Air Conditioning Not Included

[Supraluminal]

There are a lot of solutions in here but I don't think the issue is so much a lack of solutions as it is a challenge of player education. The game is pretty overwhelming at first, and it doesn't do much to even alert the player that heat is going to be a problem let alone nudge them towards any of the solutions we're discussing.

So it seems like the ONI design philosophy expects that players will learn by failing at least a few times. I think that's fine in general, but a few more signposts to help players at least understand the challenge and what their options are might be in order. I mean you don't even know that wheezeworts exist in the game at first, let alone what they do, how they work, and how to get the most out of them.

If heat were the only threat and players were giving it full attention from the start, maybe things would be fine as-is, but new players are going to be figuring out the basics of farming and power generation and water management all at the same time. It's a lot.

[badimo]

28 minutes ago, Supraluminal said:

but a few more signpost

I dislike signposts in games.  There are too many tips as-is.  I want to fail again and again and learn overtime.  If my base runs perfectly the first time I play it, the games loses all replay-ability.

The best times I have had with ONI is when I am up against the wall cursing at my dupes.  ONI doesn’t need the Microsoft paper clip in the corner reminding me my base is getting too hot.  It doesn’t even need the message telling me I have no food source or no oxygen.  My dupes starving or suffocating to death is sufficient in my eyes.

Maybe I’m old school, but I just don’t like to be spoon fed.

[Supraluminal]

1 minute ago, badimo said:

I dislike signposts in games.  There are too many tips as-is.  I want to fail again and again and learn overtime.  If my base runs perfectly the first time I play it, the games loses all replay-ability.

The best times I have had with ONI is when I am up against the wall cursing at my dupes.  ONI doesn’t need the Microsoft paper clip in the corner reminding me my base is getting too hot.  It doesn’t even need the message telling me I have no food source or no oxygen.  My dupes starving or suffocating to death is sufficient in my eyes.

Maybe I’m old school, but I just don’t like to be spoon fed.

I grew up playing games in the eighties and nineties but I have no interest in games that are actively hostile to me. For me, there's a difference between "hard" and "punishing," and it's not just about degree of difficulty: Games can be very difficult without actively antagonizing players. I for one am happy to accept some advancements in game design in this area.

That said, I don't have a problem with other people having different preferences. Not every game has to appeal to all people. At some point Klei just has to decide what their target market is and go for it.

[blash365]

i dont see how heat is an early game problem. The only early game items that could possibly produce heat are coal generators. Everything else is at the very least mid-game.

But even if we just got different definitions of which phase is which, getting to a cold biome, which should fix most of your mid-game problems with wheeze worts, ice or even an anti-enthropy nullifier, is not exactly hard.

Biomes - from what i have experienced so far - spawn in different layers around your starting position:

0 - starting biome

1 - swamp biome / caustic (?)

2 - ice / caustic / swamp

3 - anything (including lava)

 

with lava usually being to the south/bottom.

 

The key is to build probing tunnels - as any miner would do - to quickly see in which direction you find the key biomes for your next expansion.

This should take quite a while and is always a balance between creating new problems (slimelung, low pressure, unbreathable gases) and finding precious resources (critters, geysers, plants, metals, water and cold stuff).

 

------------------------------

 

19 minutes ago, badimo said:

I dislike signposts in games. 

<snip>

Maybe I’m old school, but I just don’t like to be spoon fed.

Please dont mix up old school with good design.

 

Old school games had less notifications because there were not many established systems to provide them (less screen resolution, no division between logic and user interface, no multithreading, no alpha channel, ...). Many of them concentrated on design, function, concept because that was the main "fronteer". And yes, having a good concept was a big part of what made them enjoyable.

ONI is a concept based game as well. But that does not mean it should discard 50 years of video-game-making-experience which brought us neat methods to inform us about stuff in a game before reaching the game over screen.

[badimo]

3 minutes ago, blash365 said:

At some point Klei just has to decide what their target market is and go for it.

Oh for sure.  I’m realistic.  I know Klei and every other game designer is going to abandon me for the masses.  I’m looking at you Blizzard.

[blash365]

2 minutes ago, badimo said:

Oh for sure.  I’m realistic.  I know Klei and every other game designer is going to abandon me for the masses.  I’m looking at you Blizzard.

erm. its nice of you to quote me. but i did not actually say that. you mixed up the quote with someone posting above me. Please correct it.

