Disappointed with late game

[Nebbie]

On 8/4/2020 at 6:34 PM, KittenIsAGeek said:

...
If a "fix" is ever implemented for the smelter, I would imagine it would be making the smelted material come out at the same temperature as the coolant.  It would change things completely if your steel came out in liquid form and promptly melted your smelter.

It's weird the glass forge spits out liquid glass, but the metal refinery puts out solid metal, when the whole way the refinery works is based on the metal's melting heat. The glass forge is actually in my opinion a more interesting building to work with.
Really, I'm not a fan of how much energy the metal refinery can produce, because it rewards the more experienced players, but severely hurts the less experienced ones (and the rock crusher's inefficiency just contributes to this, while smooth hatches are a noob trap); refining metal in ONI is kind of a strange difficulty wall. Unfortunately, molten metal coming out would just make that worse.

Smooth hatches should really output the 25% lost ore mass as coal. Hell, make the refinery itself spit out 25% of the mass as rock instead of metal so it's not getting you a resource advantage to use, too. Then maybe the refinery can become crazy cool.

On 8/4/2020 at 4:36 PM, mathmanican said:

...
They decided @Zarquan's ice maker shenanigans were too much, so bye-bye to that mechanic, but melting aquatuners is pretty simple (maybe this too will pass).
...

I really think melting aquatuners is going to go away, for the simple reason that machines should overheat before melting logically and so that newer players aren't as screwed by things not being done right. Really, I think the aquatuner in general right now is in a bad state where it's the lynchpin of almost every base; .

[mathmanican]

28 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

the glass forge

With the flaking updates, the solid/liquid transition on glass is actually one of the most heat producing new additions to the game.  Harnessing it, via flaking is a tad tricky, and some day I may return to optimize it. I hope someone else beats me too it, and we start seeing new bandwagon of glass forge abusers. 

ONI has so many interesting mechanics that are NOT like our world.  Trying to update one mechanic for the sole purpose of making it "more realistic" creates lots of other consequences. Updating to improve gameplay, or prevent egregious abominations from existing, comes with other risks. As a very recent example, fixing the temp-swap bug which plagued the community for the last year (which led to massive abominations) has improved gameplay for many people (allowing a steam heat battery to actually work), but also made gas heat transfer abominable and basically worthless. Sure, it improved some gameplay issues, but crippled another. The devs actually tried to fix the left-to-right counterflow liquid heat exchanger bug, but the tiny fix ended with very unwanted things. 

[Nebbie]

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

...
ONI has so many interesting mechanics that are NOT like our world.  Trying to update one mechanic for the sole purpose of making it "more realistic" creates lots of other consequences. Updating to improve gameplay, or prevent egregious abominations from existing, comes with other risks. As a very recent example, fixing the temp-swap bug which plagued the community for the last year (which led to massive abominations) has improved gameplay for many people (allowing a steam heat battery to actually work), but also made gas heat transfer abominable and basically worthless. Sure, it improved some gameplay issues, but crippled another. The devs actually tried to fix the left-to-right counterflow liquid heat exchanger bug, but the tiny fix ended with very unwanted things. 

I would say this is the big thing that gets missed most of the time when people argue "the devs left it in a year, so it must be intended!" Even despite the best efforts of programmers, things are often spaghetti as much as any lategame base's infrastructure, and ripping something out has real risks.
On "realism" in particular, I see a lot of people argue in a way that I think misses the point; it's not that ONI by some law has to be like reality, but that good game design in a game about learning and physics involves in-game learning and real-world learning reinforcing each other, and as well, any game design should avoid punishing players for doing the intuitive* thing, before considering other issues.

