This should be part of the game

[cepahkoll]

Hello, why is there no airlock in the game? This item could very well be part of the game, or something similar.
I don't see why having to keep doing gliths or having to make a gambiarra to be able to separate air when that could exist in the game.

[Neotuck]

Old topic, but a good one

Klei tries to make the game challenging to players by encouraging us to engineer solutions without making the game too difficult.  They also don't want to make the game too easy.

Most players make liquid locks, there are plenty of examples in the forums

[cepahkoll]

2 hours ago, Neotuck said:

Old topic, but a good one

Klei tries to make the game challenging to players by encouraging us to engineer solutions without making the game too difficult.  They also don't want to make the game too easy.

Most players make liquid locks, there are plenty of examples in the forums

so apparently the game will never be better because of klei, that's not a challenge, it's filling the game with glith, do you want a challenge? make germs dangerous, space dangerous, the way this is a game with no challenge or one, it's quite boring a game full of glitch, it seems like it's using game glitches to play, like I'm bugging the game

 

[Neotuck]

58 minutes ago, cepahkoll said:

so apparently the game will never be better because of klei, that's not a challenge, it's filling the game with glith, do you want a challenge? make germs dangerous, space dangerous, the way this is a game with no challenge or one, it's quite boring a game full of glitch, it seems like it's using game glitches to play, like I'm bugging the game

You are free to your opinion

But if you're intention is to provide suggestions and feedback to Klei for improved gameplay, then you posted in the wrong section of the forums so don't be surprised if replies like mine are not what you expected

[QuQuasar]

I don't think Klei will add a perfect mechanical airlock to the game, for the simple reason that part of the fun of ONI is engineering complicated machines from simple components, and mechanical airlocks are one of the first multi-component structures new players will think to build.

Plus, failing upwards is a pillar of the game's progression. Fixed oxygen with electrolysis? Now you've got a major heat source spewing out hydrogen in the middle of your base. Every problem you solve should introduce more problems: in this case, an imperfect airlock introduces the need for robust gas scavenging lines.

 

With that said, I do think the game's systems need *something* to make mechanical airlocks more viable. These monstrosities by wachunga are wonderful...

... but they are also monstrosities. The wall pumps mod allows us to make them a lot smaller (though still quite large)...
 

 

 

... but what I'd really like to see are checkpoint doors, airlocks which don't break pathing when locked by automation.

Failing that, I'd settle for dupes to stop opening doors when they're queued in front of them.

[pether]

7 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

I don't think Klei will add a perfect mechanical airlock to the game, for the simple reason that part of the fun of ONI is engineering complicated machines from simple components, and mechanical airlocks are one of the first multi-component structures new players will think to build.

Let's be honest, nobody uses huge contraptions as the one you showed. Sure, it's impressive, but most players just leave a drop of liquid and that works just fine. 

I use linked mod doors and I must say - this solution is really suboptimal: it conducts heat, require power, costs more than liquid drop, dupes must wait to use it. Now as I think about it is a terrible solution... but QoL it brings with it is great and I will use it more, even knowing how bad is it - I just hate to do this tedious liquid locks again and again, it requires so much manual input I just want to get rid of it, place one building and be happy with it.

ONI contains many examples where you can use suboptimal predefined solution, or make a contraption that makes it better for the cost of design and careful execution. Airlock doors should be as that - give us power-hungry, dupe-slowing, heat-transfering building as the one in the mod, or allow us to do it better by ourselves using available components

[goboking]

7 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

I don't think Klei will add a perfect mechanical airlock to the game, for the simple reason that part of the fun of ONI is engineering complicated machines from simple components

Sometimes Klei gives us both.  The oil refinery, for example, is a straightforward building that refines oil to petroleum.  We also have the components needed to build petroleum boilers, which do the same thing more efficiently for players who know what they're doing.  We can use gas filters, or we can build our own with automation and gas element sensors.  I'll see your space heater and raise you a metal refinery-driven heat exchange system.

