Artificial Lights DTU/power production - tuning, possible bugs and strange behaviours

[Tenedas]

With the much welcome tuning to the flue coral light requirements now Glass Jelly Ceiling Light seems the way to produce oxygen.

doing some comparison tho i think there's a bit of inconsistency among the artificial lights that should be addressed.

First of all, seems there is some asymmetry in the light distribution, the right side of the light's bell seems to be more brilliant even with the single jelly light:

Than there's the lux / DTU balancing

• Regular Light: 10W => 1800 Lux + 500 DTU/s
• Jelly Light 30W => 5400 Lux + 1000 DTU/s  (since it is costing 3 times the power should emit at least 3 times the Heat )
• Lamp Light 8W => 1000 Lux + 500 DTU/s (this one change shape but still numbers seems off , 20% less power but half the lux with same heat)
• Sun Lamp 960W => 40000 Lux + 5k DTU/s (really weird one in terms of balancing)
  • Lux per Watt at peak is 41, other lamps get around 180lux per watt so is like 22% less
  • DTU/s generated are only 5 times the DTU/s compared to a jelly Light

Furthermore using 3 Ceiling lights instead of a jelly give a curious result that doesn't get even close to mimic the light distribution even if it's the same power in the system:and should be the same light too ( i know it is distributed 3 tiles wide instead of one but seems to not get even close)

• Light Blue : 5400 Lux Region
• Dark Blue: 3600 Lux Region
• Green: 2700 Lux Region

Result is that using 3 ceiling lights instead of 1 jelly for flue corals you get

• 1 less height tile (4 instead of 5) 
• 2 less wide tile (3 instead of 5 meaning 1 less flue coral plant)
• total illuminated area with lux > 2500 is 40% less  (10 tiles instead of 17 tiles)
• furthermore there's the mysterious light distribution that is higher to the left side of the bell (red question mark) 
  • while i was making the post and moving lights around in debug mode the light cone changed even further for some light moving the higher intensity part of the cone to the left now (these are the same 3 lights of above)
  • 

Light Distribution asymmetry keep persisting even in bigger lamps, Sun lamp shows 2 types of a asymmetry:

• vertical asymmetry: the light in the central columns is decaying faster compared to the other layers
• horizontal asymmetry: the shape of the lower layer is notably asymmetric with some weird spots (3 tiles right of the highlighted one)

Furthermore seems like there's a second light source hidden in the light cone if you look closer (highlighted in light blue) that looks like a technical workaround to keep the brightness going.
In fact lower layers looks even brighter than the higher ones in terms of coloring
P.S. unpausing simulation for a bit changed the shape of the light and some of this asymmetries disappeared


started the game to check new flue coral requirements but i now think that light is entering the oxygen production zone (which i would consider a core mechanic) and maybe some balancing pass and/or refactoring of the code would be required to adjust things a bit.

Especially in this DLC since critter's light production is being fixed already in order to stop the production if they are unhappy i think a balance pass on the artificial lights would be beneficial too

At the moment jelly fish light is a clear winner among all other lamps and is even cheap and easy to build thanks to Pearl farming.
there's still some specific use case for sunlamps or mercury lamps but for the others jelly fish will power creep them straight away.

 

[blakemw]

5 hours ago, Tenedas said:

At the moment jelly fish light is a clear winner among all other lamps and is even cheap and easy to build thanks to Pearl farming.

But is it?

2x lamp make enough light for 2 Corals. 1x Jelly Lamp doesn't seem to be able to illuminate more than 3 Corals.

These are basically the layouts I could find that seem useful:

The Jelly Lamp's ability to usefully shine through mesh tiles might have some kind of utility, though if it's any higher, it can only illuminate the middle Coral, it's also not able to illuminate many buildings on the walkway.

I tried to find useful layouts with overlapping lightfields from Jelly Lamps, and didn't find a layout which improves upon the 1:3 ratio, there might be some janky ass staircase layout.

But to me, it seems the Jelly lamp is kind of specialized for if you want 3x Coral, though there's also a 3x lamp layout for illuminating 3 Corals (for the 4 high room), so I don't really see any situation where I'd really use the Jelly lamp rather than the more accessible lamps.

[cheeees]

For what I understand, the jelly ceiling lamp exists to be submeged in liquids unlike the other ones.
So it seems it was desinged specifically for flue corals, and with the recent change to flue corals, they changed the lamps too, making the unbalance between them.

[fpx007]

I don't see this a big problem, as basic cell lamp comes much earlier in tech tree. Besides, it only need metal ore, which is much easier to get than glassy material under most circumstances. Besides, its low power consumption also makes it better in situations where only very low brightness is required (e.g. lit workspace.)

[blakemw]

10 hours ago, cheeees said:

For what I understand, the jelly ceiling lamp exists to be submeged in liquids unlike the other ones.

That would be useful for illuminating Flue Coral if they were available earlier when you were still relying on wild Corals in random bodies of water. 50 glassy material is halfway to a Wide farm, and a Wide farm will 4x the yield of a Coral making it a twice as good investment. Anyway by the time you have unlocked Jelly lamps, you can definitely engineer your Coral setups to be in shallow water.