*Some counterintuitive things as examples (yes, I'm calling these bad game design):

Spoiler

1. Copper, known for crazy thermal conductivity in real life, is barely better than lead or iron, and utterly crushed by Aluminum of all things.
2. Most plants don't care about carbon dioxide, unlike real life. The only actual plant that recycles air for you doesn't produce more seeds ever, despite already being one of the most labor and resource-intensive ways to get oxygen.
3. Algae terraria consume algae instead of produce, generally suck compared alternatives...but can delete heat.
4. The coal generator is terrible at producing carbon dioxide, despite being the one generator that takes in what is basically pure carbon. It also doesn't use oxygen (and neither do other generators or the kiln), which contributes to the current meta being that your main problem is often too much oxygen, in the game Oxygen Not Included.
5. The glass forge quarters mass for no apparent reason.
6. Insulation is bad for insulating very cold liquids, because of its thermal properties plus flaking mechanics.

 

[mathmanican]

56 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

any game design should avoid punishing players for doing the intuitive* thing

Great comments, and I agree on lots of points.  The one place I completely disagree is the word you put an asterisk after, namely "intuitive." 

What does "intuitive" mean in ONI.  If I think ONI is supposed to be physics simulator, then clearly the things you mentioned above are out of whack. But this all supposes that "I think ONI is supposed to be a physics simulator." To me, ONI is not a physics simulator. It has some fun physics principles in play. But the entire "one-element-per-tile" mechanic, along with a complete lack of regard to gravity, the ideal gas law, and more, instantly means that physics is out the window.  That hopefully becomes apparent to a new player within the first few hours of game play. Yet, even 1000+ hours in, many players continue to demand "realism" when ONI clearly will never reach it. 

Everything you mentioned above doesn't appear "unintuitive" to me. Each building, each animal, each plant, each liquid/gas/solid, each object in ONI, has a rule that makes it tick.  To me, the joy in the game comes from learning how take these rules, combine them, and have fun. 

Spoiler

1. Copper.  Yeah, the properties of things don't match real life.  It doesn't take long to figure this out.  So what.  The fact that you actually get to learn to deal with heat flow in almost the exact same ways as real life, it pretty fun. Conduction computations are pretty fun to work with.  But what you learn in game doesn't quite transfer to real life either, as in real life there is a connection between mass and surface area (hence larger mass often results in greater heat flow), but that's completely false in ONI.  The fact that ONI is NOT like reality (compare/contrast) has helped me actually improve my understanding of real life heat conduction.
2. Plants.  I've never once thought they behaved like real life. The game tells you right off the bat how they work, and it clearly doesn't behave like real life.  Instead, I immediately started asking, "How can I optimize this interesting mechanic." Oxyferns - the one you mention specifically - are quite fun to abuse.  You can get a large dupe colony living off pip-planted ferns (zero dupe work), provided you are willing to have your dupes basically hold their breath 90% of the time.  Last time I played Oasis, I never bothered with any other oxygen than this, till I had insulated my entire base, and then expanded to the rest of the map and brought algae back from the surrounding biomes (maybe 50+ cycles out). I had 12 dupes living off a handful of oxyferns. Some might call this "unintuitive".  I call it, "use what you got."
3. Algae terrariums - I'm guessing you don't like the PW off-gassing mechanics (too exploity?).  Arguments can be made that this building is the most efficient way to get oxygen (in terms of resource cost). 
4. All the buildings and generators tell you exactly what they do. There is nothing unintuitive at all here to me, unless I have the expectation of "realism".  
5. The building says what the outputs will be, so done. I'm sure someone could suggest a "volume" reason on realism (but then that confuses the volume/mass issue related to conduction).
6. insulation is AWESOME for insulating cold things, once you get over the initial cool down.  If you use anything else, you still have to deal with the initial cool down, and then you also have to deal with cooling stuff down FOREVER.  Or, you learn how to use vacuum, or some other way to circumvent heat transfer, and then use that approach.  This just requires that you learn how to use the tools given (not try to imagine how you would do it in real life).  

 I think a lot of complaints about ONI boil down to what we expect from the game. My expectation from ONI is that I'll have a working game that provides me some fun (hopefully enough fun to account for the 20-something I paid). I don't expect realism (though I've learned more about heat exchangers, sprengel pumps, and many other real world contraptions because of ONI than any schooling I've ever had). For me, the game is very intuitive, and most of the time consistent. 

