How should temperature management work?

[Nightinggale]

20 hours ago, Ipsquiggle said:

We're continuing to read your feedback and discussions on these mechanics, thanks so much for your support.

The best response to such a statement would be to provide more useful discussions.

Earlier I made a statement about temperature control and cooling. Rather than repeating myself, here is the statement.

On 7/5/2019 at 8:52 PM, Nightinggale said:

For ONI to be ONI, multiple valid solutions should be available, some more creative than others.

Let's compare it to using oil for power production. There is a simple solution of using a refinery. There is a more advanced solution of the petroleum boiler for increased efficiency and dupe-less operation. If you want to go really fancy, you can get natural gas for even higher efficiency, but it's also even harder to build. There are different versions of each step, each with different building costs, size and efficiency.

Temperature management needs to be "ONIfied". It needs the multiple steps and many valid solutions approach and in fact it needs even more than the oil industry because temperature can be an issue from day one on some of the new maps. There is added gameplay to temperature management with the new maps, but the tools to deal with this gameplay are lacking.

I thought about this after writing it and as much as I like this statement, it brings up a very important question: what would ONIfied temperature management be like?

We had more than 200 posts today for and against what is in the test branch, but interesting despite everybody having an opinion on this topic, nobody really talked about what we think Klei should actually do about the issue. It's all "better balanced" or "what they think is best" or something like that. Let's for a moment (well this thread) assume ONI to be an open source project and nothing happens unless the forum come to some common ground we mostly agree on. That will force us to think about what do we actually want. Also why do we want it that way?

We have two important design goals: welcoming new players and both new and old players should have fun playing.

From here I will refer to lessons. They are in the video below. The two important lessons here are lesson #4, which is about making use of prior knowledge to explain your game mechanics. An example would be refrigerator. Players know it helps keeping the food fresh because that's what it does when it has that name. The game doesn't have to explain it meaning it's a lot easier for new and casual players to understand.

In other to welcome new players, lesson #4 says heating and cooling should be easy to understand and get started with. Ok, there is heaters for air and water and there is an ice machine to cool stuff. People understand that intuitively. There is an ice-e fan for applying ice temperature somewhere. Tier 1 temperature control is complete.

The problem is cooling. It's dupe heavy and it actually moves heat much more than it deletes. Next tier is aquatuner, which also moves rather than deleting. Top tiers are steam turbines and venting into space.

Some people don't like venting into space (loss of possibly useful elements) and today people talked about not using steam turbines precisely because they are forced to use steam turbines. Ok, fine, add more options to keep people happy, but what? How do we figure out a way to get people to not fry on a volcanic active astroid?

People used the water sieve to get rid of heat. We mostly agree that it's not a good design. It also violates lesson #4 because logically sending water through sand will not change the temperature of the water other than moving towards the temperature of the sand. The problem is now that we agreed what we shouldn't do, what should we do?

As mentioned, the video on game design. It has 20 very good lessons, but I will let the video start at lesson #4 because that's what I mentioned already.

Other lessons worth mentioning:

14:37 Lesson #5: "Don't confuse interesting with fun". If adding thermodynamics ruins the fun, discard thermodynamics. The game is meant to be fun and not a physics simulator. However certain rules of physics applies due to lesson #4.

30:06 Lesson #10 "Leave room for the player to explore". This is the definition of ONI (at least to me). Don't just add "the" solution to problems. Make the tools generic enough to make the player make their own solutions. The oil boiler is a good example. Nothing constructed by the player is intended for the oil industry, but the result is better than anything the game has to offer ready made.

38:27 Lesson #13 "Make the fun part also the correct strategy to win". Plays will do what they have to in order to win (in ONI survive) regardless of it's fun or not. Make approaches to survive fun since that's the way players have fun.

43:41 Lesson #15 "Design the component for its intended audience". Not everybody wants to do the same in the game. Make sure the game is valid for all players. For instance if people don't like the steam turbine, make sure the game is playable without using the steam turbine. This means ensure multiple ways of accomplishing the same, but done in a way which gives different gaming experiences.

[axxionx12]

I think the ice maker could be a little more potent (delete 30-40% heat) and/or using with the fan would amplify the heat deletion. This will allow a straight forward solution that's already in game that is also new player friendly.

 

Amplifying the fan's cooling would also allow people to get more out of ice dug out of ice biomes, which newer people will likely do 

[Gurgel]

Well, two things I can think of are

1. An "air conditioner". This is a two-part device with a fluid-loop and some power need. One takes in heat and puts it into the liquid. That one is missing at the moment. The other part moves the heat from the liquid to the environment, similar to an aqua-tuner.

