Automation - Output for all machines

[Imendil]

Hey,

Today was my first day with Automation wires. I was thinking whole day about closed by system for water purification that would take care of water surplus.

So I found the way, if I attach logical state of Water Purifier to Not gate and to Water Shutdown it would allow me to send surplus somewhere else.

Here I have encountered the problem: There is no output slot for Water Purifier, only input one.

 

Please consider adding Output automation slot for all machines. That would allow to create system: If this machine is active/inactive, activate/deactivate something else.

[Zarquan]

I agree that a "Is working" automation output on machines would be nice.  I would use it to turn off certain devices if others are running to prevent circuit overload, or to turn on extra generators if a taxing device is being used.  This could be related to a battery automation output as well.

However, there is a method I learned about from Saturnus that accomplishes what you want without automation.  The input tries to go through the liquid bridge.  If it can't it goes down the excess output.  If you want the excess output to be clean, you could put this after the water sieve rather than before.

You can also use a normal liquid valve set to a small value.  Over time, the pipe will clear out any excess liquid in the pipe.

[Kabrute]

I've set up a system that uses both, output bridge to toilets, overflow to electrolizer, input as shown above with excess going to fert makers, this fills up the bathrooms line, then the electrolizers line, then starts to feed the fert makers any extra left from that

[Imendil]

System that you shown up is nice and might serve purpose for this case, but there is much more possibilities to uses for "Machine working" logical output state

[Zarquan]

I certainly agree with you.  I am just saying that your particular problem that would be solved by this addition already has a solution.

If I had the outputs, I could actually use coal generators reliably.  If the generators are not working, I disable some buildings that use power to ensure that the main systems stay online.  For example, I turn off the apothecary and metal refinery if the coal generators are not working so that oxygen generation stays active.  There are sooo many applications.  If the oxygen generators aren't working, turn on warning lights.  If the gas pump isn't working, activate a secondary pump.  If a door is opened, activate the air cleaning setup.  I certainly hope they add this in to the game ASAP.  It would make so many processes easier.

[Saturnus]

There's just one caveat as I see it. No machines currently have an automation outputa at all. Some have an automation inputa but certainly not outputs. So is the suggestion here that every machine should have an output that reads it's current operating state? If so then I'd rather not see it as you can always infer the operating state by other methods.

[Imendil]

Yes, this idea is for machines to have both Input and Output. Input which as currently would allow us to control machine state On/Off, and Output that would give information if it's really working at this very moment.
Example:
- You have enabled water purifier and locked doors to room where it's located
- Water purifier stops working, because all the sand have been used. Information on output could be processed by NOT gate to the doors and unlock them for duplicant so sand could be refilled.

[AileTheAlien]

Couldn't you just unlock the door all the time? If you're worried about dupes always walking through this room, just make it only have one door, instead of multiple doors.

[Zarquan]

@AileTheAlien Many of the automation-based airlock designs involve multiple doors.  Many of them also involve locking some of the doors to purge gases.  Or maybe even only allow one dupe in the room at a time without caring who it is.

Also, @Saturnus, you can not always infer the state of the device.  You often can with sensors, but those are not 100% reliable.  If a machine is not working due to lack or resources or power, or, in the water sieve example, the sieve not working because the output pipe is being blocked, the operating state of the machine is not necessarily the state of the automation that controls it, so how would you turn the wire from true to false?. 

For example, I don't use coal very much because it feels unreliable.  If I ever rely on it and the dupes neglect it for too long, I will end up with brown outs and not be able to keep all my systems running. I could use it if I could tie the operation of certain machines to whether the coal generators are running (maybe with a buffer gate). 

There are so many possibilities.  An automation upon entering a room based on the door that isn't triggered by loitering dupes, an automation based on whether water is actually being cleaned by the sieve or the refinery is actually being run or if the electrolyzers fail or if the natural gas generators fail.  Did the tepidizer finish?  Cool, the liquid is at the right temperature and can be used.  Why should I need to use a separate thermometer when the tepidizer obviously has a perfectly good one inside it?  Did the aquatuner turn off due to a lack of liquid?  Is a gas filters output blocked?  Do I need more hydrogen in my thermoregulator loop (is there a leak)? 