[Nebbie]

37 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

...
What does "intuitive" mean in ONI.  If I think ONI is supposed to be physics simulator, then clearly the things you mentioned above are out of whack. But this all supposes that "I think ONI is supposed to be a physics simulator." To me, ONI is not a physics simulator. It has some fun physics principles in play. But the entire "one-element-per-tile" mechanic, along with a complete lack of regard to gravity, the ideal gas law, and more, instantly means that physics is out the window.  That hopefully becomes apparent to a new player within the first few hours of game play. Yet, even 1000+ hours in, many players continue to demand "realism" when ONI clearly will never reach it. 

Everything you mentioned above doesn't appear "unintuitive" to me. Each building, each animal, each plant, each liquid/gas/solid, each object in ONI, has a rule that makes it tick.  To me, the joy in the game comes from learning how take these rules, combine them, and have fun. 

...

Ah, I forgot to mention something. The key point is that players do not exist as blank slates, they exist with preconceived ideas from real life, and so have some expectations that the things in ONI with names from real life obey similar properties to those they have in real life. Defying these expectations without a good reason creates problems, as then players are left frustrated and having to spend more time looking at game-specific information.
You can of course flush all that real-world knowledge down the toilet, but doing so is not generally satisfying; it is more satisfying to see tons of parallels, to learn a thing in ONI, and then learn about it in real life, or vice versa. Ideally, you even learn about a thing in real life, come to ONI, and find better gameplay from knowing it. Coming in with no expectations of similarity makes it harder to reason about and figure out game systems, as you must spend time on even basic properties. While differences can sometimes enable learning, they often just lead to frustration; some incorrect expectations will exist anyways with realism, because of imperfect player knowledge, and it's better to limit things mostly to that so that then when players correct those expectations, they are learning about real stuff, which feels rewarding.

Also, to harp on copper a moment, even if it wasn't specifically copper, there should be something with that high of a thermal conductivity as a solid; this creates problems in many designs reliant on solid tiles and stacks the deck so far in the direction of convection that it can lead to pretty much ignoring conduction in all but later game or very optimized builds; this is actually limiting gameplay right now.
Why punish players for trying to use the stuff they've heard is good in real life, and have as the replacement something much worse that limits build potential?

I actually like the polluted oxygen mechanics (aside of Morbs and Pufts); my problem with algae terraria is that they're a little too simple at the start, they don't do what you'd initially expect, and when you try to make them fully work with later stuff, it just isn't very rewarding because of that. Oxyferns by contrast are a little more complicated to get working, and provide a slight challenge with careful management of gas flow...only to then be completely nonscalable hot garbage anyways. Overall, I'm not satisfied with the current state of oxygen in this game, electrolyzers are just a little too good (they should probably take more power, so that they can't self-power while providing spare hydrogen, so then a reason to use the plant solutions would be lower power cost in the midgame).

[mathmanican]

3 hours ago, Nebbie said:

The key point is that players do not exist as blank slates, they exist with preconceived ideas

Of course. Earth, Fire, Water, Air are the four elements that everything derives from....  What other expectations are there? My slate is very full.

On a more serious note, this is precisely the tough balance, dealing with preconceive ideas (whether they are correct or incorrect). The one-element-per-tile rule makes using realistic values for many thing impractical (there is zero relation between mass/volume/pressure and so much more). And what percentage of people playing ONI come in knowing the different thermal transfer properties of various metals?  My guess is that most people playing the game (kids under 20?) will think, "metal should transfer heat nicely, and the metals I find later in the game should be better than the metals I find early game, and space metals should be totally awesome." This is precisely how the game currently moves (with aluminum being an interesting exception).  It's pretty clear that the 75C overheat temp on things is arbitrary, and you quickly learn that in ONI the key to increasing this arbitrary constraint is "find gold" or "make steel." 

