Longer pipe/wire bridges

[Kasuha]

The pictures below are from my current base.

On the upper one is "central hub" of gas distrubution network. As you can see it's pretty clumped and ridden with gas bridges as I need to route pipes "from everywhere" and "to everywhere". It's collecting mixed gases from many places around the base, sorting them, then sending them where they belong. There's a CO2 distribution network to keep farms pressurized, oxygen distribution network to keep habitable space pressurized, hydrogen distribution network to keep wheezewort cooling chambers pressurized, and natural gas distribution network to the power station.

Being able to jump not just one but also two and three pipes would help tremendously as I would be able to put pipes closer together, making the design more organized and clean. Similar situation is there with wires where getting things organized means there are places with lots of wires and it is not always possible or convenient to keep the layout flat. Longer wire bridges would really help as well.

[Oozinator]

wow your stuff looks clean and tidy ^^

[Kasuha]

25 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

wow your stuff looks clean and tidy ^^

 

Well the power network is tidy, but at a great price. But the gas one, that's lost cause.

And you haven't seen my power plant yet, that's literal bridge orgy. I would kill to have longer bridges for it. Or maybe building outputs that can merge into packets in pipe instead of blocking buildings if the segment isn't empty. There are two pipes of CO2 coming out of it and each carries almost full packets if the facility is running at full power. There's no room for waiting or taking turns, everything must merge.

Or CO2 router whose only function is taking CO2 from three input pipes (two of them coming out of the power plant) and redistributing it to three output pipes, one to keep farms pressurized, two to air scrubber room. That one would benefit from longer bridges a LOT, I wouldn't have to make such a gordian knot of it.

 

[Oozinator]

Gnihihi, but that is, what makes ONI great for me and it`s so relaxing to watch, when it works. Interactive screensavermode
 

[Coolthulhu]

Instead of massive pipe bridges, a more 3D approach could be better.

Say, get rid of bridges and have two different types of pipes/wires/etc.: regular and "raised", with the latter being more costly, not buildable over buildings, and requiring explicit connectors (rotated from regular to raised or raised to regular) to connect to regular pipes/wires.

The raised variant could be merged with high transfer ones: thick pipes and HW wires. In regular game, you don't want to connect HW wires with regular ones anyway (except by transformer), so strictly forbidding direct connection from HW to regular would not hurt much.

The only problem to solve here would be HW wires in tiles, but it could be solved by allowing HW wires in tiles, but not allowing them to connect to other HW in tiles. That is, HW in air connecting to HW in tile is fine, HW in air to HW in air is fine, but HW in tile could not connect to HW in tile.

[Oozinator]

Game should be not to easy. Pipes and wires are limiting space and i see it as gamemechanic now. Hard to plan ahead, but it's possible to build "LagGenerators" ^^

[AlexRou]

I liked how factorio does it's underground pipes, you plop the input section and then you get a variable distance to plop the output section. But there's a distance limit and they must be in line of each other. 

[Kasuha]

2 hours ago, Oozinator said:

Game should be not to easy. 

I don't think that "draw a pipe from A to B" is the right kind of challenge for this game. Sure, there are logical puzzles based on that principle but I see ONI as slightly different kind of game.