Some of these can be done sort-of with current automation, but I don't entirely trust an automation that can fail because a dupe decides it's lunch time and drops something on a pressure plate or one tile happens to be of an unexpected gas.  I don't see how you could tell if you accidentally liquefied hydrogen in a thermoregulator and now are missing hydrogen (which immediately boiled away once it left the regulators).  Or if, in the original example, the water sieve is blocked.  Is there an easy way to tell if the carbon skimmer is out of CO2 or clean water? 

You could use this to make a gas-type sensor, or an impurity sensor.  What you do is you take a gas filter and a pump.  The filter is set to, say, hydrogen.  There are two tiles of pipe leading to a shut off valve (linked to a buffer on the NOT of the gas filter).  If there is too much hydrogen near the pump, the filter will shut down and the NOT of the gate will indicate the presence of hydrogen.

[AileTheAlien]

6 hours ago, Zarquan said:

Many of the automation-based airlock designs involve multiple doors.  Many of them also involve locking some of the doors to purge gases.  Or maybe even only allow one dupe in the room at a time without caring who it is.

You can build airlocks without knowing if a pump is on or off, by turning the pump on or off based on the same signal deciding to lock or unlock the doors. i.e. Decide what the pump should be doing, don't decide what something else should be doing based on the pump.

As far as allowing a single dupe into a room, you can already do that with floor plates. The proposed output from a device being operated wouldn't help in that situation, so it's not a good example of what this proposed change would help.

[Imendil]

Massage table active -> enable lights in "chill out room"
Generator inactive -> enable hamster wheels

Also that might be used to protect wires from overloading: one machine working -> disable other which could damage wires

There are multiple uses for that. It's all about giving players possibilities and boost creativity.
It's not even changing current Logical Input, it's just adding something new to the game. It won't have impact on your gameplay if you don't want to use it, but it might help someone that want to link some systems together and make colony smarter.

 

[Saturnus]

28 minutes ago, Imendil said:

Massage table active -> enable lights in "chill out room"

Already possible

28 minutes ago, Imendil said:

Generator inactive -> enable hamster wheels

Hamster wheels already have this feature built-in by directly sensing battery state.

28 minutes ago, Imendil said:

Also that might be used to protect wires from overloading: one machine working -> disable other which could damage wires

If two or more of your machines on the circuit requires or can be conditioned with a sensor input you can already set up a simple logic to do this.

The reason I'm against the addition at the current stage of development of the game, it is early access after all, is that I think it unequivocally stifles player creativity. The game right now requires you to think out of the box an come up with creative solutions.

When the game is fully fleshed out and released, I'm all for mods such as this to make the game easier. 

[Zarquan]

@AileTheAlien, You are right about the doors.  That was a flawed example that can already be easily accomplished..

@Saturnus I don't mind the argument "It would probably be overpowered and make the game too easy," That is a fine argument, and it could likely be true with many of the suggestions here.  But I don't like the argument "You can already do it," especially when it is not true.  How do you use automation to decide if the message tables should be enabled based on the status of the coal generators?  That is one example I would like you to tackle.  It might be reasonable to say that these ideas would give more control than the player should have.

[Saturnus]

15 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

 

@Saturnus I don't mind the argument "It would probably be overpowered and make the game too easy," That is a fine argument, and it could likely be true with many of the suggestions here.  But I don't like the argument "You can already do it," especially when it is not true.  How do you use automation to decide if the message tables should be enabled based on the status of the coal generators?  That is one example I would like you to tackle.

Why do I have to solve every simple problem? Yes, I can do it with the tools we have available now. It's not really that hard a problem.

Hint: coal gens in a closed room and air pressure sensor.

[Imendil]

@Saturnus pressure plate being active while dupe is laying on table in my opinion is considered a bug, cause logically it shouldn't work.

I want to make simple beautiful wiring. All you are talking about are workarounds for this missing feature. With Logical output being present, all of your "solutions" are useless, as there would be simpler wiring

[Saturnus]

3 minutes ago, Imendil said:

@Saturnus pressure plate being active while dupe is laying on table in my opinion is considered a bug, cause logically it shouldn't work.

Then report it as a bug and see if it gets fixed.

[Zarquan]

I'm not saying you have to solve everything.  I am saying that you shouldn't say everything can be done unless you have a general solution.  I also shouldn't have said it can't be done without proof of impossibility.

