How to teach new ONI players the basics through gameplay

[ZombieDupe]

I have two simple ideas which will take time to implement but are crucial and obvious ways in which you can teach a player by keeping their attention to the game as opposed to wondering what to do and getting stuck or just bored from confusion.

* More cartoon video shorts that SHOW how things work. I have found that a lot of players who have no idea what they are doing often don't even notice there are tutorials and then complain about the lack of tutorials. One way to do this would be to make the notification area stand out more, with a bigger font and most importantly have the tutorial sections slowly blend between two colors so the player's attention is grabbed to that and they would notice them. You could also start by replacing all the text-based tutorial notifications with video ones, or more visually oriented (images and gifs as opposed to text that looks like this paragraph). Yes, even the controls section. At start there are like 5 notifications given to you for starting the game as well, which is too much. Extending how long a cycle lasts in minutes could also not only help new players but make cycles count more later in the game and make dupes generally more productive and less needy.

* Make POIs that actually matter and make you think about basics of builds. Have small setups for having the player take a look at it and think about how that's integrated when they stumble upon it. You could have a small basic SPOM which would help in teaching the player to handle oxygen distribution, hydrogen burning and cooling of material and buildings. A steam turbine disabled with automation on top of a steam chamber connected to a magma pool with a volcano underneath, or how about a germ cleaner system (we really could do with a building that takes germy liquid and gas chlorine to disinfect it rather than using liquid reservoirs as that doesn't make sense). Right now the POI are purely just buildings that are hard to remove or not even possible to remove at all and it's annoying. Also annoying that these buildings are ones you can't build. And I mean if you have the time to make a new door that's 1x3 that looks exactly like an existing POI door then you definitely have time to pay closer attention to the purpose of your POI.

And at the end of it all, make sure it makes sense. None of this Aqua Tuner + Steam Turbine heat deletion that none in their right mind would think of as a logical solution unless they are an engineering expert. All these POI buildings could have so much more purpose and interaction from duplicants to use as well much like the AETN or the Neural Vacillator but they just don't (lockers, desks etc). If something has little to no function or whatever function it has makes zero sense, then maybe it's time to take a second look. Fun comes from being able to do things with something you would expect to, not from the limitations that hinder it.

[spike4597]

genius idea. although, probably should add to dlc AND base game.

also, they couldn't implement the steam turbine part cuz that would give free plastic.

[Yobbo]

I really like your idea about POIs hinting about how to do things.

The mechanics of the absolutely crucial AT/ST setups for heat deletion are extremely unintuitive. They make no logical sense when considered via real-life mechanics, and there is no hint at all in the game that this is the core use of steam turbines. In fact the game documentation about steam turbines indicates you should use them for "converting geothermal energy into usable power". This is a niche use case at best, and completely misleads any new unspoiled player. There are no other practical methods of sustainable heat management, other than getting lucky with high-output cold geysers or taking advantage of the borderline exploitative heat deletion behaviours of certain buildings (like compost heaps or electrolyzers).

I did a small analysis of how my bases were lasting so long without direct heat management, and determined that i was, completely accidentally, making significant use of electrolyzer heat deletion. I don't think this is something that can be relied on. Sustainable heat management should be something a new player can figure out how to deal with from in-game knowledge only, but it currently is not.

 

4 hours ago, spike4597 said:

they couldn't implement the steam turbine part cuz that would give free plastic.

They sidestepped this in the POI that has a comfy bed by making it out of obsidian.

[babba]

Also, every time a player fails on getting something working... a pop up message shall appear, stating: "Don't worry, babba, also failed on this" 

[gabberworld]

9 hours ago, babba said:

Also, every time a player fails on getting something working... a pop up message shall appear, stating: "Don't worry, babba, also failed on this" 

hmm, i never feel tho that i failed about something in this game. its more like i learned something new

[pether]

I feel like ONI is too complex game to teach players everything with POIs on a single map and the videos would be annoying for players who know this stuff already.

So maybe it would be better to make campaign mode, with 5-10-20-or more small missions with clear, single objective that is supposed to teach player new things: eg there could be one mission where you start with wild hatches and objective to hatch stone hatch morph. During those missions you would have enough resources not to focus each time on oxygen production etc, just to learn one more thing.

The advantage of this approach is that every time Klei decided to add something new to the game that require tutorial (like radiation), they can just add one more mission to the campaign mode and not to worry if yet another tutorial POI would fit the map

And ofc cartoony tutorial videos would fit that idea very well - one mission - one movie

[Yobbo]

13 minutes ago, pether said:

I feel like ONI is too complex game to teach players everything with POIs on a single map and the videos would be annoying for players who know this stuff already.

I don't think you need to have all such tutorial POIs appear in every map. Just having a random one or two should be enough. Such that each game the player looks forward to finding a new and interesting POI.

