive (see video). It used to heat up the base during early game and new players gets confused where the heat comes from. This haven't changed. Likewise using it to delete heat isn't intuitive. It got removed, which arguably is a good thing. The heating part should be removed too.

What the game needs is to stop creating energy out of nothing and destroying energy out of something. Take plants for example. Why is the mass a constant and why does the produce not reduce mass even though it has mass itself. Just added energy into the world by harvesting that plant. The complete disregard for thermodynamics has really put me off of this game.
 

[avc15]

ONI's simulation and real physics have to diverge somewhere. It's a slippery slope.

 

Yesterday they chose to draw the line back there, today they choose to draw the line up here. Some internal reasons that we are not going to hear about.

[Lurve]

2 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Find an ocean biome or a large pool of water in a slime or ice biome, build an aquatuner in it and run p water through as a coolant. Bam. A sufficiently large body will take literally hundreds of cycles before heat becomes an issue and if you still don't have a turbine by then just swap to another water body. Assuming you set a bypass on the aquatuner it won't even need to run that often as early and mid game bases simply don't generate enough heat to warrant it.

You don't even need an ocean biome.  Dupes constantly generate liquid from the bathrooms.  Cool an insulated bristle farm using an aquatuner in a pool of piss, pump out the excess and dump it somewhere else.  The biomes to the side are completely covered in abyssalite.  If you fill one of those up and still can't deal with the heat you have bigger problems on your hands.

[Yunru]

11 minutes ago, Risu said:

What the game needs is to stop creating energy out of nothing and destroying energy out of something. Take plants for example. Why is the mass a constant and why does the produce not reduce mass even though it has mass itself. Just added energy into the world by harvesting that plant. The complete disregard for thermodynamics has really put me off of this game.
 

Okay, let's say that does happen. What does it add?

(Hint: Nothing)

[Nightinggale]

13 minutes ago, Risu said:

What the game needs is to stop creating energy out of nothing and destroying energy out of something. Take plants for example. Why is the mass a constant and why does the produce not reduce mass even though it has mass itself. Just added energy into the world by harvesting that plant. The complete disregard for thermodynamics has really put me off of this game.

If the game honors thermodynamics, the next step is honoring gravitational pull, meaning the gravity isn't the same on all cells. Water shouldn't flow down right below a heavy bolder because it's so massive compared to the rest of the astroid and mining it should alter gravity too. Next is the printing pod. Why doesn't it consume power?

The game aims for good gameplay rather than precise physics and that's actually want we want. Yes it sounds nice what you say, but if it's actually implemented, it would provide horrible gameplay and nobody (not even you) would play it.

Lesson #5 matches this issue (in spoiler this time because I already linked to this video on this very page).

Spoiler

 

 

[avc15]

I kind of want to see how people tackle the new difficulty. I hope klei don't just revert, let it ride a while.

[goboking]

2 minutes ago, avc15 said:

I kind of want to see how people tackle the new difficulty. I hope klei don't just revert, let it ride a while.

The problem is that they don't have a while.  If the game is to be released sometime this month then they've got to get things squared away.  For that reason, I question the wisdom of making such a big change now, so close to the deadline.

[avc15]

this is klei we're talking about here - they'll release it when they think it's done.

[camelot]

26 minutes ago, JonnyMonroe said:

Find an ocean biome or a large pool of water in a slime or ice biome, build an aquatuner in it and run p water through as a coolant. Bam. A sufficiently large body will take literally hundreds of cycles before heat becomes an issue and if you still don't have a turbine by then just swap to another water body. Assuming you set a bypass on the aquatuner it won't even need to run that often as early and mid game bases simply don't generate enough heat to warrant it.

You should give this advice to the new players. I've played this game around 1700 hours and actually very ok with this change. I always think that Klei should make their games (in general) easier for new players and harder for veterans. But not this one. For totally new players, I guess that only small amount of them (10-20%) would have the patience and knowledge to figure out how to deal with heat mid game

9 minutes ago, avc15 said:

I kind of want to see how people tackle the new difficulty. I hope klei don't just revert, let it ride a while.

