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The EZ-Bead. An alternative bead pump / waterfall maker.


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Thanks to an observation by @greydaze and an explanation by @mathmanican, we have a new and simple way to make a bead pump... and other stuff.

Spoiler

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The observation was that when a mesh tile is placed directly underneath a liquid pump, the output becomes a tile of liquid rather than the ordinary behavior of entering another dimension until it hits something.

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This "bead" phenomenon is well studied by @mathmanican's various threads: 1, 2, 3. So it can do the same sorts of things here. Namely make waterfalls and bead pumps.

A review of the relevant rules and their applications here:

  • Liquids and gasses can swap tiles once per tick. (There are 5 ticks in 1 game second.)
  • Liquids exit a liquid vent once every 5 ticks.
  • Liquid beads will fall downward every tick until prevented by another liquid or solid.
  • Liquid beads are destroyed when falling and their mass is less than 10g.

To make easily make a bead, place a mesh tile just below a liquid vent. Use 10g or more per packet. Because beads can sometimes split when interacting with other things, you may want to use 20g-200g per packet if you care.

This will give you the following pattern (only the top vent is active).

pattern.thumb.png.b718ca0c9cdfb8afe7db9e0cf8fe37be.png

An "ideal" bead pump has a bead every other tile. You will notice this is impossible by the nature of the timing no matter where we place any other vents.

Thanks to reasons, you can actually make a perfect bead pump.

Spoiler

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You can also make these other patterns by adding more vents / differently spaced vents.

Spoiler

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And you can combine them together side by side as above, but not everything works. Here are some ways to fail:

Spoiler

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No way to get dummy thicc multi-elemental waterfalls, it seems. I do like that viscoblob.

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3 hours ago, nakomaru said:

An "ideal" bead pump has a bead every other tile. You will notice this is impossible by the nature of the timing no matter where we place any other vents.

Am I reading it right that it is feasible even without debug/sandbox owing it to overdoing?

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3 hours ago, flapee said:

Am I reading it right that it is feasible even without debug/sandbox owing it to overdoing?

Yes. You can make a prefect bead pump with a valve outside sandbox but it requires two liquids. This lets you use one liquid to form the beads.

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1 hour ago, OxCD said:

Is it sucking up gases as bead-pump does ? It doesn't seem... :-/

Basically, yes, but you can't get a perfect seal that i'm aware of.

The following layout uses 60g/s total, 6 vents, 2 active on each column.

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It will rapidly consume 2kg atmosphere and fill up to very high pressure.

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A few minutes later:

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But you can't really get to vacuum or have a perfect seal.

And you can't go over 1000kg or the top vent over pressurizes :(

I'm using it to stimulate/funnel PO2 for my clay production silo.

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On 8/13/2019 at 11:59 AM, nakomaru said:

No way to get dummy thicc multi-elemental waterfalls, it seems.

Found a way, and thought you'd like to see it. It's quite space intensive, but can be expanded as many tiles thick as you want (all valves are set at 10g), and use different liquids...

waterfall-stable-ezbead.thumb.png.bf86981eedbf17db62a874e6e7cd4090.pngmultiliquid.thumb.png.f2fb0ac7c5a14877aaf985763edf2a77.png

I've spent the last few days analyzing liquid mechanics ( @f4rtux is hoping to add the key liquid mechanics properties to https://oni-db.com/ soon, and I'll be posting my findings too). The previous attempts failed because of the following rule:

  • When two liquids, side by side, are falling, and nothing is below them, the liquid to the right changes from bead form to drip form (disappears from game till bottom of fall). If you have several liquids in a row horizontally, and nothing is below them, then every second liquid will stop beading.

The above waterfall was an experiment to prove my theory. The key to make this work is to get the right most waterfall formed before you start the next. You do have to build waterfall from right to left, but you can make some gorgeous looking things. 

FYI, for those hoping to use this in base at some point ( @Cairath I'm thinking of you) the bottom of the fall looks like a complete mess.. I think I would use mini liquid pumps to catch the liquid, mid fall, rather than let it hit the ground (as once it does, the multi liquid mayhem is quite a mess, propogate upwards and break the fall...). 

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2 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

Does this persist through save/load

No. However it will reform by itself upon save load. However, an adaptation of the bead pump (not this EZ bead) can persist upon save load (and with a slight modification, thanks to my dive into liquid mechancis) you can make the waterfall off either the left or right side now. I'll explain more why the following works in my liquid mechanics post (coming soon). 

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With the above structure, (both sides, left side, right side), you can make the waterfall persist upon save/load. It's all about making sure the quantity of liquid in the top middle tile stays above a specific threshold.