[Supraluminal]

2 minutes ago, badimo said:

Oh for sure.  I’m realistic.  I know Klei and every other game designer is going to abandon me for the masses.  I’m looking at you Blizzard.

I don't know, seems like masochistic games are having a bit of a heyday, aren't they? There was that whole rash of maso-platformers like Super Meat Boy, and the Dark Souls games (which I've avoided) are supposedly intentionally pretty obtuse and intended to be explored by repeated failure. And of course Dwarf Fortress, a direct ancestor to ONI, seems like it fits here

[badimo]

8 minutes ago, Supraluminal said:

like Super Meat Boy

That’s true.  Mobile for sure has many titles that are pure torture.  It is a fine balance.  I guess I just worry the the Dev team might listen to folks complaining about difficulty and nerf the regular survival mode into oblivion.  Then I have to play on “hardcore” mode.  Somehow that ruins the game for me, but that is my own mental block.

[Supraluminal]

Just now, badimo said:

That’s true.  Mobile for sure has many titles that are pure torture.  It is a fine balance.  I guess I just worry the the Dev team might listen to folks complaining about difficulty and nerf the regular survival mode into oblivion.  Then I have to play on “hardcore” mode.  Somehow that ruins the game for me, but that is my own mental block.

Well, I would again make a distinction between "hard" and "hostile to the player." I know that some people do in fact want games to almost push them away with their design, and that's fine, but it's certainly possible to make games that are accessible (meaning they give players sufficient tools and information) but also very difficult in terms of execution.

For ONI, that might in part mean a new player experience that doesn't give away specific solutions to the player, but does at least nudge them in a direction. Something that communicates, "Your colony is going to get hot! Get creative and explore the asteroid for the tools you need to survive." Not just a piece of text, but subtler breadcrumbs like tempting resource pockets and ruins and stuff that pull players towards a cold biome. Maybe a slow trickle of cold air from a crack in the abyssalite. The game already has some of that, but it could be tuned more carefully.

And that's just one small possibility; there's also a lot that could be done to help players grasp just how much heat a particular machine makes, for example. Even really simple things like finding a more graphical way to communicate heat production than just a wattage number that means nothing to a new player.

If you provide some basic forms of orientation for new players, you can then balance the rest of the game (resource availability, material costs, etc. etc.) to make it really challenging to meet all your colony's needs in the long run. People will still need to explore and experiment to learn the game, and probably fail a bunch of times, but they won't feel as confused or helpless while they're doing it.

Those are my thoughts on it, anyway. I do genuinely think one good way to make a bad game is to try to please everyone, so I get the concerns about what kinds of help the game gives to players. Hopefully you're able to enjoy whatever game ONI becomes in its final form.

[PickPay]

ONI is hard, Don't Starve is punishing. That said I can see why the game is painful for new players starting now. I got time to learn with each version adding new content and more depth otherwise it must be overwhelming. Especially so that the game can be misleading with not so intuitive solutions to problems like heat that aren't always obvious before its "too late". I guess it's a learn-through-failure type of game (I remember my first time playing Banished and my colony died, I was like wow... thats new for me :D) so players should be aware of that but a little more guidance wouldn't hurt. And for the hardcore players that want no help well there could be options to disable notifications etc.

The game encourages you to expand and in the process should allow you to discover solutions.

[PhailRaptor]

2 hours ago, blash365 said:

i dont see how heat is an early game problem. The only early game items that could possibly produce heat are coal generators. Everything else is at the very least mid-game.

Both Batteries and Large Batteries produce quite a bit of heat.  I don't even build Coal Gens in most games.  The thing that makes all the heat in my base is the 2 Large Batteries, powered by Hamster Wheels.  Reaching cycle ~100 or so if I haven't gotten at least 2 Wheezeworts I know I'm going to have a heat problem.

[blash365]

4 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

Both Batteries and Large Batteries produce quite a bit of heat.  I don't even build Coal Gens in most games.  The thing that makes all the heat in my base is the 2 Large Batteries, powered by Hamster Wheels.  Reaching cycle ~100 or so if I haven't gotten at least 2 Wheezeworts I know I'm going to have a heat problem.

Then we just have different playstyles.

I am not even in cycle 100. I have about 4 large batteries + 1 smart, 4 coal reactors, 3 hydrogen reactors, 2 ng reactors.

Metal refinery, oil refinery and polymer press.