But this isn't always the case.  There is no building that generates power from refined uranium.  Instead, we have to build an elaborate setup that extracts heat from the steam generator by a research reactor, something that requires careful planning and many components to pull off safely and efficiently.  All that's to say that the current lack of a perfect airlock doesn't mean one won't eventually be added to the game.

[wachunga]

15 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

but what I'd really like to see are checkpoint doors, airlocks which don't break pathing when locked by automation

Agreed. It could even be added to current mech doors as an "advanced mode". Or here is a crazy thought ... buildings with automation inputs gain channel options when automation ribbons are researched. The player chooses which bit controls which function.

Here is a slightly less monstrous airlock that I have been screwing around with. Instead of atmo sensors, power sensors tell when the pumps are going, which themselves are atmo sensors of a sort. Allows the chamber to be a bit smaller. Each lock is one way. Not fully tested, just screwing around, yada yada yada.

Spoiler

 

It should be pointed out that liquid locks are not necessary to the degree that the community at large uses them. You don't need to liquid lock your farms, or your power rooms, or your base, or your space access, or much of anything really. People should stop blindly copying whatever crap they see on youtube or reddit or whatever and think for themselves. If you don't like liquid locks, then don't use them. Use gas density to keep specific gases where you want them. Aside from heat rising and cold sinking, gases are terrible at conducting heat to other gases. So approach hot areas from below and cold areas from above. Vacuum builds can be constructed in gas and then vacuumed out with pumps in antechambers that you pinch off once vacuum is achieved.

[QuQuasar]

 

12 hours ago, goboking said:

Sometimes Klei gives us both.  The oil refinery, for example, is a straightforward building that refines oil to petroleum.  We also have the components needed to build petroleum boilers, which do the same thing more efficiently for players who know what they're doing.  We can use gas filters, or we can build our own with automation and gas element sensors.  I'll see your space heater and raise you a metal refinery-driven heat exchange system.

Yes, but consider that these simple-to-implement solutions are also the *first* solution to their respective problems. You build the more complex and efficient solutions to replace the simpler, less efficient ones.

With airlocks, a basic door is the starting point: simple-to-implement and extremely bad at it's job of preventing gas transfer, but better than nothing. The 4x2 door-pump-door is moderately complex, but a far better solution for preventing gas transfer.

The proposed 3x2 one-click airlock is both simpler-to-implement and 100% efficient at what you build it for. Nobody's going to care about the power cost unless it's ridiculous (looking at you transit tubes). I do concede that heat transfer is a good side effect, though, since it encourages people to look for other solutions in specific situations.

 

To be clear: I don't object to a 3x2 perfect mechanical airlock. I object to a simple 3x2 perfect mechanical airlock. I'd love to be able to make them that compact, and in fact, I think my proposal (checkpoint doors) combined with wachunga's reminder that power sensors exist might make that a viable build. Perhaps not two-way, but a one-way 3x2 would definitely be viable.

5 hours ago, wachunga said:

It should be pointed out that liquid locks are not necessary to the degree that the community at large uses them. You don't need to liquid lock your farms, or your power rooms, or your base, or your space access, or much of anything really. People should stop blindly copying whatever crap they see on youtube or reddit or whatever and think for themselves. If you don't like liquid locks, then don't use them. Use gas density to keep specific gases where you want them. Aside from heat rising and cold sinking, gases are terrible at conducting heat to other gases. So approach hot areas from below and cold areas from above. Vacuum builds can be constructed in gas and then vacuumed out with pumps in antechambers that you pinch off once vacuum is achieved.

Agreed. I use moon pools for vacuum rooms and for some types of steam chamber, and I also for drecko's before I realized how much easier it is to simply shear the meat-drecko's before you drown them.

 

(By the way, a pair of weight plates under the airlock chamber might allow you to get rid of the duplicant motion sensor).

(Also, the trick to two-way airlocks is to stagger the outside checkpoints so that one goes green before the other, giving dupes travelling in one direction priority over the other. This prevents them from opening the doors simultaneously.)