In this way i think it would be great for advanced designs or uses of mechanics that otherwise would not warrant their own tutorial.

[cpy]

If you are engineering expert you would NOT figure out heat deletion exploit! You'd have conservation of energy firmly stuck in your head. Until we can find way to convert significant amount of heat direclty to electricity IRL people won't know about this combo easily.

Imagine if we could turn all that global warming into direct electricity! This would be a game changer!

[Gurgel]

5 hours ago, cpy said:

If you are engineering expert you would NOT figure out heat deletion exploit!

Actually, not a problem. At least for me as a PhD engineer. WWs (the original ones back when) and the Anti-Entropy Nullifiers are pretty clear hints that heat-deletion is a thing in ONI

[cpy]

Anti-Entropy Nullifiers : hint: it's in the name! But steam engine? I know how steam engine works. I can guesstimate what anti entropy does. decreases entropy...duh!

If it had anti entropy steam engine then yes, i'd definitely think there's something weird going on there.

[sakura_sk]

"Anti-" doesn't mean decrease though...

[DolphinWing]

Yeah, but after the Thermodynamics class, I only remember that increasing entropy is not so cool. So any "Anti-entropy" thing might be good. 

[babba]

Imagine a future world, where the delivery of a game charters unknown territory...A future world where games are delivered in a big carton box, with a printed 920 pages ONI tutorial manual and with some mighty antipiracy enigma code wheel made out of flimsy carton. Someday humans will evolve and will enter the era of boxed physical game delivery, another step to prosperity.

"oni, in Japanese folklore, a type of demonic creature often of giant size, great strength, and fearful appearance. They are generally considered to be foreign in origin, perhaps introduced into Japan from China along with Buddhism. Cruel and malicious, they can, nevertheless, be converted to Buddhism."

!   !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Moore

"Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed... To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life... One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated."

[MilesLong4200]

15 hours ago, cpy said:

If you are engineering expert you would NOT figure out heat deletion exploit! You'd have conservation of energy firmly stuck in your head. Until we can find way to convert significant amount of heat direclty to electricity IRL people won't know about this combo easily.

Imagine if we could turn all that global warming into direct electricity! This would be a game changer!

Hmmm I'm confused. Is this not how a normal steam turbine works? Heat -> energy? You aren't deleting heat, just turning it into electricity.

[babba]

9 minutes ago, MilesLong4200 said:

Hmmm I'm confused. Is this not how a normal steam turbine works? Heat -> energy? You aren't deleting heat, just turning it into electricity.

I think this is where the game is at its best - If the player thinks about it and realizes that its just a conversion process in to "something different".

Its like when I eat a cake and a guest comes in and sees nothing. Only as the guest realizes that my belly volume has increased, the guests penny can drop "Ah, babba deleted the cake. There must be crumbs !"

[cpy]

22 minutes ago, MilesLong4200 said:

Hmmm I'm confused. Is this not how a normal steam turbine works? Heat -> energy? You aren't deleting heat, just turning it into electricity.

Absolutely not, they convert pressure gradient into movement of magnets. Always those pesky magnets.

[MilesLong4200]

Are you not just describing what i said but with more intermediary steps? 

Input is heat, output is electricity. 

[Yobbo]

48 minutes ago, MilesLong4200 said:

Hmmm I'm confused. Is this not how a normal steam turbine works? Heat -> energy? You aren't deleting heat, just turning it into electricity.

IRL steam turbines extract mechanical (and thus electrical) energy from heat gradients. In this game they don't work that way, in stead they annihilate heat, and happen to also output electricity while they do it, breaking the laws of thermodynamics in the process.

IRL you can't have a closed system that will decrease its temperature over time. Entropy can only increase. This appears to be a fundamental law of the universe. With steam turbines in this game you can, and pretty much must set up such a system.

The AETN is an advanced technological wonder that explicitly breaks the known laws of thermodynamics. It can be expected that it will delete heat. It's right there in the name that it works contrary to the laws of entropy and deletes heat. The regular steam turbine is not such a thing.

In my early colonies i expected that heat management would require setting machinery up to utilize both the AETN and the cooling effect of wheezeworts. This was a trap. Both the colonies where i tried this died to heat death. In the end the AETN and WW are so pathetically weak as to be unusable for long-term base cooling, or indeed cooling almost anything at all. One regular steam turbine deletes more than ten times the heat of this advanced technological wonder the player cannot build and can only chance upon.

[MilesLong4200]

15 hours ago, Yobbo said:

IRL steam turbines extract mechanical (and thus electrical) energy from heat gradients. In this game they don't work that way, in stead they annihilate heat, and happen to also output electricity while they do it, breaking the laws of thermodynamics in the process.