I'm going to guess your background includes something that gave you specific experience with different type of metals (material science?).  Mine is pure mathematics. Something in your background gave you training to know things about material properties so you know exactly which ones to pick in real life (or you looked them up because of the game - Klei won and educated someone -  and are now frustrated they didn't pick the exact values and preserve real life relationships).  My background (a PhD in mathematics, with plenty of time spent with PDEs, heat flow, gas diffusion, etc., from a theoretical point of view) did not give me any intuitive notion. I know that different metals have different properties (I just slap a constant in place), but I don't bother with specific materials (the "pure", hence "nonapplied", modifier).

Because of ONI, I have since learned tons about real world heat transfer, because I wanted to know how the game differed from real life. I was never annoyed that the game chose different values than real life, and assumed the devs picked values that made things reasonable for game play sake. It made perfect sense to me when they swapped to using DTUs, as too many people got upset by the disconnect between actual life and the game.

You could say that I had a "blank slate" in material properties. I wonder what proportion of the population has a "blank slate" with respect to material properties of metals. I could be the only anomaly, but I'm going to bet that both you and I are exceptions, and kids under 20 form a much larger market share. For many of them, general "earth, water, fire, air" principles may be the only slate they have to work with. For them, this game introduces so many awesome principles that move them in the right direction (clearly not perfect, but game play matters too).  

You are absolutely correct that the more "real science" a player knows, the simpler it is have unmet expectations about what the game "should" have. I can see how it would be frustrating from that point of view.  I also am going to guess that this is a very small fraction of players. I also think the Klei forums attract these players. There's a lot more activity on Steam, Reddit, and Discord, but often the depth of the discussions there is much less. I love it here. 

Thanks for the discussion @Nebbie. 

 

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

6 hours ago, mathmanican said:

(maybe 50+ cycles out). I had 12 dupes living off a handful of oxyferns. Some might call this "unintuitive".  I call it, "use what you got."

My current game resembles this plan...  Cycle 80 I _finally_ built an oxidizer.  Though my ferns were in farm tiles and not pip-planted, it was still nerve racking to see "Bahni is suffocating!" and realize its just because they breathed up their pocket and were running to the next.

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

I was never annoyed that the game chose different values than real life

Me either.  I think there's a couple of categories of individuals.  Some look at a game and say "this isn't acting how I want it to.  Why won't the dev's fix it?"  Others, like myself, look at a game and see, "This isn't acting how I expected.. what can I do with it?" 

1 hour ago, mathmanican said:

You are absolutely correct that the more "real science" a player knows, the simpler it is have unmet expectations about what the game "should" have.

I kinda agree, but I also kinda disagree here.  I'm an engineer. I love systems; I love physics.  I have zero expectations about what the game "should" be, other than "its a sandbox with its own unique physics laws."  I enjoy poking at systems and seeing what comes out -- and ONI is chock full of systems to poke and prod at. 

[mathmanican]

58 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I have zero expectations about what the game "should" be, other than "its a sandbox with its own unique physics laws."  I enjoy poking at systems and seeing what comes out

This is exactly where I sit. I would love a DLC/mod that left all the game mechanics in place, but allowed us to toggle off and on different oni laws.  Don't like flaking, fine, play without it.  Want to change the way gasses behave, done. Want to enter your own values for SHC and TC of things, have fun. Want to change the molar mass on liquids so crude actually floats above water, have at it. Want to enable multiple elements per tile, check this box (and cry as your computer ignites in a fireball from overheating - there will need to be a warning label and release of liability next to that check box).  Want to compress gasses to make liquid (need PV=nRT), press here.  Implementing some of these would be super simple, while others would almost be like making a new game.  I'm not sure though, how large an audience such a DLC would reach (the STEM folks would love it). This would provide so much replay ability, and maybe get another 10,000 hours out of me.  If only the market demanded this. 