The issue with the coal generators in a closed room is that you would need a reliable way to dump the CO2.  I personally don't like using the water trick with vents, as it feels like an exploit.  If the outflow pipe gets blocked, the coal generators will be constantly assumed to be on by the automation and the system will fail.  I suppose I could use a carbon skimmer, but that would mean that I have to destroy the CO2.  I use my CO2.  I freeze it and feed it to hatches or feed it to slicksters.  Also, what if the carbon skimmer fails for some reason, like lack of water of lack of filtration medium in the water sieve?  And how can you tell how many coal generators are actually running unless you put each generator in its own room?  Ignoring the reliability issues, if you use a carbon skimmer and a sieve, you are already using a large amount of the power from the coal generator just to determine that it is working.  This would be like if your computer could only tell that there is a CD in the CD drive by measuring airflow around where the disc should be.  The CD drive knows if there is a CD in it through internal means and there is no reason the computer can't just ask it "is there a CD in the drive."  I feel the same way about buildings like the coal generator.  They know if they are running.

I agree that complicated contraptions are an important part of the game and are fun, but some of the missing pieces that have to be compensated for with these complicated contraptions end up hindering the creative process.  Before the automation update, I created an AND, OR, NOT, and buffer gate.  Some of these were complicated contraptions.  Now it is better and I can actually use the gates rather than simply have them around for show.  It's like the difference between a high level programming language and assembly.  I could have argued "It can already be done with this finicky machine, but that doesn't mean that it isn't better that you don't have to use the finicky machine.  Then we wouldn't have the automations we have today and the creative process would have been stifled.  Now, sometimes it is good that it takes a complicated contraption, as it increased the cost and balances the game, but that isn't always the case. 

Removing most of the complicated contraptions is a bad idea.  I would strongly oppose an oxygen liquefying device or a petroleum boiling device.  I am even a bit nervous about a dedicated true airlock device.   That is because all of these are exploring the physics of the game to find new and interesting ways to do things.  I certainly don't want the logical components dumbed down.  I support the idea that mixing automation outputs should damage the automation wire if the outputs are not equal (as that is a short circuit). However, some of just make it harder to actually build the larger machine.

This could be a case where adding the feature would make automations too powerful by reducing the cost, but I doubt it.  I suspect that adding these output automations would lead to a boon of creative machines and devices, as it would make them reliable and smaller and practical.

[Saturnus]

@ZarquanFirst. Let me say again that I'm all for mods applying this functionality after the release from early access. I just don't agree it should be a core part of the game. If advanced automation circuits are what interests people then there are certainly more suitable games.

As for the carbon skimmer maintaining air pressure note that a coal generator outputs 20g/s CO2. To skim that requires 8W. To process the resulting polluted water output using water sieves, which is not a very effective way, requires an additional 1.6W. So less than 10W to automate the process per coal generator. That's less than 2% of it's power output. I think that's a fairly decently low cost. You can also infer the presence of more than one coal generator by a delay on the sensor but that is indeed more complicated.

[Zarquan]

Why would they introduce automation circuits if the if they wanted to keep it simple?  We already had most of the functionality available to us.  They obviously want us to do complicated things, but the automation is essentially independent of the build in machines that they provide us.  It is true that there are games that have better circuits, but I like ONI.  I liked it before automation and I like it now.  I don't appreciate the implication that if the game isn't exactly the way I want it, I should simply leave and play another game.  I don't think anyone here is saying the game is bad or unplayable.  We are just saying we played the game, in an early access state, and thought "This feature would be nice to have in the buildings."  If the concept were unbalanced and made automation far too powerful, then the opposition would make sense to me.

What you are saying is only operate the CO2 scrubber at a decently high pressure then shut it off,  If you use automation on the sieve correctly, you can ensure you only take in 5000 g of pH2O at a time.  If the pressure stays below the threshold for a certain period of time, assume the generators are off.  You might be able to use filter gates to determine how many of the generators are on.  You operate on a cycle, let the room pressurize, which takes the measurement of how many generators are running, then remove CO2 until you get to the base line again.  This could certainly work.  If you have a large enough pipe buffer on the polluted water end, you can be assured that the sieve not working for a time will not effect you.  You could even use the water pipes coming off of the CO2 scrubber to try to cool the devices without the use of pumps.  This still seems like a lot of work and calibration for a seemingly simple yes or no question.  Plus, there is still the problem of gas pressure equilibrium.