  • Each tick of the game (0.2 sec) you loose 7/16 of the liquid (4/16 goes left, and 3/16 goes right).
  • Liquid vents output their contents once a second, hence the need for 5 vents (5 ticks of the game) to make the EZ bead waterfall. 
  • Save load resets the liquid vents, forcing them to output exactly 0.4 seconds after the game loads (two ticks upon save/load). 
  • As such, a save/load can result in a worst case scenario of not getting liquid for a full 6 ticks (1.2 sec) instead of just 1 sec. This extra tick can be accounted for with the bead pump/waterfall, but not the EZ-bead pump, as it relies 100% on exact timing.

You could force the EZ-bead pump to persist upon load, if you paid attention to the exact timing of when you saved, otherwise it would fail 4/5 times upon save load...

2 hours ago, Lifegrow said:

Do mesh tiles at the bottom-most tile prevent the splurginess ?

Mesh tiles do nothing to help. My guess is the splurginess you refer to has to do with the fact that mesh tiles can force liquid to bead (when leaving vents) instead of dripping (disappearing from game and falling till it hits a tile and then zooms upwards to the top of whatever lake it is in).  

I did, however, find a nice way to make this particular setup stabilize. 

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Solid tiles (which airflow counts as here) will convert beading liquid into drip form. The middle tile, under the salt water, just collects the salt water which then drips off both sides. The key is to make sure there is zero contact with the liquid below, and the waterfall.  One single bead of water in either the salt or petro columns, will cause problems for ages....

More coming soon.  You made a comment earlier this week about liquid mechanics, let's see:

On 8/31/2019 at 3:25 PM, Lifegrow said:

Got you covered bud : It's "Janky as all balls"

I'd love to make it less "Janky", and hopefully provide a clear understanding, similar to @Yothiel and @wachunga's work with heat transfer. If anyone knows of post that makes this clear, please direct me.  I've got a monster post (been forming it in GoogleDocs for the past few days) coming. 

 

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I guess I'll finish with a picture of a 4 wide, and 5 wide, waterfall that is stable upon load.  Getting things stable with different liquids is tricky, especially if the "min horizontal flow" (see here) is different (water and salt have 0.01, whereas crude and petro have 0.1). If you want a single liquid waterfall, and you want it to persist upon load, then 300g/s on each of the vents exiting above the naptha, and 10g/s on the vents above the mesh tiles, will get you a stable waterfall.  With these same ratings, you can mass produce this structure to just about any size, provided your "min horizontal flow" rating is 0.01 (water, salt water, brine, polluted water, super coolant, etc.).  You could even do this with liquid oxygen....  To get a petro waterfall, just multiply the 300g/s by 10 to get 3000g/s (since 0.1 = 10 * 0.01). You can leave the 10g/s valves alone, infact they can probably be set to zero at this point and never used again (they are needed to jump start the right facing water fall, but then are not needed, and 10g/s is the min amount that will persist as its own bead). 

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Here's the save if you want to play with it. It also has the 3 liquid structure pictured above, which will dissolve and then reform upon load. 

WaterFallBead.sav

 

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2 hours ago, mathmanican said:

I guess I'll finish with a picture of a 4 wide, and 5 wide, waterfall that is stable upon load.  Getting things stable with different liquids is tricky, especially if the "min horizontal flow" (see here) is different (water and salt have 0.01, whereas crude and petro have 0.1). If you want a single liquid waterfall, and you want it to persist upon load, then 300g/s on each of the vents exiting above the naptha, and 10g/s on the vents above the mesh tiles, will get you a stable waterfall.  With these same ratings, you can mass produce this structure to just about any size, provided your "min horizontal flow" rating is 0.01 (water, salt water, brine, polluted water, super coolant, etc.).  You could even do this with liquid oxygen....  To get a petro waterfall, just multiply the 300g/s by 10 to get 3000g/s (since 0.1 = 10 * 0.01). You can leave the 10g/s valves alone, infact they can probably be set to zero at this point and never used again (they are needed to jump start the right facing water fall, but then are not needed, and 10g/s is the min amount that will persist as its own bead). 

waterfalls-4and5.thumb.png.db51dfd992aee240f09b57fc33efab58.png

Here's the save if you want to play with it. It also has the 3 liquid structure pictured above, which will dissolve and then reform upon load. 

WaterFallBead.sav

 

Been having a little tinker with this (you may recall from my little shine bug tinkerings that I loves me some watery wibbly walls).

Sadly I've got some weird shenanigans happening as usual - this time with extreme temperature doowhatsitsisms... Wondered if you'd experienced the same?

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That there is solid petroleum - made solid by a vent that decided it would randomly change it's lifestyle choices and become an super cooler boy.

I'm using lead for the heavier liquid instead of crude as i'm messing with a sour gas boiler thang, however this has really thrown a spanner in the works :D 

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