What I would do here is make the whole thing early-game friendly: Takes, say, 2 x 60W of power and pumping is already included in one of the parts. Moves a certain amount of DTUs per cycle. Initial loading with a selectable fluid by a dupe, no need for any "pipe magic". And automatic shut-off when either component gets withing 10C of vaporization or freezing temp. Of course, this needs to pump slower than the available pumps, and it must not be massively more efficient than the aquatuner and the like. And there would be quite a few applications for using only one of the components.  

2. A "heat sink". Basically a well-insulated fluid tank that has a very high specific heat and heats up or cools down very slowly. Needs to use a lot of material (some stone) and if you deconstruct it, you get the heat in the parts.

[BaloneyOs]

Consistency is arguably really important in a game built around planning. The minimum output temps wrecked consistency because polluted water of any temperature range from freezing to 40C was output at 40C for the same operating costs. In contrast the Ice Maker needs time proportional to the input temperature to chill its contents to a certain temperature.

If they had made it so that it was MORE expensive to heat up colder inputs (have machine output more heat for example) before outputting material it it would've still been more consistent with existing game mechanics. IMO a change like that would've been acceptable as well and temperature management in this game should stay sensible as long as it's not self-contradictory. Honestly there's a lot of design space.

Some currently "ONI-fied" temp simulations are kinda funky but do add to gameplay. For example in a vacuum even connected wires don't exchange heat but can conduct electricity 

[bobucles]

Is there a point to using the ice fan compared to say, dunking an tempshift plate of ice directly into tiles?

[Gurgel]

17 minutes ago, BaloneyOs said:

For example in a vacuum even connected wires don't exchange heat but can conduct electricity 

Space/vaccum cooling is basically a mess. Sure, you can drip water or you can blow gas, but that is all not very intuitive. 

[pacovf]

19 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

A "heat sink". Basically a well-insulated fluid tank that has a very high specific heat and heats up or cools down very slowly. Needs to use a lot of material (some stone) and if you deconstruct it, you get the heat in the parts.

I like this idea. I think it would be better if the heat sink was made only of solids, but I like it.

2 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Space/vaccum cooling is basically a mess. Sure, you can drip water or you can blow gas, but that is all not very intuitive. 

My hope is that they will add some kind of pipe that allows direct exchange between a building and the pipe, no intermediate medium necessary.

[bobucles]

Is there a heat sink better than water? A storage tank of water represents a lot of DTUs. The only other option is space age supercoolant. Most other materials will heat up and cool down far more readily.

Tempshift plates place a lot of mass into a small region. High mass = more heat sinking.

Storage units hold 20000kg of stuff. I dunno how easy it is to transfer heat, but that is a very compact amount of mass to try sinking heat with.

[Ambaire]

Why should the ice maker delete heat? The ice maker and ice fan are ways of moving heat around. That said, does the ice fan currently delete the ice? If so, I think that part should be reworked.

[Gurgel]

7 minutes ago, bobucles said:

Storage units hold 20000kg of stuff. I dunno how easy it is to transfer heat, but that is a very compact amount of mass to try sinking heat with.

Storage compactors are insulated to some degree, so basically unusable for this. I am thinking of a device that can hold, say, 100t of some stone in a 2x5 space or so and has liquid input and output. The same is possible for gas. The idea is from here: https://energilager.nu/en/the-project/ 

[axxionx12]

15 minutes ago, Ambaire said:

Why should the ice maker delete heat? The ice maker and ice fan are ways of moving heat around. That said, does the ice fan currently delete the ice? If so, I think that part should be reworked.

The ice maker is ideal for this type of ONI magic because it is labor intensive for dupes, requires bottled water, and is difficult to automate. Therefore, it provides an early game solution for heat management that can't be scaled up easily. Making it or the fan more potent seems to be a good solution for early game heat management.

 

Also I think the fan drops a bottle on the ground when finished, but not totally sure 

[Giltirn]

I think we should formalize heat storage by adding a device that takes in heat and some kind of medium (preferably a renewable one) and outputs little thermally sealed containers containing the material super-heated by the input heat. These could initially be stored and later either fired off into space or the contents dumped out into a liquid pool for power generation. This is already doable now to some extent using steel aquatuners but this is a high-power, high-tech solution. I envision something perhaps a little less power efficient but much smaller scale and lower tech. The machine would not delete heat, merely bottle it up for later use or for ejection into the infinite heat-sink of the void.

[Arcus2611]

I can see some rationale to the fixed output temp change, in that it's arguably more intuitive to new players, who aren't likely to realise fixed output temperatures are a thing, but will easily comprehend that hot input in > hot input out.

