Air Conditioning Not Included

[Kasuha]

39 minutes ago, Master Miner said:

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.

I would like to disagree. Most players are reasonable enough to understand that games don't come with realistic physics. But a lot of people want to play fair, according to rules, or "how developers intended it to be played", regardless of how lifelike the physics are.

The problem comes from the fact that the game is in Early Access, is in development, and there's lack of info from developers on what "how it's intended to be played" is. So it's up to everyone's opinion which feature is fair to use and which is considered cheating. And different people have different approaches here, from considering everything that's in the game at the moment fair game to comparing the game with real life physics and considering every unrealistic thing a cheat or bug.

There's no universal recipe on that, we can just hope that as the game gets closer to publishing it will became more clear what the intended features are. There's no doubt it will not be very close to real life physics though, at least for people who do have a good physics background.

[Master Miner]

1 hour ago, Kasuha said:

Most players are reasonable enough to understand that games don't come with realistic physics

Even more, I guess almost everyone understands that,

Relation to the RL physics is also important, because it is a great source of fun, but that isn't what I was writing about.

It is about the consistency, integrity and overall quality of the in-game physics.
It is about whether the in-game physics is solid enough to be fun to play with.
If it is too lousy, e.g. if it is trivial to make a perpetuum mobile and have infinite cheap everything, than it won't be a lot of fun to play.
I think that bending the in-game physics in order to balance few aspects of the game leads to increasing mess and decreasing fun.

[trukogre]

5 hours ago, Giltirn said:

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?

Energy conservation isn't the most basic principle in physics, it's not even true.  Mass-energy conversion violates energy conservation, obviously.

 

" 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."

See, you're all into science, but this statement is just like, your opinion, man.  So everything is all about science, and then here, at the crux of the argument, it's just your opinion.  If you're going to abandon science in the crux of the argument you might as well call everything you said magic and throw away any semblance of concern about science in every context whatsoever.  So, I"ll do that with your statements, and, *boom*  now they're irrelevant.  Good talk.

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Master Miner said:

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?

I very clearly explained that "it's impossible to break the laws of physics" is about real world physics. You can't break the laws of physics in real life. So yes,  they assume too much, and so do you; although it would be more accurate to say they, and you, failed to comprehend clear English statements instead.

[itsYiyas]

I think the ingame physics are entirely fine.

They purposefully aren't perfect in order to minimise the requirements for the game which can get laggy for a lot of players later in the game. There's some unclear "loopholes", like the drip cooling, but for the most part the physics is not only robust enough to make it playable but predictable enough without a holistic understanding of physics - which makes it fun.

[Foefaller]

I've personally found that surrounding your farms with granite insulated tiles and making sure all the oxygen from the area comes solely from algae keeps that part of your base cool enough for quite a while after you've switched to electrolyzers for everywhere else, even with no Wheezworts.

IMO as others earlier in the threat have put it, it's less of a "there isn't enough ways to deal with heat early game" problem as much as it's a "there's not enough warnings about heat" problem, nothing to explain why you Algae Distillers are a good investment when Electrolyzers are easier to set up, have zero risk for getting your dupes sick and the only truly sustainable way to get oxygen with steam geysers.

[trukogre]

22 minutes ago, Foefaller said:

I've personally found that surrounding your farms with granite insulated tiles and making sure all the oxygen from the area comes solely from algae keeps that part of your base cool enough for quite a while after you've switched to electrolyzers for everywhere else, even with no Wheezworts.

IMO as others earlier in the threat have put it, it's less of a "there isn't enough ways to deal with heat early game" problem as much as it's a "there's not enough warnings about heat" problem, nothing to explain why you Algae Distillers are a good investment when Electrolyzers are easier to set up, have zero risk for getting your dupes sick and the only truly sustainable way to get oxygen with steam geysers.

other than reading forums, reddit, or trying it out for yourself, you mean.

[Foefaller]

3 hours ago, trukogre said:

other than reading forums, reddit, or trying it out for yourself, you mean.

Well, yeah, because those aren't in the game. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting the total minutiae of base management to be explained in game, nor am I against having anything beyond the basics left to self-discovery or outside sources either (I play Warframe a lot when I'm not playing this, and have been for 4 years, so yeah, totally fine being thrown into the deep end).