58 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

"This isn't acting how I [thought it might].. what can I do with it?"

Oh, and this is SO how I play ONI. (Had to change that word "expected" though.)

[Gurgel]

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

You are absolutely correct that the more "real science" a player knows, the simpler it is have unmet expectations about what the game "should" have.

I do not think so. While I am not a physicist, I probably know a major part of the relevant "real" science. Yet I have absolutely no problems with the deviations in ONI. I think the problem is elsewhere. One suspicion I have is that people having this issue do know scientific "facts" (still no quantum-gravity, so basically all of known physics is bogus), but they do not really understand Science (the approach/process). When then some "facts" deviate, they get confused, because the cling to absolutes.  

Basically it is the difference between having some "facts" committed to memory and being able to find out facts and adjust your mental model to what you find. I run into these people professionally all the time, mostly when doing risk management, but also in engineering. They think they have absolute truth and they get confused and sometimes angry when you tell them that no, most things are relative and most things "everybody knows are true" are anything but. 

[Gurgel]

12 hours ago, mathmanican said:

 (and cry as your computer ignites in a fireball from overheating - there will need to be a warning label and release of liability next to that check box). 

Hehehehehe, definitely.

12 hours ago, mathmanican said:

I'm not sure though, how large an audience such a DLC would reach (the STEM folks would love it). This would provide so much replay ability, and maybe get another 10,000 hours out of me.  If only the market demanded this. 

Well, one thing I am finding out about myself these days (and ONI played a part in that) is that I am apparently not a typical member of the STEM group either. I would find such a DLC completely boring. What I enjoy is exploring a given model of reality and then working with it. Doing my own model? That is easy-mode. I can just scribble randomly on my white-board instead. 

[mathmanican]

6 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

I am apparently not a typical member of the STEM group either

I think you definitely are a typical member (computer background, if I remember correctly).  It sounds like you enjoy most the exploration of a model that is imposed upon you. This is one part of systematic inventive thinking (SIT). It appears you enjoy (as do I) the "Cognitive fixedness" portion.  Once we place as fixed the box in which we get to solve problems, it allows for tons of creative endeavors. However, there are other aspects to consider, such as "multiplication" (as defined there) where we change parameters. 

As I've considered my interaction with ONI, I think it has been an excellent training ground to teach systematic inventive thinking.  I look back over the designs I've made in the last two years, and can basically classify each design using the language of SIT. I've only recently started exploring SIT, but think purposefully using it in more deliberate ways to explore systems in ONI could yield even more crazy contraptions.  @Gurgel, if you haven't ever read about SIT, I recommend giving it a look. 

[Gurgel]

2 hours ago, mathmanican said:

I think you definitely are a typical member (computer background, if I remember correctly).  It sounds like you enjoy most the exploration of a model that is imposed upon you. This is one part of systematic inventive thinking (SIT). It appears you enjoy (as do I) the "Cognitive fixedness" portion.  Once we place as fixed the box in which we get to solve problems, it allows for tons of creative endeavors. However, there are other aspects to consider, such as "multiplication" (as defined there) where we change parameters. 

As I've considered my interaction with ONI, I think it has been an excellent training ground to teach systematic inventive thinking.  I look back over the designs I've made in the last two years, and can basically classify each design using the language of SIT. I've only recently started exploring SIT, but think purposefully using it in more deliberate ways to explore systems in ONI could yield even more crazy contraptions.  @Gurgel, if you haven't ever read about SIT, I recommend giving it a look. 

Well, on a brief look, it seems that this is basically the field of Psychology finally figuring out that quantity is not an indicator of quality and that when you actually have engineering problems to solve, "brainstorming" is pretty worthless as the problem space is too large. (Unfortunately, bad ideas like brainstorming seem to be incapable of dying and too many people are not capable to see their limits.) That matches my experience from working with other good engineers: You get only a few suggestions for a given problem and all have real merit. You can always identify the bad engineers by their "random seeking" approach and their sticking to the current hypes. They often come up with the most ridiculous suggestions.