For me, aquatuner + turbine. Built them anyway to deal with heat from refining steels

[avc15]

6 minutes ago, camelot said:

For me, aquatuner + turbine all the time

Rephrasing. Yes, of course. But the real question is how you reach cycle 200 i.e. before you have or can easily make use of those techs. Especially on the more hostile planets.

[Junksteel]

51 minutes ago, goboking said:

As long as you recognize the difference between "I don't like those solutions" and "there are no solutions" we can have a productive discussion. 

No need for further discussion on my part. The game isn't unplayble, the problems are manageable. It's proven fact already and I wont insist in the contrary. It's just that I don't understand why nerfing the previous tools and then adding a heat increaser in the place of heat deleter. I don't find the solutions fun and have no interest to prove my way to play is better or more fair or something. It's a design decision.  If it matters (which I don't think it does) I wont bother with steam turbine setups everywhere just to prove how good of a player I am. It's a nightmare just to think of it.

Devs decided it is a good change for the game and I wish the best for project future as I had lots of fun with ONI to the present day. But why doing so radical changes right before the release? Dividing the audience with new skill system, new immunity system and now all the cooling nerfs. I think it was a bad move to pull all those things out of the hat in the last moment without proper time for testing and discussion. People are so mad because some are emotionally attached to the game and it is becoming another different game really fast. Is it good? May be... for some.

[camelot]

12 minutes ago, avc15 said:

Rephrasing. Yes, of course. But the real question is how you reach cycle 200 i.e. before you have or can easily make use of those techs. Especially on the more hostile planets.

By hot planets you mean Aridio and Volcanea? Hell, I feel that Volcanea is even easier to expand early game than Verdante due to algae and water. With a bit of luck with reed fibers, I can build those things in Cycle 50

[Guest]

So many responses are just "use the meta. it works. it's fun for me so it should be fun for you too. Shut up and quit whining."

For a sandbox game to be fun for me, it needs more options to experiment with, not less. I do not care about the realism of the building or the physics. I care about the fact a major form of heat reduction was removed without providing anything new to replace it. Thus eliminating possible build options that were available to me one patch ago. That would be fine if new options were available as a replacement. People say this change will "force people to be creative". Sorry, but I don't need incentive to experiment. It's why I play the game in the first place.

Let me give an example. I like playing with self imposed rules. The latest has been the "no wort, no aetn" rule. I found it to be a refreshingly fun way to play. Now that play option just became a straight path to aquatuners and turbines. I will give it a single playthrough but I know already it is just going to be a slog because there are no new challenges, just tools removed from my toolbox.

[Nightinggale]

20 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

The game isn't unplayble, the problems are manageable. It's proven fact already and I wont insist in the contrary.

I would debate the "proven fact" because of the simple fact that the topic is a change, which was made yesterday and many players have skipped a day because crashes were also added. I'm not saying it isn't manageable. I'm saying the current setup is mostly untested, hence the gameplay effect isn't "proven".

20 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

I don't find the solutions fun and have no interest to prove my way to play is better or more fair or something.

I fully agree with that statement. When people say they can manage temperature by not generating heat, then I wouldn't be surprised if they can actually do that, at least on some maps. However that's not the same as it makes the game more fun to play. In fact I don't want to play like that. I'm not calling the water sieve perfect. I'm pointing out that there is currently no suitable early/mid game replacement strong enough to make the game fun for me.

[Christophlette]

18 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

But why doing so radical changes right before the release?

Often, game developers will work on getting all the functionnalities of a game working. Then at the end, they will try to balance everything. All functionnalities are now in the game, so they're doing some balancing.

20 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

I think it was a bad move to pull all those things out of the hat in the last moment without proper time for testing

I wouldn't say "without proper testing" honestly. Because the game is still in testing mode. It's not out yet and the bugs are only on the preview branch. The testing of the test version.

 

22 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

and discussion

That one is there since the start. Klei doesn't communicate very well. They keep us informed on the global roadmap and release dates but that's about it. I'm on your side on that matter.