I'm just saying the reason there are players that struggle with early-game heat is largely because they aren't clearly told in-game that heat is something you should be thinking of from the beginning, because heat deletion is rare and most forms of management are largely cases of moving heat around or keeping it away from the things that are sensitive to it.

Heck, I'm still have no clue how Tempshift plates are suppose to help with that...

...but tutorial stuff like that is usually added later, and there is obviously more in that vein that's going to be added (there is a database page for Heat, it just doesn't have anything there yet.) so not going to fuss about it beyond pointing out it's a thing.

[trukogre]

I'm almost 100% sure that "trying it out for yourself" is in the game

 

If you look at it from a role-playing perspective, then your first time role-playing duplicants going to an unknown asteroid, than you're not told that heat will be a problem for your first colony because it's your first colony and the duplicants wouldn't know that the heat would be a problem, so the game doesn't tell you that either  .  it's perfectly consistent.

[Master Miner]

16 hours ago, trukogre said:

I very clearly explained that "it's impossible to break the laws of physics" is about real world physics.

Yes, you wrote that a game can not break real world laws of physics - because nothing can.

On 17.3.2018 at 5:21 AM, trukogre said:

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

And that's where I even more got the impression that you missed or that you're ignoring that players will usually want to have better in-game physics, that aspects of the in-game physics that resemble RL add to the fun and that a game implementation can break the written or unwritten rules of the game and make players feel fooled. When it does, then it'll better get fixed. It is easy to make a game boring, It is all but easy to make a good game.

BTW, some people here in the forum think that the in-game physics can not get much better because of computational limits of the chosen required hardware. That's not the case - that hardware is capable of at least 10x, if not 100x more when the software is developed in a way that matches how the hardware was intended to be used.

[Miasab]

Since we not have nearly infinite sand, I found it much better for temperature to get oxygen with filters rather than electrolyzers.

[trukogre]

8 hours ago, Master Miner said:

Yes, you wrote that a game can not break real world laws of physics - because nothing can.

And that's where I even more got the impression that you missed or that you're ignoring that players will usually want to have better in-game physics, that aspects of the in-game physics that resemble RL add to the fun and that a game implementation can break the written or unwritten rules of the game and make players feel fooled. When it does, then it'll better get fixed. It is easy to make a game boring, It is all but easy to make a good game.

 

I'm not ignoring or missing 'that', I'm disagreeing with 'that'.  I think that there's a sweet spot, that physics which are completely made up and implausible would be less fun, but physics which are too realistic would also be less fun.  If you want to do completely realistic physics, go get a physics degree--how fun does that sound to you?  How fun does that sound to the average player?  I'm guessing the answer to the first question is higher than the answer to the second one, which is fine, we all have our own biases.

 

[TrustyFish]

7 hours ago, Miasab said:

Since we not have nearly infinite sand, I found it much better for temperature to get oxygen with filters rather than electrolyzers.

This seems to be a very underestimated source of oxygen. Slime for example: 

1. When allowed to decay into Poxgen converts 100% of its mass to Poxygen, which in turn can be filtered 90% to oxygen.

2. When processed in a distiller it gives 1/3 algae, 2/3 Pwater. the algae converts to oxygen at a small loss, and the Pwater needs to be filtered and then elecrolyzed for less than 90% oxygen.

While slow, the first method is similarly efficient at converting slime's mass to oxygen while not using any power or producing any heat. (except perhaps crushing stone into sand if you somehow play long enough to find yourself running low on sand. But the second method also uses some sand, so that difference seems minimal as well.

You can also allow polluted dirt and polluted water to gas off in the same way.

[Giltirn]

On 3/17/2018 at 3:37 PM, trukogre said:

Energy conservation isn't the most basic principle in physics, it's not even true.  Mass-energy conversion violates energy conservation, obviously.

I'm afraid that is a common misconception; no known phenomena breaks energy conservation. What Einstein's equation tells us is that mass and energy *are the same thing* (another name is the mass-energy equivalence principle). If you have a wire carrying energy then it is a fact that that wire will be slightly heavier than a wire carrying none. A blue photon weighs more than a red photon. I have a degree and a PhD in physics (both of which I enjoyed getting immensely, thank you) and work in the field of theoretical physics so you can trust me on that one - otherwise I suggest looking up the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence).