You can also easily identify "engineering products" (no insult intended to good engineers) like MS Windows or MS Office, or Linux Systemd, or PHP or JavaScript, that have been created using this low-quality approach, because there is no useful theory behind what they do and known useful and proven theories got ignored. "New" and "different" are seen as positive qualities without any understanding how wrong that idea is. (Sure, new or different things can have merit, but that is not because they are new or different.) They seem to just have randomly tried things out and if they found a minimum of apparent merit, they went that way. An analogy from the optimization field is genetic optimization: It routinely produces results that just barely solve the problem but are really bad in all other characteristics. Just look at the crappy solutions biology comes up with.

Or to put it differently, SIT seems to indicate that you actually have to really understand both the problem and the space you are working in in order to be able to come up with good solutions. Of course, any good engineer knows that and has found that out by themselves. I think I had the basics down when I was 14 or 15. But there are tons of bad engineers around and typically they do not know they are bad ones. In fact, I think finding the SIT-type idea by yourself should be a requirement for any advanced engineering degree (MSc and up), as the ones that cannot do this are hugely costly to society as a whole. Of course, that would cut down the numbers of people graduating that tier by 80..90% or so, but the benefits would be staggering. Now, that said, technicians (not engineers) are very valuable too, but they need to stay technicians. As soon as they work as engineers, bad things happen. (I am also one of those people that think the Janitor should pretty much earn the same per hour as the CEO. At least the Janitor has assured positive productivity, the CEO usually destroys value.)

For me, this gets most pathetically obvious when supposed engineers do unselfconscious design, i.e. do what everybody else does without really understanding it or questioning it. I have time and again run into serious problems when I suggested (with proof) that common approaches do not work or make things worse. Fortunately, these days I often have the authority to actually make my case and getting heard, but that does not always work. Explaining fundamental (but "surprising") things to mediocre talents time and again is really tiresome. What makes this worse is that the software field is still inundated with people that have not even survived a formal engineering education. Engineering education done right is a _filter_. That you also teach them the basics of their field is just a side benefit.

That said, I agree that ONI is a nice test-bed to tests somebodies engineering capabilities. Ideally, give them nothing but the game and the goal of long-term survival. Pass those that make it after a few weeks of trying without help and tell the others to go for a less demanding field of study. I would really like if we could do exams and student selection that way. I already got rid of the worthless rote learning for my exams (they can use any written material they produced themselves), but that is still not enough in a world where things in the engineering space get more and more complex and "products" are bad more often than not.

That said, the SIT idea is not bad. It is right on the mark and studying it is time well spent if you are so inclined. It is just not very surprising to me. I may have use for it in some discussions though (for invalid "arguments from authority" ), so thanks for pointing it out. 

[mathmanican]

44 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

... rant ...

I think we would get along wonderfully in real life.  I loved the entire post (don't agree with all of it, but loved it just the same). You've got passion. 

As for SIT, I found it gave a very simple framework to describe what I do all the time in math as well as ONI. It also may provide a framework to give me language and resources to train others in SIT, particularly when they are stuck in unselfconscious design. That describes quite a bit of what teaching looks like.

We should probably move this discussion to another place. I've enjoyed it.

[TheMule]

16 hours ago, mathmanican said:

the devs picked values that made things reasonable for game play sake

And this is the key point. This is a game, not a simulation. Playability trumps realism.

What really bothers me, is people who seem to take offense if the game doesn't do something 100% accurately according to their expectations (sometimes, not even based on reality, see "real airlocks" threads that spawn routinely), meanwhile in their bases a lot of things are happening against the most basic common sense. They are picky when it comes to some non game breaking behaviours (such insulation being cooled down by extremely cold liquids, which only affects - and only marginally - the startup process of a late game build).