I am cooling my base with 3 wheezes with an AC similar to

 

As a matter of fact, i am running into issues with heat now. But only now and it is still manageable. I still have 1 wheeze in my first cold biome. I can see at least 2 more cold biomes, one of which surely has an AETN in it.

I am not sure what the difference is between your base and mine, but if you have heat problems from just 2 batteries, then i dont get how it is possible.

Even if those 2 batteries were heating your base up, it would take ages to affect your entire base. Unless you isolate everything with abysalite the heat would propagate to other tiles.

Please also note that you can automate your reactors with smart batteries, which actually helps alot with resources and heat. But since you are using hamster wheels, that cant be the main problem.

[trukogre]

14 hours ago, Giltirn said:

I agree with most of what you're saying, but the aquatuner just moves heat about, and the ice biome is often very distant and is finite in its cooling capacity (before all the ice melts). There are only a limited number of wheezeworts on a map, and those plus the AETN are the only sources of cooling we have apart from using weird, counter-intuitive heat-deletion 'quirks' like dumping heat into polluted water and converting the water to fertilizer. I consider the latter exploits because they are completely illogical and exist only because of the limitations of the simulation (of course you could say the worts and AETN are also, but at least they were *designed* for that purpose).

Edit: In practise, a (practically) infinite amount of cooling is available in a real asteroid by building radiators on the outside which radiate their heat into space. I would very much like to have this as a late-game option.

if you think that the only reasonable methods of of performing a necessary task are exploits, then the only reasonable options left are

A: decide that using exploits is ok because the game is in early access and using exploits to cover areas where the game is unfinished is ok with you.

or 

B. decide not to play until better methods are added.

Up to you, doesn't matter to me.  I don't consider them exploits, personally, nor do I consider them completely illogical.

 

[badimo]

2 hours ago, Supraluminal said:

"Your colony is going to get hot! Get creative and explore the asteroid for the tools you need to survive."

I'm okay with this, but I prefer if this happens only on the loading screen (i.e. a random tip is given to players each time they load the game).  If it happens while I'm playing I feel like the game is babying me.  Within game, they give you a heat overlay.  To me, that is enough.

2 hours ago, Supraluminal said:

Even really simple things like finding a more graphical way to communicate heat production than just a wattage number that means nothing to a new player.

I agree that this is a weakness and needs to be resolved.  I feel like ONI needs an in-game item thesaurus that you click on where you can review every item in the game (and it covers the whole screen).  I hate how the item information is covered by clicking on the actual item and then reading information in tiny little panels.  It is ridiculous that exit temperatures of liquid/gas are not even covered and you have to Google to find this.  Right now, learning about plants is especially annoying.

Where it could go awry (in my mind) is eliminating relatively easy challenges (RE: early game cooling) AND too much guiding to new players.  The first experience I had was to have my dupes pee on the floor.  I think every new player should experience that.  It is funny.  After cleaning up that mess and building a toilet, your dupes start to starve.  After dealing with that nightmare, your dupes start to suffocate.  This was a fun gaming experience for me and I don't want Klei to eliminate it by telling you what to do and when to do it.

1 hour ago, PickPay said:

And for the hardcore players that want no help well there could be options to disable notifications etc.

Sounds reasonable.

[thewreckedangle]

not the best picture right now, but i put the batteries in a tiny bit of water. seems to keep them cool and you can do it pretty quickly

[Giltirn]

3 hours ago, trukogre said:

if you think that the only reasonable methods of of performing a necessary task are exploits, then the only reasonable options left are

A: decide that using exploits is ok because the game is in early access and using exploits to cover areas where the game is unfinished is ok with you.

or 

B. decide not to play until better methods are added.

Up to you, doesn't matter to me.  I don't consider them exploits, personally, nor do I consider them completely illogical.

 

I'm not saying I'm not going to use them, I just dislike them immensely because they break a ridiculous number of laws of physics. As I said, wheezeworts and the AETN also do this, but I'm willing to suspend belief for *intended* game features. The problem is that many people are happy to say that we don't need any more cooling systems as you can do this already with some hideous, mind-melting corruption of the laws of physics that makes Einstein spin in his grave. While adequate stop-gap solutions, clearly these things are unintended side-effects of the simulation and quite likely to be patched out, and we should be pushing collectively for real solutions.

[Supraluminal]

5 hours ago, badimo said:

I agree that this is a weakness and needs to be resolved.  I feel like ONI needs an in-game item thesaurus that you click on where you can review every item in the game (and it covers the whole screen).  I hate how the item information is covered by clicking on the actual item and then reading information in tiny little panels.  It is ridiculous that exit temperatures of liquid/gas are not even covered and you have to Google to find this.  Right now, learning about plants is especially annoying.