[ALCRD]

What the heck is "gliths" and "gambiarra" ?

[blakemw]

14 hours ago, wachunga said:

 

It should be pointed out that liquid locks are not necessary to the degree that the community at large uses them. You don't need to liquid lock your farms, or your power rooms, or your base, or your space access, or much of anything really. People should stop blindly copying whatever crap they see on youtube or reddit or whatever and think for themselves. If you don't like liquid locks, then don't use them. Use gas density to keep specific gases where you want them. Aside from heat rising and cold sinking, gases are terrible at conducting heat to other gases. So approach hot areas from below and cold areas from above. Vacuum builds can be constructed in gas and then vacuumed out with pumps in antechambers that you pinch off once vacuum is achieved.

Yep. You'll often see things like this in my bases:

 

Natural Gas Vent with access via CO2 lock.

CO2 locks are very, very stable because there is no denser gas than CO2. They can only really be disrupted by liquids, and liquids tend to just fill the lock, so unless it's liquids near phase change temperature the lock is very stable.

 

Access to steam chamber via inverted Oxygen lock.

Inverted light gas locks are very stable if filled with hydrogen, and are also very stable if filled with oxygen or polluted oxygen as long as dupes wear atmosuits. A dupe will break an oxygen lock in no time if allowed to randomly emit CO2. In the ideal world I build an insulated tile to seal off the oxygen lock, in reality I often forget to seal it off and just leave it open forever since very little heat actually leaks out.

Note that an inverted light gas lock allows for automatic purging of lighter gases from a steam chamber, if the chamber is already filled with oxygen or polluted oxygen there is no need for any priming, you just add water to the steam chamber and the steam will push all the excess oxygen out of the inverted lock.

 

Smog Slug breeding chamber where hydrogen is trapped by verticality. (it leaks, but my base tolerates random hydrogen)

Smog Slugs are pretty hand things for rocket interiors, but I only ever need 2 or 3 of the things. So a dinky little setup like this is enough to keep a handful of Smog Slugs and their eggs on hand. I'm not going to full ass a setup when half assed is good enough.

 

Berry Sludge farm

Basic gas heat conduction and convection mechanisms give a reasonable amount of thermal isolation between the Sleet What and Bristle Blossom. There are many things that could be done a little more optimally including not letting the Grubgrubs move between different temperature zones, but I don't mind throwing a couple extra kDTU/s into the ST/AQ to account for the heat leakage: most of the heat being deleted is from the water and dirt fertilizing the sleet wheat rather than from leakage. And the ST/AQ is at very low utilization even cooling a bunch of other stuff off-screen.

[wachunga]

12 hours ago, QuQuasar said:

(By the way, a pair of weight plates under the airlock chamber might allow you to get rid of the duplicant motion sensor).

(Also, the trick to two-way airlocks is to stagger the outside checkpoints so that one goes green before the other, giving dupes travelling in one direction priority over the other. This prevents them from opening the doors simultaneously.)

I've been burned by "doorless" weight plates when dupes inevitably drop something on them, creating a false positive that locks the chamber forever. Anyhow, silly me didn't see that I could stick the motion sensor in a place already covered by one of the 3 "checkpoint" pumps, so a 4th pump would be unnecessary. I really like the idea of directional priority, brings to mind a road under construction controlled by flagmen at either side. Or an old school one lane covered bridge.

 

7 hours ago, ALCRD said:

What the heck is "gliths" and "gambiarra" ?

Seems like our friend is brazilian and gambiarra is an expression for an improvised fix or kludge. But doing such things is like half of what the game is about. So if gambiarras isn't their thing, I would recommend they play a different game. Or better, learn to embrace and enjoy the chaos artisanal engineering.

[Sasza22]

As shown above perfect airlocks are often unnecessary. Usually the base layout itself will be enough. For space a single airlock door will suffice. The amount it leaks won`t be substantial. We also have transit tubes as airlocks discussed in another thread.