Meanwhile, all their cooling loops completely defy gravity, liquid is looping around w/o any pump pushing it, moved by the magical teleporting capability of a mere liquid bridge. Their 30kg dups carry around 2000kg of stuff magically producing bottles for mopped liquids. They eat but don't poop, they don't drink (usually) yet they pee. Wild life have a life cycle that's doesn't involve food - at all. Yet, their biology changes completely when domesticated. Pufts even fly... in the vacuum of space, if given the opportunity (think for a second what's the mechanism that allows them to "fly" and apply it to vacuum). The list is infinite. Everything makes sense only from a playability pov. Critters become hungry when tamed not because of biology, but only because it makes the game more interesting.

All that does not seem to bother these players. It's a strong indication that the game is just a game, not a simulation, yet they refuse to see. They are completely blind to that.

But yes, for them the game is bad because insulation in a very specific corner case does not match exactly their expectations of realism. We're talking about something made from isoresin, a space material that doesn't even exist in real life...

22 hours ago, Nebbie said:

The key point is that players do not exist as blank slates, they exist with preconceived ideas from real life,

which are shattered to pieces on cycle 1. Last time I checked, real life is not printed by a machine using genetic ooze. How these "preconceived ideas from real life" manage to survive the early game is the true mystery here.

Early science is discovered from dirt, and supercomputers drink water. Strangely, a very early tech, developed before you discovered the basic AND logic gate - actually you need a supercomputer to research that.

The ecosystem is also very confused about what the starting plants need. Some need water and light, other don't. One of my newbie mistakes in my first colony was building a nice farm with station and hydroponic tiles, everything by the books, for mealwood. Ideas from real life, I guess.

And that's in the first 15 minutes of the game. Everything so matches real life that it's a real pity they got copper wrong. Yeah, it's copper thermal conductivity that really ruins everything... 

[mathmanican]

6 minutes ago, TheMule said:

... clip ...

This thread is oozing with passion from us all. Thanks for the fun all. I hope the devs find some use from all this. 

[TheMule]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

You can also easily identify "engineering products" (no insult intended to good engineers) like MS Windows or MS Office, or Linux Systemd, or PHP or JavaScript, that have been created using this low-quality approach, because there is no useful theory behind what they do and known useful and proven theories got ignored. "New" and "different" are seen as positive qualities without any understanding how wrong that idea is.

I kind of agree, but most of those examples do not really fit. For example PHP is a kid's effort, not a engineering product. JS wasn't an engineering effort either.

A lot of products were based on proven theories and completely failed, for bad execution or just because the old theories no longer match the world. MULTICS comes to mind, and I guess you're accessing this forum via TCP/IP and not a ISO/OSI suite of protocols.
But we digress...

[mathmanican]

1 minute ago, TheMule said:

But we digress...

We could start a "let's nerd out corner."

[Gurgel]

21 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

I think we would get along wonderfully in real life.  I loved the entire post (don't agree with all of it, but loved it just the same). You've got passion. 

Thank you. I do care about fixing things. BTW, excellent lossless compression of my posting there

[BT_20]

I like ONI as it is and I don’t want it to be accurate to real word physics but at the same time I think the game could have benefited from a few things. I think it would have been amazing to have approximations of convection + radiation, and nitrogen systems

[TripleM999]

Some have mindsets with variable values... for some, these mindset are fixed. I do not know, if it is an advantage, but i'm pretty aware, when my mindset does not fit a given environment, or when it fit. I began with a pretty unfitting mindset to play this game, like i did with my study of computational science. Over time the mind adepted, and if you are lucky, there comes this point of epiphany, where everything falls in place. The playing with gas, when searching for the turbine heat deletion bug, gave me some insight, i was hoping for, but didn't expected then. If you try to force your current mindset on the game, you will get many frustrating moments from it. But if you you try to adept and even attune to it, you will get much satisfaction from the several things/mechanics, which interact with each other.