Where it could go awry (in my mind) is eliminating relatively easy challenges (RE: early game cooling) AND too much guiding to new players.  The first experience I had was to have my dupes pee on the floor.  I think every new player should experience that.  It is funny.  After cleaning up that mess and building a toilet, your dupes start to starve.  After dealing with that nightmare, your dupes start to suffocate.  This was a fun gaming experience for me and I don't want Klei to eliminate it by telling you what to do and when to do it.

Yes, I mostly want the game systems to be more legible to players. I don't see a need to serve up cookie-cutter solutions - maybe the ruins could include one or two bare-bones (even half-broken) prototypes to illustrate some of the more advanced concepts. Even that might not be necessary if all the components are easy enough to understand.

I agree with you 100% about things like having dupes wet the floor, running out of your starting oxygen, running out of food before you figure out how to build a farm. Those are good gameplay experiences that are evocative (funny, scary, etc.) and make you scramble to find a fix.

The thing is, those examples all have easy-to-trace causes and you get quick feedback as you start to address them. Dupes pee on the floor? I see there are outhouses, better build those earlier. I need oxygen? I see there's a building tab dedicated to that. Food? Same deal. You can fix initial O2 problems near-instantly with one deoxydizer, food with a musher and a pitcher pump. So the cycle of player failure -> consequence -> player fix -> observe results and adjust moves quickly.

Also, the odds are very good that even a new player won't immediately lose all their dupes to one of these failures. They'll probably have a base collapse later on as things get more complicated and they run out of nearby algae and coal, but they can survive a first brush with an emergency in one of those systems.

Heat I think is quite different. By the time it's having major impacts on your base, it might be too late to fix it at all, at least for a new player. It's not as easy to tell what you did wrong (or failed to do right, in the case of insulating from the surrounding hot biomes). Heat moves relatively slowly, so the feedback loop for it is much longer, which is something that human beings are terrible at dealing with. And the tools for managing heat are mostly much trickier to use. Critically, the hydrofan - which is the heat equivalent of the deoxydizer or musher, a low-tech self-contained quick fix for a specific problem - seems terrible. Just making it more viable as at least a stopgap measure would do a lot for the new player experience.

99% of players are going to come to this game with little or no idea of what a heat exchanger is, let alone how to build one. I know a common source of confusion is the fact that thermo regulators and aqua tuners are heat pumps, not heat destroyers, even though that's exactly consistent with real-world air conditioners. Thermodynamics is not an intuitive thing for most people, so a little slack seems warranted.

Okay, that got long. Point is, I would like people to crash headlong into failure in ONI, but I think it'd be best if they come away from that with some solid ideas about what they did wrong and what they can do better next time, rather than just confused and frustrated.

[PhailRaptor]

3 hours ago, thewreckedangle said:

not the best picture right now, but i put the batteries in a tiny bit of water. seems to keep them cool and you can do it pretty quickly

That is quite a good short to medium term solution, but eventually the water is going to be heated.  Water has a very high Heat Capacity, so it takes dramatically more energy to heat up than other substances.  But it will eventually happen.  You will eventually need to devise a system for changing out the heated water at a certain temp, and replacing it with cool water.

When they first teased the Automation goodies, I immediately thought of a water cooled Battery tower, using temp sensors to open/close horizontal doors, and hydro sensors turning pumps on and off, for that exact purpose.  A secondary pump at the bottom of the tower to send the water off for cooling or other uses.

[trukogre]

4 hours ago, Giltirn said:

I'm not saying I'm not going to use them, I just dislike them immensely because they break a ridiculous number of laws of physics. As I said, wheezeworts and the AETN also do this, but I'm willing to suspend belief for *intended* game features. The problem is that many people are happy to say that we don't need any more cooling systems as you can do this already with some hideous, mind-melting corruption of the laws of physics that makes Einstein spin in his grave. While adequate stop-gap solutions, clearly these things are unintended side-effects of the simulation and quite likely to be patched out, and we should be pushing collectively for real solutions.