IRL you can't have a closed system that will decrease its temperature over time. Entropy can only increase. This appears to be a fundamental law of the universe. With steam turbines in this game you can, and pretty much must set up such a system.

Ah I see thank you! The net cooling with no exhaust is where ONI kind of falters.

[Pedro_L]

17 hours ago, MilesLong4200 said:

Are you not just describing what i said but with more intermediary steps? 

Input is heat, output is electricity. 

It turns pressure in to electricity, the heat is only used to increase pressure, it is then absorbed by the environment

However in ONI you literally turn the heat in to electricity even if the pressure wouldn't allow you to (like forming a vacuum with steam turbines)

16 hours ago, Yobbo said:

One regular steam turbine deletes more than ten times the heat of this advanced technological wonder the player cannot build and can only chance upon.

If you wanted to be realism thinking you could vent all that heat into space by putting a aquatuner in water. That was in fact the first thing I thought of when I heard that water was infinite

[BT_20]

To me the most noticeable discrepancies from real life are the complete lack of convection and radiation. Also almost every single combustion reaction in game doesn’t use oxygen. Finally  the “polluted element” in game makes zero sense.

[babba]

5 hours ago, Pedro_L said:

If you wanted to be realism thinking you could vent all that heat into space by putting a aquatuner in water. That was in fact the first thing I thought of when I heard that water was infinite

Maybe humans should take ONI as a blueprint to vent all methane in to space - Like building a 100 KM straw and then hooking the botties of 1 million cows on to it. Sadly venting materials in to space makes us loose materials. Also all cows would need to be interconnected with lots of divider straws. It would be great if we could hookup GassyMoo cows to such a natural gas straw system in the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space

"Outer space does not begin at a definite altitude above the Earth's surface. The Kármán line, an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level."

>>> Blueprints in survival mode would be welcome !

Gassy Moo NG bottling

 

 

[Pedro_L]

3 hours ago, babba said:

Maybe humans should take ONI as a blueprint to vent all methane in to space - Like building a 100 KM straw and then hooking the botties of 1 million cows on to it. Sadly venting materials in to space makes us loose materials. Also all cows would need to be interconnected with lots of divider straws. It would be great if we could hookup GassyMoo cows to such a natural gas straw system in the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space

"Outer space does not begin at a definite altitude above the Earth's surface. The Kármán line, an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level."

>>> Blueprints in survival mode would be welcome !

Gassy Moo NG bottling

 

 

What a creative solution

[Sasza22]

5 hours ago, BT_20 said:

To me the most noticeable discrepancies from real life are the complete lack of convection and radiation. Also almost every single combustion reaction in game doesn’t use oxygen. Finally  the “polluted element” in game makes zero sense.

A lot of things were purposely simplified to reduce the amount of entities needed. Convection for one actually exists in the gmae but isn`t too noticable. The absence of thermal radiation is only apparent in vacuum. Combustion not using oxygen makes it easier to manage with how gasses behave in ONI (which is also completely different from RL) and help with the oxygen economy. I imagine we`d need a ton more oxygen creators early to keep up with combustion generators.

Polluted stuff is actually a nice simplification device. Just throw all organic waste into one thing so we don`t have to worry about what it actually is. Similarly all rock melts into magma no matter what it originally was. It`s not realistic but makes the game both easier to make work and easier to pick up.

[KonfigSys]

The game is not realistic and it cannot be 

1. The entropy may never go down in a closed/isolated system. 

"second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time, as they always arrive at a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest."

2. The asteroids are small comparatively to the earth and if the game was to obey the thermodynamic laws, the only way to reduce temperature was to heat some materials and through them away from the closed system. In fact, some players using that by heating up water, steam, gases and venting them out to the space. 

3. The AETN and wheezeworts were very powerful when the game was firstly released. The ST/AT came much later as cooling couple.

It was very easy to set up cooling using such powerful AETN and wheezeworts (both are not realistic of course in RE). So Klei introduce another mechanics (ST/AT) and nerfed AETN and wheezeworts. ST/AT cannot be built right at the beginning (plastic, steel) and hence, they create some kind of hurdle compared to powerful ex-AETN.

ST/AT also not realistic to decrease entropy but close enough. The couple does not work without extra cooling or extra energy (so in a way it is not a closed system). 

AETN can be considered realistic if the device takes the hydrogen and heat it up to very high temperature and then through it out to another dimension or space outside of our closed system. 

4. Klei does not model heat radiation in vacuum but at the same time it does not model heating the surface due to solar activity. I do not think that they need to go the path as it does not add much to the game. It all depends how far away the asteroids are from the star to understand if there is a net temperature balance from incoming radiation from the star (in form of visible light) and outgoing heat radiation from the space biome (as the surface temperature rarely exceeds 400C it will be infrared spectrum and not much heat dissipation). .