I think the purpose of its existence is illuminating aquatic buildings... though grooming and sheering stations have a fixed animation duration and don't benefit from lit workspace. This also seems to be the case for the aquatic variant of these buildings. I'm really struggling to find even a single aquatic building that actually benefits from lit workspace. So illuminating your underwater buildings is pointless or merely for ambiance for strictly the player's enjoyment.

Basically I don't see myself using Jelly Lamps in their current place in the tech tree and cost for anything gameplay related (e.g. I might use them as "lamp skins"). If the glassy material cost were reduced to 20 and they were earlier in the tech tree I'd consider using them for purposes like illuminating wild Coral.

 

[Tenedas]

I understand all the comments in regards of the submergible attribute in respect to the jelly lamp.

So said it is a really neglible part of the thread just to emphasize that the lamp have a stong stats on top of a bonus attribute (whatever it is useful or not)

So my point is:

Light have it's own simulation layer and should deserve some more regards in terms of balancing and CONSISTENCY among buildings. 

Until now wasn't that big of a deal but with flue coral light layer is entering the "oxygen production" design space. Who knows if it get expended in the future. For example algae now produce oxygen if in water and "sufficiently" illuminated.

So for now probably is still manageable with some patch on single buldings like the 3x buff of the jelly lamp, maybe for long term is worth an overhaul of the whole layer tuning and balancing some aspects like the mysterious light distributions 

 

[cheeees]

17 hours ago, blakemw said:

Basically I don't see myself using Jelly Lamps in their current place in the tech tree and cost for anything gameplay related (e.g. I might use them as "lamp skins"). If the glassy material cost were reduced to 20 and they were earlier in the tech tree I'd consider using them for purposes like illuminating wild Coral.

Yeah it's hard to find a use for the jelly lamps since most of the times you would just need a tile with some lux reguardless of the amount for the lit workplace buff.

I think they are more space efficient for bonbon trees and maybe they are better for nyctophobic duplicants.

14 hours ago, Tenedas said:

Light have it's own simulation layer and should deserve some more regards in terms of balancing and CONSISTENCY among buildings. 

Until now wasn't that big of a deal but with flue coral light layer is entering the "oxygen production" design space. Who knows if it get expended in the future. For example algae now produce oxygen if in water and "sufficiently" illuminated.

So for now probably is still manageable with some patch on single buldings like the 3x buff of the jelly lamp, maybe for long term is worth an overhaul of the whole layer tuning and balancing some aspects like the mysterious light distributions 

Well about the uses for light, I don't really see why would it need to be changed, as far as I remember any amount of lux in a tile that a duplicant is standing on, is enough to give them the lit workplace buff, more than that doesn't do much, if the light exceeded something like 50,000 lux they get a sunny buff that is just stress reduction.

Even things that aren't duplicants like bristle blossoms just need any amount of light, bonbon trees and gas grass do requiere a lot more lux. But just more lux.

How light works in the game doesn't seem to be that complex or needed for most of the game. Light kinda is an "IF" statement and if there is light then something happens if not then nothing happens.

 

About balancing though, as you mentioned an unbalance exists.

Right now part of how the game works is that a light sourse will emit the light and if there are 2 light sourse and they both have light in the same tile then that tile will have higher lux. There are some weird interactions with this, light seem to have a radius, the father the light is the dimmer it will be and the lenght of that radius depends on the sourse.

There is also the strange fact that light gets dimmer if the gas absorbs the light or if it passes through a glass tile.

And as it is right now some balancing could be used, maybe not. For what I  understand, I think the intention with the light buildings was to make space and wattage a part of it's mechanic.

Light is not really needed for much other than some specific cases that requiere a bigger number of lux in that tile, so having a brighter light source isn't really a benefit other than it being the only way to get more lux.

For example sun lamps seem to exist so gas grass and beachchairs can be used because normally celing lamps have less lux output and less lenghth of their light radius. So by making the sun lamp use more wattage you are reducing the space they use and incresing the light radius's lenghth. (gas grass farming is not possible with ceiling lamps because of space efficiency)

Mercury lamps are also a thing but it seems they were intentionally made unbalaced since mercury isn't renewable.

This balance between space efficiency and watts is basically thrown out the window with the jelly lamps. lol
You can use some jelly lights and be able to use the beachchairs for less watts than the sun lamp.

So yeah no idea what the devs will do, if they nerf the jelly lamp or if they buff the sun lamp and make it use less watts.

And finally that thing about the light overlay.
It seems to be messy and glitchy, I thought the colors of it were calculated like rads. (the more rads there are in a tile the greener it gets).
But the overlay seems to bug any time you add another light sourse.

Since lux and rads seem to work similar, my guess would be to change it so they work exactly the same, where you could see the light absortion factor of elemets and stuff.

 

In the images below you can see the tiles have the exact same lux in them but one is a brighter yellow than the other.