Update heat output for buildings

[alficles]

It appears to be well known that buildings produce some significant multiplier of heat for reasons best described as "game balance". That's fine, but it makes trying to figure out how much dissipation I need needlessly difficult. Example:

I want to cool a polymer press using some petroleum. I observe that the press produces 162.5W of heat. My petroleum has a specific heat of 1.76 (J/g)/K. At 162.5 J/s, it should heat my 10kg of petroleum by 162.5 J/s / (10kg * 1.76 (J/g)/K ) ⇒ 162.5 J/s / (17600 J/K) ⇒ .0092 K/s. This is quite obviously not the case.

If you want the building to produce 162.5kW, then put that on the page. Or whatever other number you want. But let us use regular math, with no hidden coefficients, to figure out how to manage our resources, heat being one of them.

[TheScaryOne]

Buildings generate 8x heat IIRC, which is why the Tempshift Plates are so good.

Totally agree that less stuff needs to be obfuscated, though.

[alficles]

On 12/10/2017 at 10:23 AM, TheScaryOne said:

Buildings generate 8x heat IIRC

Right, and that's part of the point. Are you sure? Why not just check on the tooltip, where it describes it for everything else?

And is it that they create 8x more heat? Or is it that they're considered to have 8x more mass? How would you tell the difference?

[trukogre]

On 12/10/2017 at 9:23 AM, TheScaryOne said:

Buildings generate 8x heat IIRC, which is why the Tempshift Plates are so good.

Totally agree that less stuff needs to be obfuscated, though.

It's actually 200x for most buildings, but I don't know that the multiplier affects the temp shift plates. My understanding was that it did not.

30 minutes ago, alficles said:

Right, and that's part of the point. Are you sure? Why not just check on the tooltip, where it describes it for everything else?

And is it that they create 8x more heat? Or is it that they're considered to have 8x more mass? How would you tell the difference?

If you look at the code, heat generation for buildings is given in kilowatts wherever the ingame description refers to watts, and there's a 1/5 multiplier for effective  building mass in thermodynamic calculations, which combines for the 200 multiplier.   Why the code doesn't match the tooltip is a question that Klei would have to answer.  It's possible to find out all the above with careful ingame testing, even if we didn't have code access; but the average player who doesn't read forums might never do that testing.