Now that said i`m not fully against adding a proper airlock (i`d prefer an insulated airlock door variant but i digress). Something like that for beginners to have a proper seal to a room without having to google how to do it figure it out. It would be a kinda logical evolution of the technology researched. It would probably use plastic and refined metal etc.

But here`s the issue. Liquid locks are super easy to make and super cheap. Even if we had a buildable airlock people would still use liquid locks due to how early they can be build, not having resources for a proper one or for the flexibility it provides. You can make them 2 or 3 tile high and some designs include vacuum in the middle and even avoid dupes getting wet.

IMO adding this won`t fix anything for hardcore players but will provide an easy goal to pursue for beginners so it might be a good idea after all.

[Slvrsrfr]

i try to use gas weights to keep it in check, natural curves, but what ends up getting me is when one side or another tips the balance.

My chlorine will start seeping upwards because my o2 pressure is getting low.  Etc all. It 's a game of working around work-arounds.

[Neotuck]

Looks like this post turned into a "Show and Tell" of player engineered airlock solutions

I like making 3-4 tile high liquid locks that dupes need to jump though to prevent exhaling or soggy feet 

BTW @blakemw clever way to maintain temps in your farm, I just use vacuums between liquid locks to control temp

[GuyPerfect]

Are P-traps too high tech or something?

[Prince Mandor]

I have better idea. Game needs a 30x30 building called "Base". So, players can just put it and have working base. Possibly there are dupes inside, but Base is opaque.

Also it must have a big button, and after pressing it player receive a message window telling "You have working base. You WIn!"

[Kemthazul]

I'm on the side that frowns on using liquid locks because they are somewhat immersion breaking, especially when used in creating vacuums. Yes I am aware that this is a sci-fi setting and there is a lot of schmoogley-gooey going on but this is a game that touts itself on having well-done gas/hydraulic mechanics, and if the game should die in any hill, it should be that and make it as realistic as possible. I know there's compromise already made with the circumstances that led to the possibility of liquid locks in the first place (there could be either only gas or liquid in a single tile), but the fact that the devs ignored it long enough that liquid locks are now considered by the community as bug turned into a feature is a shame nonetheless.

[Prince Mandor]

3 hours ago, Kemthazul said:

but the fact that the devs ignored it long enough that liquid locks are now considered by the community as bug turned into a feature is a shame nonetheless.

They are not ignored it! They created special liquid Visco-Gel specially for liquid lock and make a lot of programming and bugfixing in viscosity of liquids, to make liquid locks efficient.

Just think again. ONI universe don't have atoms. It have tiles. There are no conception of "pressure" in game mechanics. And if there are no pressure, than vacuum is same as any other gas. And liquid lock is perfect for gas separation, we use it every day in real life

[Zarquan]

19 hours ago, Kemthazul said:

I'm on the side that frowns on using liquid locks because they are somewhat immersion breaking, especially when used in creating vacuums. Yes I am aware that this is a sci-fi setting and there is a lot of schmoogley-gooey going on but this is a game that touts itself on having well-done gas/hydraulic mechanics, and if the game should die in any hill, it should be that and make it as realistic as possible. I know there's compromise already made with the circumstances that led to the possibility of liquid locks in the first place (there could be either only gas or liquid in a single tile), but the fact that the devs ignored it long enough that liquid locks are now considered by the community as bug turned into a feature is a shame nonetheless.

They didn't ignore it, they endorsed them.  In fact, the devs included at least two examples of liquid locks in their own promotional material.  The first link even has a one tile liquid lock holding in a vacuum.  If that's not an endorsement or at least an acknowledgement that this is OK, I don't know what is.

https://youtu.be/wcLayGm_pM4?t=14

https://youtu.be/wcLayGm_pM4?t=40

[Kemthazul]

23 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

They didn't ignore it, they endorsed them.  In fact, the devs included at least two examples of liquid locks in their own promotional material.  The first link even has a one tile liquid lock holding in a vacuum.  If that's not an endorsement or at least an acknowledgement that this is OK, I don't know what is.

https://youtu.be/wcLayGm_pM4?t=14

https://youtu.be/wcLayGm_pM4?t=40

Ah, that's too bad then. I guess they will keep endorsing this until they implement even a little bit more primitive form of liquid pressure, maybe next DLC I guess? 

