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Ohm's law is not respected


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Hello, developers.

i'm russian player, and i love this game, this is very detailed and funny.

But Ohm law not worked in game. For example: I have thick wire with max load 20kw, and many thin wires with 1kw max, that are connected directly to thick wire. If one of thin wire connect one pump station with 120 watt power. it will not destruct with overload, when thick have more than 1k load on other lines. But in game which wire have load  that equal sum of all consumers.

I was confused with this mechanic of game. i want not to build transformaters on each floor of my colony. In real life i can connect thick wires to thin without problems. what is wrong?

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Yes, it's game but many physics laws already work, such as hydrogen rise and carbon dioxide falls, or heat conductivity and heat capacity are taken into account. I do not understand, why ohm's law is bad idea? It's logical and naturally.

 

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Cuz hydrogen rise and carbon dioxide falls is easy to understand and learn. 

Ohm's law adds little to nothing to the game other than changing where wires breaks and it would take a significant time to develop the simulation that works and is fast enough for a game. For the average player, few are going to notice the difference between wires breaking through ohm's law and wires breaking in random places. 

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What about -infinite decor stat from thick wires? And huge transformater? So many disturbing elements due to violation of ohm's law. It's disturbing elements make them think. It distracts from the game. it's make my colony so ugly, and i have negative decor stat, in all industrial rooms, as thick wires give -500 for decor stat.

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It's so that you design your base a certain way and keep industrial things away from dupes. What you are asking for is a major rework of the electrical system and so you need a very good reason if you want them to do it. 

So far your comments sound like "I don't want to learn the game's rules" or "make the game fit my needs"

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I have few power networks (some small, some complex), a lot of transformers and I exploit many game "laws". It's a quite entertaining for me to discover new unexpected features and think how to use them for benefit of my colony.

BTW transformers in game are not the transformers from real life because there is no voltage in game. In game they're more like separators and arresters.

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So much white knighting in this thread. This guy is not asking for the game to work the way he wants, he is asking for electricity to work the way electricity works. 

It is well understood that games must simplify where necessary but this is not a simplification, it is backwards. What the game often calls an overload is like saying a water line burst because there wasn't enough water in the line. 

The involved science is not complex. Overloads happen when the wire between the source and what it powers cannot handle the current flowing though it.  They have nothing to do with other wires and other loads. 

If Klie wants to change the way electricity works in their game, that is their choice but if they are going to make it something so non-intuitive, they should provide a an explanation of why it works that way or, at least,  tell players it will be different.   I think ONI is a good game even considering their interpretation of electricity but I find it to be a weak spot.  

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1 hour ago, SpaceHobo said:

So much white knighting in this thread. This guy is not asking for the game to work the way he wants, he is asking for electricity to work the way electricity works. 

It is well understood that games must simplify where necessary but this is not a simplification, it is backwards. What the game often calls an overload is like saying a water line burst because there wasn't enough water in the line. 

The involved science is not complex. Overloads happen when the wire between the source and what it powers cannot handle the current flowing though it.  They have nothing to do with other wires and other loads. 

If Klie wants to change the way electricity works in their game, that is their choice but if they are going to make it something so non-intuitive, they should provide a an explanation of why it works that way or, at least,  tell players it will be different.   I think ONI is a good game even considering their interpretation of electricity but I find it to be a weak spot.  

You are best man ever, thank you, i completly agree with you. ^_^

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I agree with the original poster. In my opinion having thick wire as a main bus, splitting into thinner branches is much more intuitive  because it reflects reality. Works same way as pipes really ....  When I started playing, I could not understand why is my power network being overloaded when I was using the thick wire to bring the supply and then use thin wire to connect appliances. I really like the game and this is really the only bigger tjing so far that confused me and I had to google what am I doing wrong.

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And what after? Kirchhoff's laws? Resistance that change with temperature? Higher harmonic? Maybe real time current flow simulation?

But to be serious, this is a game that is not about electricity. That's why devs abandon current and voltage and they leave only two factors: power and time. It's enough to play a game that have own laws and don't require much of PC power. Power circuits in game can be quite complex and simulate it in the way you want will just kill performance. Game would have to calculate every tile of wires and calculate direction of power flow, where it merge, where it split, how it split and everything that realtime.

Learn game laws and use them. Don't expect real life simulation.

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5 hours ago, Oozinator said:

Perhaps Klei could make it optional "Ohm's law on/off", for those people out there, wanting to play with 1 FPS..

I'm sure if Tagrenam and SpaceHobo program a mod implementing that once ONI is in retail and opened up for such modding, that Klei will be happy with their efforts.

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On 10. 12. 2017 at 4:52 PM, SpaceHobo said:

The involved science is not complex. Overloads happen when the wire between the source and what it powers cannot handle the current flowing though it.  They have nothing to do with other wires and other loads.