 

[trukogre]

13 minutes ago, Giltirn said:

I'm afraid that is a common misconception; no known phenomena breaks energy conservation. What Einstein's equation tells us is that mass and energy *are the same thing* (another name is the mass-energy equivalence principle). If you have a wire carrying energy then it is a fact that that wire will be slightly heavier than a wire carrying none. A blue photon weighs more than a red photon. I have a degree and a PhD in physics (both of which I enjoyed getting immensely, thank you) and work in the field of theoretical physics so you can trust me on that one - otherwise I suggest looking up the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence).

 

Ah, yes, I thank you for the clarification.  I notice you didn't address the main point of my argument which rendered your main point irrelevant, I'm not sure if you mean to come back to that later or if you're ceding that point and just coming back to give the physics lesson.  Either way, I appreciate the correction.

[Giltirn]

1 minute ago, trukogre said:

Ah, yes, I thank you for the clarification.  I notice you didn't address the main point of my argument which rendered your main point irrelevant, I'm not sure if you mean to come back to that later or if you're ceding that point and just coming back for the physics lesson.  Either way, I appreciate the correction.

I'm afraid I did not address your argument because I did not understand it. I stand behind my assertion that tossing out energy conservation in a simulation-based game like this a big problem. As other posters have pointed out it makes a mockery of a game which renders realistic values to such things as temperature and thermal conductivity. But you are quite right that it is simply my opinion which you are free to disagree with. I also agree that there are limits to any simulation and we must make sacrifices for playability and the computational demand. It is also still an alpha and therefore incomplete. As an EA customer I am simply providing my 2 cents on what I consider good and bad about the game.

[trukogre]

10 minutes ago, Giltirn said:

I'm afraid I did not address your argument because I did not understand it. I stand behind my assertion that tossing out energy conservation in a simulation-based game like this a big problem. As other posters have pointed out it makes a mockery of a game which renders realistic values to such things as temperature and thermal conductivity. But you are quite right that it is simply my opinion which you are free to disagree with. I also agree that there are limits to any simulation and we must make sacrifices for playability and the computational demand. It is also still an alpha and therefore incomplete. As an EA customer I am simply providing my 2 cents on what I consider good and bad about the game.

Your argument is circular, your second and third statements above are essentially the same.  simplified down, your argument is: "unrealism in a sim game is a problem, because: it's a problem that your sim game is unrealistic."  My point was that you go on and on about science, but when it comes down to it, you resort to circular logic, which if removed leaves "I don't like it". as you entire argument. You might as well have omitted all mention of science, in the end, and just gone with "I don't like it; I want it to be more realistic."  Am I wrong in my simplification above, is there a meaningful distinction to be found between "simulation game" and "game which renders realistic values", and between " is a big problem" and "makes a mockery of"?

[Giltirn]

Just now, trukogre said:

Your argument is circular, your second and third statements above are essentially the same.  simplified down, your argument is: "unrealism in a sim game is a problem, because: it's a problem that your sim game is unrealistic."  My point was that you go on and on about science, but when it comes down to it, you resort to circular logic, which if removed leaves "I don't like it". as you entire argument. You might as well have omitted all mention of science, in the end, and just gone with "I don't like it."  Am I wrong in my simplification above, is there a meaningful distinction to be found between "simulation game" and "game which renders realistic values", and between " is a big problem" and "makes a mockery of"?

I feel you are now arguing for the sake of arguing. You are absolutely correct; I don't like it, and I believe I have communicated my reasons why. These reasons are to do with how real physics is portrayed in the game. I also conceded that it is merely my opinion. However you continue to attack my posts and I don't feel like either of us are making any real headway and so I don't intend to respond any further.

[Kabrute]

@ImDaMisterL

[trukogre]

21 minutes ago, Giltirn said:

I feel you are now arguing for the sake of arguing. You are absolutely correct; I don't like it, and I believe I have communicated my reasons why. These reasons are to do with how real physics is portrayed in the game. I also conceded that it is merely my opinion. However you continue to attack my posts and I don't feel like either of us are making any real headway and so I don't intend to respond any further.