[Ceos]

Humorously I am a material scientist (metallurgist in specific) so did come in with some preconceived notions and some of my intuitions have worked out really well...  aluminum *is* a really great heat conductor, magma does have very high viscosity,  dirt is low thermal diffusivity... but also poorly... space is not perfectly insulative (radiation transfer energy as T^4 volcans should cook dupes standing near).  That has not stopped me from enjoying things, quite the opposite actually. I love the discovery of how materials work, and how to use those rules to make awesome thing (jet engines in real life, petroleum boilers in ONI).  Knowing most of the "real" rules I am amazed how well this simulation does and how much fun it is. The discovery is the most fun part for me and edge cases doubly so.

To the points brought up about dev intent  and abusing mechanics I keep coming back to the single player nature of the game. My abuse should not hurt others enjoyment (I do love drowned electrolyzers, and associated infinite gas storage) . If I find more fun learning to take apart and reassemble a rubik's cube why should I not? I can't claim to have solved it the intended way but it's solved and I had fun.

[TripleM999]

2 hours ago, Ceos said:

If I find more fun learning to take apart and reassemble a rubik's cube why should I not?

Yeah, taking apart rubiks cube, and see, how it works, gave me more fun, than solving it the usual way. 

[frogglebunwich]

The derps are just too stupid. Why drop your food on the floor to go poo,  every  night? 

If they are eating at a table the table should catch the food and the derp should get back to eat it after pooing not just leave it there to go stale overnight. 

And they drop stuff they are sweeping (which loses the sweep order, which it shouldnt) to find oxygen when they were heading towards oxygen in the first place and just needed to keep going.

And they are so bad at doing local jobs unless you can shut them in and all the others out they will run halfway across a map to do something right next to an idle derp who could have done it instead. No sense of distance.

The derplicant jerb AI doesnt work very well, is pretty annoying after release, was forgivable in alpha/beta not so much now.

[Gurgel]

2 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

The derps are just too stupid. Why drop your food on the floor to go poo,  every  night? 

Dupes are _very_ obedient, but can only think of one thing at a time. I think you are making them do this. Not enough toilets?

That said, I would like things dropped from a sweep errand to stay marked for sweeping. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

I'm with @Gurgel on that one.  The dupes in my base will generally use the toilet, then eat; or they'll eat, then use the toilet.  Either way, they complete one task before starting the other.  This is because each dupe has access to a toilet when their shift break occurs.  Nobody has to wait.

However, @frogglebunwich has a point too.. if my dupes grab a food item bigger than they need, then yeah, they'll simply drop the extra on the floor.  My last great hall had a sweepy just to handle that problem.

5 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I would like things dropped from a sweep errand to stay marked for sweeping.

Yes.  In almost all cases, if the dupes drop something I marked for sweeping, then it isn't where it needs to be and should still be marked for sweeping.

While we're doing some wishing.. It would be nice if the Dupe's AI was a bit less rigid.  For example, a dupe starts sweeping 5 seconds before their shift change.. why not just go for the shift change 5 seconds early?  Or they're two steps away from the storage locker and suddenly its time to eat. Would be nice if they took the last two steps and put the stuff away, THEN went to eat.  However, this would add a lot of complications to the current AI system, so I understand why they don't do it that way.  But it would be nice.

 

7 hours ago, frogglebunwich said:

they are so bad at doing local jobs unless you can shut them in and all the others out they will run halfway across a map to do something right next to an idle derp who could have done it instead. No sense of distance.

OK, now this is something that can get frustrating.   Right now I have a very small base (just started a new asteroid) and I've got the "long travel times" alert up because dupes will run and dig one tile, then run back and harvest a plant, then go dig another tile.. You can "solve" the problem by using the priority system, but that still doesn't help when there are multiple jobs of a single type in multiple areas of the base.  For example, digging up and digging down in your starting biome.  Instead of one dupe digging up and the other digging down, they'll swap places every few tiles, crossing the entire base.  The "enable proximity" box helps as well, but introduces some other problems -- such as sometimes ignoring critical tasks in the base when they're far away.