Involved science is not. But its implementation is. Instead of single place having few numberes refering to sum of all connected devices (current state in which detection is single if bigger than...) you would have to utilize quite complicated graph algorithms and expensive detection of what consumer devices are behind each wire. Then simulate facts like that having multiple producers on same line could result in brakage in one situation and not in other (like thick wire -> thin wire -> thick wire, when consumerers after thin wire will eat up all power from producers on that side its ok, when not and other place behind thin wire needs more power thin should break due to overload (this is pretty much how fuse works)). This is much more work that it may seem resulting in maybe slightly nicer bases but heavy CPU load in already CPU hungry game. No thank you, i can live with current state even though i did study electronic.
Btw now work as programmer so i know little something from both worlds ;)

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5 hours ago, trukogre said:

I'm sure if Tagrenam and SpaceHobo program a mod implementing that once ONI is in retail and opened up for such modding, that Klei will be happy with their efforts.

Could be, but said Klei, that they make ONI "open for modding"?

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I can't really care about the realism deficits of the wire system. This game has plenty of more significant deviations from realism, including that the map is basically a giant perpetual motion device.

I can object to two other things about it though. The first is that the system is non-intuitive. You get overloads in randomly chosen places, but you intuitively expect that the overload should be in a specific place. Then you learn that a grid is all one thing, and only then do you have the knowledge you need to solve the problem. But that's really a tutorial problem rather than anything fundamental to the mechanic: anything non-intuitive should really be spelled out in a tutorial somewhere.

The biggest issue is that the overloads aren't really adding to the game anyway. As I said a moment ago, you have a bit of an abrupt shock when you first stumble into the mechanic, and then you figure out the fix and that's pretty much the end of it. The game would probably be cleaner if you just couldn't plug consumers into heavy wire or suppliers into light wire. Or even if there was just one type of wire and no overload system (which is basically what the game looked like before the introduction of the current heavy wire).

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Or simply tutorial "missions" to guide you through basic mechanics. But after you learn it, there is no problem using it ;) and it actually creates quite an interesting gameplay mechanic where it forces you to thing about materials vs heat vs power generation etc.. 

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On 12/12/2017 at 3:22 AM, sadovsf said:

Involved science is not. But its implementation is. Instead of single place having few numberes refering to sum of all connected devices (current state in which detection is single if bigger than...) you would have to utilize quite complicated graph algorithms and expensive detection of what consumer devices are behind each wire. Then simulate facts like that having multiple producers on same line could result in brakage in one situation and not in other (like thick wire -> thin wire -> thick wire, when consumerers after thin wire will eat up all power from producers on that side its ok, when not and other place behind thin wire needs more power thin should break due to overload (this is pretty much how fuse works)). This is much more work that it may seem resulting in maybe slightly nicer bases but heavy CPU load in already CPU hungry game. No thank you, i can live with current state even though i did study electronic.
Btw now work as programmer so i know little something from both worlds ;)

I was going to disagree with this post, but when you stop to think about potentially complicated wiring around a base it does fall back to needing "complicated graph algorithms."

Spoiler

I was thinking they could implement a simple system where each wire type could break the system up into blocks which would just have a net demand or supply (Adding up all buildings directly connected) and compare that with connected neighbors by simply adding it all up and if supply is over the Wattage limit it overloads at the connection or under the demand and nothing is powered.

Seems straight forward and simple enough for a 'normal' power system I lay out, but adding it all up probably isn't so easy if you have to keep iterating around (or make a list) to count the demand on a wire from it's neighbors, then the neighbors' neighbors, and so on out to the end.  Once you start to think about people making wacky circular power systems alternating small, conductive, and heavy wires, special cases for the one side of transformers/(whatever limiter they throw in) it can/will become a buggy nightmare.  It circles back to 'complicated graph algorithm'

 

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You are over complicating things. Remember that simplification I mentioned?  I don't think anyone is asking Kleie to factor resistances across different materials. 

You have sources and you have loads. Current along a particular bit of line is the sum of the loads past that bit assuming there is enough at the source to draw from.  If that current exceeds what the line can handle, that line eventually burns out. If there is not enough current from the sources, the loads will work at a reduced capacity or not at all.  

Things get a bit more complicated when you have a true power grid with multiple paths form sources to loads. A bit of simplification can happen here. If there are two lines from the same source to the same load, the current can just be split between them according to their capacities. If a line travels from a different source or through different loads,  it can feed to or draw power from another line based on the difference in current. 

Quite a number of calculations might occur in the second scenario but it is all simple math and CPUs are really good at simple math. Not only that but the math would only need to be run when something changes on the grid. I cant see this eating more CPU than one or two dupes. 

There would still a be reason to carefully plan a power network as a mess would make the reason behind an overload difficult to determine. 

 

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