I feel like polluted water needs a rework

[mitboy]

So, I feel like the way polluted\clean water is is too binary. Instead, we should have % of contamination. For example, a 30% of contamination of water should mean that on 1kg of clean water there is 300g of contaminant. If waters of different % of contaminaton merge, the contamination will slowly even out. 

That would mean, though, that even a drop of polluted water could contaminate whole tank, so the way to preven that could be adding some sorth of resistance for pure water - perhaps a body of water can be contaminated only if there is more than 1% of contaminant on whole body.

So, all the machinery that are set to convert clean water to polluted should take this into account. Such things as Carbon Skimmer should have input 1kg of water and output 1.3 kg of 30% contaminated water. 

Things like Water Distiller should take into account "polutness" of each piece of water to get correct output of pure water and contaminant.

[vovik]

1(pure water amount)/0.7(amount of pure water in contaminated water) = 1,42. Also, germs now count as contaminator too, so 1 patch of germy water contaminates whole tank...

[mitboy]

36 minutes ago, vovik said:

1(pure water amount)/0.7(amount of pure water in contaminated water) = 1,42. Also, germs now count as contaminator too, so 1 patch of germy water contaminates whole tank...

Yes, but this way of calculating would be too difficult to calcuate.

[Neotix]

What it really change/add to gameplay that justify adding more calculations and impact on performance?

For me it seems that change almost nothing like ratios and break some designs like gravity filter.

Besides if water and polluted water could mix them what about other liquids? They could mix as well? If not then what about mechanic consistency?

[AileTheAlien]

Oil and water don't mix in real life. You could easily justify specific liquids only mixing with specific other liquids in the game.

As for breaking gravity filters - I think that would be a net positive for the game. Fluids not mixing makes it fairly trivial to bypass the actual filters which are in the game.

[Neotix]

5 hours ago, AileTheAlien said:

Oil and water don't mix in real life.

Don't be so confident about it  

5 hours ago, AileTheAlien said:

You could easily justify specific liquids only mixing with specific other liquids in the game.

And what you get as products? New liquids? Do they could mix further? Where you want to put the line that separate game mechanic from RL physic/chemistry simulation? What players gain from that?

 

I don't say that original idea is bad. It can even use modified germs mechanic. I just don't see what players will really gain in this change? What new mechanic it brings?

Cosmetic changes are good if they don't have negative impact on performance. But when we want to add more calculations then we should get something in return.

[Oozinator]

6 hours ago, AileTheAlien said:

Oil and water don't mix in real life.

!

 

[AileTheAlien]

Unless they're going to add surfactants / emulsifiers to ONI, my point still stands. Or are you proposing that they add soap as a new liquid to the game?

[AileTheAlien]

15 hours ago, Neotix said:

I just don't see what players will really gain in this change?

The gain is having fluids that work similarly to fluids in real life, which would make it easier to learn the rest of the game systems. They lose the ability to easily cheese the game systems, to bypass using the actual filter objects in the game.

[mitboy]

On 15.01.2018 at 9:54 PM, Neotix said:

What it really change/add to gameplay that justify adding more calculations and impact on performance?

For me it seems that change almost nothing like ratios and break some designs like gravity filter.

Besides if water and polluted water could mix them what about other liquids? They could mix as well? If not then what about mechanic consistency?

Things that people said below - it makes game more realistic in terms of creating and destroying mass. I could theorise interesting things such as negative impact on dupes if they use slightly polluted water for cooking or creating oxygen with it (Oxygen and Polluted Oxygen, btw, in my opinion should also be on a spectrum), but I don't even think it is needed here. 

Gravity filter of polluted water makes little sense irl, so yeah.

So, apparently, we might get salt water in some sort of sea update, so I would say water should just get certain properties which is % of pollution, % of salt and maybe something more that can be relevant in the future.  Oil and water have a hard time mixing, so I personally don't see much problem with leaving them as they are. 

[Neotix]

Does making game more realistic is such important? For me is not because for me game should be fun, not forcefully realistic in every aspect.

About mixing water and oil. Those are not only liquids in game. We have a lot more that can mix with each other IRL.

I still don't see in this thread any beneficial application for players that will bring something new. Players separate h2o and ph2o and that won't change. Why anybody would bother with more or less polluted water when they can just use clean water for dupes and polluted for everything else or just filtrate it. Right now water can be contaminated by germs and what that changed? Nothing. Nobody care about germs in water because polluted water is used to make NG and is not consumed by dupes.

[Zarquan]

I certainly think this is definitely a worthy suggestion.  I would argue that the current setup is a bit unintuitive and could be improved.  I know I needlessly panicked the first time a dupe messed in the water reservoir.  However, I am not sure that this solution is doable.

The main benefit is that you would want to try much harder to protect your water sources.  I think it would certainly add a lot of realism to the game without violating the basic physics of the game, which would be a significant upside.  The idea that one of your dupes makes a mess in the reservoir and everything is fine just if you can get one of your dupes to the bottom to mop it up makes no sense to me.  If I understand, you would treat contamination as a tile-statistic, like heat.  There would be transfer of contamination across liquid tiles to attempt to reach an equilibrium, meaning water with different levels of contamination would mix just like water with different temperatures.

My main concern is shared with some of the other people here in that the computational load might significantly slow down the game.  I could be wrong, but I believe the thermal computations are one of the largest bottlenecks in the game.  If this change would make the game significantly slower, then it might be essentially impossible to include it and still have a playable experience.

I would argue that germs are not contaminants in the same way that makes polluted water polluted.  Certain germs would thrive better in more contaminated liquid, but they do not contribute to the mass.

Also, how would fertilizer synthesizers and other things that currently take polluted water continue to operate? 

This certainly wouldn't be an easy change and would require an overhaul of many of the built-in buildings.  I am not opposed to the concept, as it keeps the basic physics intact, but more details would need to be flushed out before it could be added.  It would certainly take a lot of work. 

[mitboy]

19 hours ago, Neotix said:

Does making game more realistic is such important? For me is not because for me game should be fun, not forcefully realistic in every aspect.

About mixing water and oil. Those are not only liquids in game. We have a lot more that can mix with each other IRL.

I still don't see in this thread any beneficial application for players that will bring something new. Players separate h2o and ph2o and that won't change. Why anybody would bother with more or less polluted water when they can just use clean water for dupes and polluted for everything else or just filtrate it. Right now water can be contaminated by germs and what that changed? Nothing. Nobody care about germs in water because polluted water is used to make NG and is not consumed by dupes.

1. Yes, this is pretty big thing about this game? I think plenty of stuff should be tweaked here in terms of realism, but water is the main one.

2. Petrolium and Nafta are basically oil an shouldn't be mixing with water too, probably. Although I could see mechanics such as mixing water and oid would slowly pollute water, though. Magma is way to hot for anything. We barely encounter liquid gases. 

3. I don't think it necessarily should bring some super cool gameplay mechanics. I think germs of food poisoning are way too weak right now, so it's the problem not with water, but with germs. 

@Zarquan

Great points! In terms of temperature, I think this calulation wouldn't be as hard as temperature since we are only concernered with one liquid.

As for things that use polluted water, one way to calculate it would be that the output of fertilizer should depend on the polutness of water. So technically you can connect clean water to fertilizer maker, but it won't produce any fertilizer or natural gas.