EDIT: Upon looking at it,

 

This would'nt have been a thing if we actually have proper airlocks that wouldn't break dupe pathfinding (in vanilla at least). Which I guess brings us to the topic at hand, heh.

16 hours ago, Prince Mandor said:

There are no conception of "pressure" in game mechanics. And if there are no pressure, than vacuum is same as any other gas. And liquid lock is perfect for gas separation, we use it every day in real life

Yes I am well aware of IRL liquid locks, we even have it on our very homes like the U/S bends in toilets, but the way it is used in ONI is very impractical, because as you said, there are still no concept of "pressure"(at least liquids?) in game mechanics, so dupes could just vacuum huge rooms with the same tiny liquid lock, which is immersion-breaking for me. Once ONI starts to work on proper pressure mechanics (if they would, probably not because the devs love the current form of liquid locks), we would likely see the death of liquid locks as we know it.

[Zarquan]

56 minutes ago, Kemthazul said:

Yes I am well aware of IRL liquid locks, we even have it on our very homes like the U/S bends in toilets, but the way it is used in ONI is very impractical, because as you said, there are still no concept of "pressure"(at least liquids?) in game mechanics, so dupes could just vacuum huge rooms with the same tiny liquid lock, which is immersion-breaking for me. Once ONI starts to work on proper pressure mechanics (if they would, probably not because the devs love the current form of liquid locks), we would likely see the death of liquid locks as we know it.

I don't think we really want them to implement true pressure rules.  It would require them to drop the per-tile rule, as the "puffs" of 20 grams of CO2 would be extremely low "pressure" and cause liquids they hover over to react to the low pressure, which would cause all kinds of chaos, like water spontaneously shooting in to the air or boiling.  They would need to completely redesign the physics of the game to get pressure to work.  Also, you can use liquid locks to create effective vacuums IRL.  The first vacuum pump was the Sprengel Pump, which used mercury to both hold in a vacuum and pull the vacuum at the same time.

[Kemthazul]

20 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

I don't think we really want them to implement true pressure rules . . .They would need to completely rework the physics of the game to get pressure to work.

You're right. Ideally, that's what I would hope to happen, but I trust Klei with complementing IRL mechanisms and make it game-friendly. I mean they reworked the whole rocketry system in one DLC, so maybe, fingers-crossed, they could implement a similar reworking to hydraulics.

You're also correct that we could create effective vacuums IRL, but if you look at them, they are relatively small in scale. Pressure differentials with the liquid locks people do right now in ONI to make vacuums should make the liquid boil. But since pressure doesn't exist, it's all handy-dandy.

I guess I'm just shocked that liquid pressure doesn't exist lol, but I understand why, dealing with those is such a hassle, it's a contributing factor to FPS death in dwarf fortress (I think I dun remember, or at least moving bodies of water), hence I'm hoping for a compromise..? 

[Dragony]

Yeah pressure is really missing. A liquid lock sealing off a chamber holding 1000kg of steam per tile is just.... I can't even describe it in words. I mean... isn't that nearly 1000 bars? I have googled a bit and an explosion has around 100 bars of gas pressure.

If THAT is not immersion breaking, then what?

[Zarquan]

4 hours ago, Dragony said:

Yeah pressure is really missing. A liquid lock sealing off a chamber holding 1000kg of steam per tile is just.... I can't even describe it in words. I mean... isn't that nearly 1000 bars? I have googled a bit and an explosion has around 100 bars of gas pressure.

If THAT is not immersion breaking, then what?

It's immersion breaking if you need the physics to match the real world.  I see ONI as its own universe with its own physical rules.  In the ONI universe, liquids can't be displaced by gases and "pressure" (as it exists) is purely a function of mass rather than a function of the volume, number of molecules, and temperature.