Bring back the metric system!

[suicide commando]

Get rid of the new DTU's, they're only confusing, bring back the metric system of measurements, joules, watts, grams, seconds, etc.

This way, those already familiar with various physics laws can more easily read and interpret the data they see, and the ones who aren't, get to learn a few things about thermodynamics.

[Morse]

As I understand it, the whole idea of changing joules to DTUs was because it was NOT actually joules, but rather some arbitrary unit that was named joule just because why not? And I agree, that if you see a heater that consumes X watts of electrical energy but provides Y watts of thermal energy, you start to wonder whether the people who write that even understand what a "watt" or a "joule" (or even an energy) is.

So for me, introduction of the DTUs doesn't mean that the game became less "scientific", but rather the admission that the physical simulation is rigged for the sake of gameplay. Which... I'm not entirely ok with, to be honest. Game already have quite a number of totally magical stuff that defies laws of physics altogether. All the "violations for the sake of balance" could go there, while leaving the "normal" buildings completely normal, but that would be a different game then, I guess.

[D.L.S.]

Yes, or at least checkbox in settings to switch this new DTU units to joules.

2 minutes ago, Morse said:

As I understand it, the whole idea of changing joules to DTUs was because it was NOT actually joules

 

No, its seconds not a real seconds, thats why watts not correct.

[Morse]

7 minutes ago, D.L.S. said:

No, its seconds not a real seconds, thats why watts not correct.

That's just changing the timescale, it doesn't has to do with anything. If your device is producing more thermal energy than it is consuming electrical energy, then you are violating some serious laws, and scaling of any kind won't fix it. Unless you do it non-uniformly. If you introduce some temporal time-dilations, then in accordance with the Noether's theorem the laws of conservations will stop working, and things will become interesting. But let's not go there

[Tekky]

I also don't like the new DTU units.

In my opinion, it would be better to obey the physical law of the conservation of energy. For example, a Liquid Tepidizer which uses 960W of electricity should actually produce 960W of heat energy.

[D.L.S.]

10 hours ago, Morse said:

That's just changing the timescale, it doesn't has to do with anything. If your device is producing more thermal energy than it is consuming electrical energy, then you are violating some serious laws, and scaling of any kind won't fix it.

You dont understand what i mean, when you dealing with joules and watts, converting them back and forth - time is important, important to have 1 time frame one time scale. Your electric watts and heat watts using different time dilation, thats why it is not fit, i suppose. It is hard to explain my point, but what i wanna say is that you cant trust ingame watts neither electric or heat, only Joules correct here.

3 hours ago, Tekky said:

For example, a Liquid Tepidizer which uses 960W of electricity should actually produce 960W of heat energy.

As for Liquid Tepidizer, i did test in previous build: in description of device it suppose produce 20.32kW of heat, i put it in 12000kg of water at 0.1C and run for 165 this ingame seconds(i measured time by pumping water with water pump(in another room, just as timer), was pumped 1650kg of water, water pump pumping 10kg each this ingame "second" unit, so its perfect timer), then i measured water temperature - it was ~13.3C so roughly, using ingame constant for water heat capacity, i calculated that water gain ~670MJ of heat energy in 165 seconds, which about 4MJ per second, which is 4MW heating power, and in description only 20.32kW, error 200 times... So spending 960W of electric energy you in fact receiving 4MW of heat energy with this magic device.

[Morse]

6 hours ago, D.L.S. said:

So spending 960W of electric energy you in fact receiving 4MW of heat energy with this magic device.

My point exactly. And so they replaced the heat energy with DTUs to shove the problem under the rug.

[Tekky]

Thanks for pointing out the actual heat production of the Liquid Tepidizer. It was very interesting.

On the one hand, it would be great if the game obeyed the laws of physics. On the other hand, it would be virtually impossible to boil several tons of water using only 400W manual generators.

ONI seems to be going the direction of sacrificing realism for gameplay. However, maybe there is a way to have good gameplay without sacrificing realism:

In everyday life, it is normal that, for certain things, the power requirements are very low, whereas for other things, the power requirements are very high.  For example, a small hand-held battery is able to power your mobile phone, but it would never be able to sufficiently power heavy machinery such as an automobile.

For this reason, it would be understandable for an average ONI player that the power requirements for heating up large amounts of water are a lot higher than, for example, pumping it to the magma biome and heating it up there.

Therefore, heating up water on the spot would be a luxury that only players with advanced power generation could afford, whereas in the earlier stages of the game, players would be forced to pump to/from the magma biomes instead. From a gameplay perspective, this would be interesting.

In conclusion, I would say that it is possible to have realistic physics without sacrificing gameplay.

Of course, for this to work, it would be necessary to drastically increase the power output of the more advanced forms of power generation. This would not make manual generators obsolete, as they could still be useful in powering low-power devices such as pumps in remote areas of the map which are not connected to the main power network.

[D.L.S.]

It is not mandatory to heat water with electricity, can be some natural gas boiler, this things common in RL, they have high rated power, higher then electric water heaters. It isnt profitable burn gas/coal in generator and use electricity to heat water.