 

The problem then is the need for more cooling methods since existing solutions have been getting nerfed (other than the steam turbine, apparently). Personally I'd also like to see extreme cold also doing causing problems for some machines, instead of all machines only breaking down at high temps.

[EnderCN]

I don't have an easy answer but I will say the answer should be that you have to give up map resources in order to reduce heat and if you aren't careful you should use up too many resources and get yourself in trouble.  Loops that are completely self sustainable should not be a thing, you should always be worried that you are going to run out of something in the long run with every action you take in game.  The game was advertised as a limited resources can you survive game and that is what I want.  If you can make your base 100% self sustainable the game is broken imo.

[DarkMaster13]

5 minutes ago, Arcus2611 said:

I can see some rationale to the fixed output temp change, in that it's arguably more intuitive to new players, who aren't likely to realise fixed output temperatures are a thing, but will easily comprehend that hot input in > hot input out.

 

The problem then is the need for more cooling methods since existing solutions have been getting nerfed (other than the steam turbine, apparently). Personally I'd also like to see extreme cold also doing causing problems for some machines, instead of all machines only breaking down at high temps.

A minimum operating temperature also adds options for building materials that increase the minimum.  As for things that are damaged by the cold, batteries and engines come to mind immediately.  Running generators cold certainly can cause some cold damage to them, while batteries are often damaged simply by being cold regardless of charge.  So if you want to run something powered in a cold biome, you have to be prepared to spend a lot of metal on wires or to run the generators constantly so they aren't dropping below their operating temperature all the time and taking damage.

Generators could have a minimum operating temperature around -15 to -10 degrees C.  They'll stop taking damage once they've warmed themselves up, but will probably cool back down below that if you turn them off.  Batteries can be around the same or a little lower, but they take constant damage while the generators only take damage when turned on.

Other buildings can also have minimum temperatures, but they'd probably be much, much lower.  Generally needing to be below -100 degrees C before they start taking cold damage.  Notably this can't include the air pumps or liquid pumps, unless there's also a material they can be built out of that can run in liquid hydrogen without taking cold damage (-253 degrees C or 20 K).

[pacovf]

That would be cool, though I don’t think it’s happening for the official release.

[Giltirn]

19 minutes ago, EnderCN said:

I don't have an easy answer but I will say the answer should be that you have to give up map resources in order to reduce heat and if you aren't careful you should use up too many resources and get yourself in trouble.  Loops that are completely self sustainable should not be a thing, you should always be worried that you are going to run out of something in the long run with every action you take in game.  The game was advertised as a limited resources can you survive game and that is what I want.  If you can make your base 100% self sustainable the game is broken imo.

If you can't make a 100% sustainable base then "survival" is merely just going as long as you can before your inevitable demise, with the cycle count being some dark twisted score. I personally do not want to play such a game. Sustainability is my primary focus when I play, as I expect it is for many others.

[Dosephshih]

As being a causal player, I like the game to keep a little certain level of magic which is fun. I don’t prefer to be too realistic. 

For example the latent heat of change of state is not included, the mixed phase of water is not realistic, the effect of pressure on the boiling point is not included. All of these are not very obvious to those people not interested much on physics. (Although I doubt that people don’t like physics would like this game very much?)

And I think all these unrealistic are acceptable as a game. 

Btw, I was thinking if ethanol can be used to delete heat as it evaporate, however it brings the latent heat concept as mentioned.

i only hope that it will not delete the fun if it become too difficult to delete heat.

[Eternal Firesea]

I've been thinking about this, looking at al the posts here, and I think a large part of the issue is that people seem to view heat in a separate context from the "normal" gameplay elements: as an obstacle to overcome or a puzzle to solve to gain access to other features.  Something that, once you have a "solution", is out of the game.
I think it would work better if we viewed temperature management the same way we view the other parts of  base management:  as resource management.
Heat capacity is a resource, like water and oxygen, and generated heat is a waste product, like polluted water and carbon dioxide.  If produced heat is a waste product, we can deal with it like we do the others:  contain it, dispose of it, or process it into something useful.  I feel that, in that context, it's a lot easier to match temperature management and its tools up with the other parts of progression.
For instance, if the Ice-E Fan is the Oxygen Diffuser of temperature management, then you could see adding something like the Algae Terrarium, say, a small box filled with ice that adds heat capacity to the surrounding area, but a lot less aggressively than the fan does.  For earlier tools for processing, I have to point out a real-world device, the Stirling engine,a heat-based generator that is far less powerful than most industrial systems.
This analysis works for the other gameplay aspects of waste management.  It's usually pretty clear where polluted water comes from, and the earliest source of carbon dioxide is pretty obvious, but, as many here have pointed out, waste heat can come from unexpected places.  I had no idea until I checked the wiki while writing this post that the Oxygen Diffuser outputs air at 30C.