They don't break any laws of physics.  Breaking the laws of physics is actually impossible.  If we ever observed a 'law' of physics not being followed, we wouldn't say "OMG that natural phenomena is breaking the laws of physics, arrest that natural phenomena!".  Instead, we would say " hey look, we  were wrong about the laws of physics, let's figure out a new version that accomodates these observations".  The game physics don't do this, because they are a game.  The game has it's own 'laws of physics'.  So, nothing is broken, nothing needs to be fixed, you don't need to suspend belief--wait, why would you suspend belief?  I talk to Einstein's ghost regularly, he doesn't spin in his grave over any video game, although he is a fan of spinning as in the new exercise fad.  I'm sorry that ONI melts your mind with corruption, that sounds painful, you might want to get that looked at.

[badimo]

8 hours ago, Supraluminal said:

maybe the ruins could include one or two bare-bones (even half-broken) prototypes to illustrate some of the more advanced concepts.

I could live with that; good idea.

8 hours ago, Supraluminal said:

Critically, the hydrofan - which is the heat equivalent of the deoxydizer or musher, a low-tech self-contained quick fix for a specific problem - seems terrible.

When I played with a special rule that I could not mine Abyssalite, I kid you not, I saved a farm for ~100 cycles by using a hydrofan.  That might have been the one and only time anyone has ever used that building.  Having said that, if they want to buff hydrofan so a dupe doesn't need operate it, I'm okay with that.

[avc15]

you won't find yourself lacking an early game solution if you just put some wheezeworts inside your base. That's what they're meant for.

I understand some people boycott wheezeworts, but this is the tool made for the problem you're describing.

[Giltirn]

10 hours ago, trukogre said:

They don't break any laws of physics.  Breaking the laws of physics is actually impossible.  If we ever observed a 'law' of physics not being followed, we wouldn't say "OMG that natural phenomena is breaking the laws of physics, arrest that natural phenomena!".  Instead, we would say " hey look, we  were wrong about the laws of physics, let's figure out a new version that accomodates these observations".  The game physics don't do this, because they are a game.  The game has it's own 'laws of physics'.  So, nothing is broken, nothing needs to be fixed, you don't need to suspend belief--wait, why would you suspend belief?  I talk to Einstein's ghost regularly, he doesn't spin in his grave over any video game, although he is a fan of spinning as in the new exercise fad.  I'm sorry that ONI melts your mind with corruption, that sounds painful, you might want to get that looked at.

OK, fine - the game has its own rules. But anyone who has even a grade school education is going to have some intuition about energy conservation, it's the most basic principle in physics. If you abandon it you may as well just call the whole thing magic and throw away any semblance of consistency with the real world.

Wouldn't it be nice if people who play this game get some better understanding about fluid dynamics and thermodynamics from playing, just as so many people gain greater understanding of orbital mechanics by playing Kerbal Space Program?

[itsYiyas]

13 hours ago, Supraluminal said:

Critically, the hydrofan - which is the heat equivalent of the deoxydizer or musher, a low-tech self-contained quick fix for a specific problem - seems terrible

-80w heat isn't that bad to be honest - probably enough for 1 electrolyzer or your entire starting base. I think the issue is it costs dupe operation, which effectively makes it a 400w machine, where wheezeworts are free and the AETN deletes 400w heat for "nearly free".

[Giltirn]

12 minutes ago, itsYiyas said:

-80w heat isn't that bad to be honest - probably enough for 1 electrolyzer or your entire starting base. I think the issue is it costs dupe operation, which effectively makes it a 400w machine, where wheezeworts are free and the AETN deletes 400w heat for "nearly free".

If you had a powered version it would probably trivialize the whole heat mechanic. I wonder however if there could be a "wind-up" version that still requires dupes to operate it every so often but not constantly.

[Master Miner]

14 hours ago, trukogre said:

They don't break any laws of physics.  Breaking the laws of physics is actually impossible.

The problem is that some (or many? or perhaps even most?) players will expect to have a lot of fun with a solid, reasonable in-game physics.

They will expect that the displayed numbers and units of Joules, Watts, Grams and Kelvins mean some integrity, that they will be able to calculate with that numbers and build a system based on that calculations. They expect it to be a great fun aspect in the game, but...

But that is not the case, and when they find that out, they feel cheated. Or fooled. They feel like the rules of the game were broken when they write "laws of physics were broken". I think you might already understand that.

When you write "they don't break any laws of physics", then the player in question feels even more ridiculous and miserable, because it is "their fault" that they assumed to find consistent, solid in-game physics that is fun to play with.

It is "solely their fault" that they assumed too much. Obviously.
Or... is it?