You can't "feel"  my motivations, since you aren't telepathic, even with  a Ph.d in physics. However, if you want to look at arguing for the sake of arguing, let's look back and realize that you initially replied to me in this thread, not me to you, and you did so with a post that called legitimate gameplay methods intentionally put into the game by the devs 'exploits', and that you've now retreated from that to a position of "As an EA customer I am simply providing my 2 cents on what I consider good and bad about the game."  Well, as an EA customer, there is a suggestion forum for precisely that, and when you respond to me in an unrelated topic in a different forum entirely calling legitimate gameplay exploits, as your method for simply providing your 2 cents to klei regarding your EA purchase, perhaps you are the one arguing for the sake of arguing.   Or, you're simply choose unsuitable methods to accomplish your goals.  Either way, best wishes, and good luck to your adventures with the laws in physics in the future, both in game and out of it.

[Master Miner]

14 hours ago, trukogre said:

I'm disagreeing with 'that'

You're mixing stuff that should be kept apart and making up statements / implications that do not hold:
- "in-game physics can not broken, because being fictitious, and doesn't need to be fixed"
not true: it can be, and it is broken in ONI, some forum members even think it is broken beyond repair. I think it can be greatly improved / repaired with reasonable effort. This doesn't have anything to do with RL physics.

- "following RL physics too closely will make the game less fun for most players"
not true: if the players would be required to have deep(er) understanding of the (in-game) physics, if they would have to learn too much to progress in the game, that would make the game less fun, but the implication that following the RL physics implies this does not hold. Compare how people can very well survive in RL without having much idea about laws of physics. But they do a bit more if they start to understand how things work. The same principle will work perfectly in a game.

Please note that I'm generally not advocating any strict following of RL physics in the game.
My motivation is to have a good, solid in-game physics that is balanced with the other aspects of the game, that is fun to play with and that is not a mockery, that does not fool the player.
(Like it is now in ONI - just ask if you don't see / know where and how.)
 

14 hours ago, trukogre said:

[...] physics which are completely made up and implausible would be less fun [...]

Besides that, even if implausible, in-game physics needs integrity, it shall not break promises that it itself makes.

I see the "sweet spot" you've mentioned being well within reach and I wonder why the ONI designers choose to derail from what seems to be original intention - to have solid in-game physics which is one of the "something extras", a "special ingredient" in the game, which would suit 14+ years old who do go to school and prefer to have fun constructing and building increasingly complex structures.

Even without the physics aspect, ONI is a game which is rather for players who do like intellectual entertainment, who do like to "turn on thinking" while playing, and who will, IMO, be rather disappointed to find out that the in-game physics is a mockery. Klei needs to decide who ONI is for, which part of the public they would like to sell the game to.

BTW, if there are in-game devices that "magically" convert heat into matter (and would therefore "break" the RL 2nd law of thermodynamics), like Wheezworts and AETN, that's perfectly fine with me. It just needs to be consistent. If everything is just magical and disconnected like it is the case now in ONI, then, as you write above, that's less fun.

If I'm wrong about that original intention, and if the numbers and units in the details are only a mockery, only there to make things look "scientific" and solid at the first glance, but have no consistent meaning otherwise, than that would, IMO, be a shame - a sad, pathetic display.

[trukogre]

You appear to be attributing statements to me that I never actually wrote.  Unsurprisingly, I won't continue a discussion with someone who does that. I'm surprised you wasted the time writing all that followed...there doesn't seem to be a point when the discussion is already over.

[FullMetalArthur]

On 18/3/2018 at 7:36 PM, Giltirn said:

I'm afraid I did not address your argument because I did not understand it. I stand behind my assertion that tossing out energy conservation in a simulation-based game like this a big problem. As other posters have pointed out it makes a mockery of a game which renders realistic values to such things as temperature and thermal conductivity. But you are quite right that it is simply my opinion which you are free to disagree with. I also agree that there are limits to any simulation and we must make sacrifices for playability and the computational demand. It is also still an alpha and therefore incomplete. As an EA customer I am simply providing my 2 cents on what I consider good and bad about the game.

People are printed into life by a pod
Water stick to ceilings
dupes build things with a magical multitool that shoot bolts and screws

Science your way out of that LOL. Don't take it too seriuosly. In the end is a game, it it was based in real life physics and should it be ultra realistic, it wouldnt be fun for a regular guy with no PhD.

 

P.D. When a character dies, you can tell he is really dead by looking at those bigs X right where the eyes should be. Just like in real life.

[JoeW]

Please stay on topic and keep away of personal attacks and arguments. Thanks.