[BaloneyOs]

5 hours ago, Gurgel said:

Space/vaccum cooling is basically a mess. Sure, you can drip water or you can blow gas, but that is all not very intuitive. 

Agreed. Setting up an expensive cooling system just for robo miners does feel like a barren experience but that must've been the intended challenge? It's true that space as is would be much easier if it were convenient to cool stuff there (I say this but I've always just deconstructed overheating robo miners anyways ).

[Grey0ne]

I would propose the solution that exists in real life: thermal radiation.

In real life all objects emit thermal radiation, it is the only way to transfer "heat" through a vacuum and it is one of the fundamental mechanics of heat transfer. The side of an object in space that faces away from the sun cools down very, very quickly.

Of course you can not implement realistic thermal radiation for all objects and tiles, but you don't have to.You could have an area in our world that is exposed to space, but that is not on the top side of our rock. And there the tiles delete their heat very quickly and therefor simulate thermal radiation.

So our world would consist of these borders: 

top side: exposed to the sun and space, very hot, meteors, solar panels work.

bottom side: lava

lower left and right side: like it is now, neutronium or whatever

upper left and right side: exposed to space, no sun, all tiles that are exposed to space delete heat at a certain rate, maybe also meteors, they can come from all angles.

Some people might argue that this is too simple to be fun. But seriously, why does everything have to be super complicated. Step outside at night, you will realize that it has gotten colder. That is just how it works.

[DarkMaster13]

There's a day/night cycle, so that won't necessarily work.  It might be better to just have a radiator structure that requires space exposure and to be in darkness to function.  It then slowly cools itself down.  The thing is basically a large metal fin.  It will also cool whatever surface it's attached to, so you can stick it to a metal tile and run pipes/vents/conveyors through the tile carrying what you want cooled down.  They wouldn't be fast, but would at least serve as a way to sort of build your own weazeworts once you have space exposure.

[Hedning]

We have:

-Cooling from farming (WW)

-Cooling from exploration (AETN)

-Cooling from industry (steam engine/aquatuner)

-Cooling from game mechanics (using either mass annihilation [eg hydrogen generator] or body temp outputs [eg petroleum generator])

I'd say our cooling methods are still quite varied. In my base my sieve removed about 1 AETN worth of heat. Not that hard to replace.

My concern is for the new player, seeing nothing obvious to deal with heat. 

My objection is to those that thinks removing fixed outputs makes the game realistic. It changes nothing in this regard.

[Darkin Coaled]

What we need is more magic.

We had nullifiers and worts, now we pretty much only have nullifiers.

What ONI currently is is the real world. In the real world everything runs on steam turbines. Not everybody knows this but all power generation has a turbine in it. Power plants that burn something, whether it be coal, oil or gas? Those all have a steam turbine in the back. Nuclear reactors? Steam turbine as well (super high tech, I know).

The game is already magically letting us extract energy out of burning things without the extra step of "you now have a lot of heat, make it do work". Which is fine and all.

What the game doesn't do is provide game-appropriate silly ways of doing heat management. We had a magical plant that removed heat. It was magic and people liked it. Hell, I liked it. Now we have a sad, limited version of it and nobody wants to play with it anymore, and I agree as well.

We had a magical machine that provided ridiculous amounts of heating/cooling for almost zero cost and that was just wrong. It's a machine, don't make machines magical, make magical beans magical. Right? So a lot of people, me included, are glad that it's gone (back to it's utility).

Rust biome is lacking a critter, can we have one that eats heat? otherwise why is the biome in its natural form so cold? Make it be a critter that goes dormant in too high or too low temperatures. Make it not be too efficient and only increase its spawning rate and not heat deletion rate when tame and happy. Magic. Silly, game-appropriate magic. I would love those.

That's one example, think of more and you'll see that this makes a bit more sense and is more intuitive. Machines do machine stuff, magic does whatever magic does, in limited but useful ways.

[EnderCN]

7 hours ago, Giltirn said:

If you can't make a 100% sustainable base then "survival" is merely just going as long as you can before your inevitable demise, with the cycle count being some dark twisted score. I personally do not want to play such a game. Sustainability is my primary focus when I play, as I expect it is for many others.

We want very different games then.  I'm fine with changing the focus from getting supplies on your asteroid to getting them from space, but eventually everything on your asteroid needs to run out or what is the point.  If stuff isn't going to run out you just have another boring old building game.  Scarce resources is kind of this games thing imo.