Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0

[GregoriusT]

I would guess one would send a few Barrels of Lubricant to Planets so you can make Electric Motors and Stuff right away. maybe a bit of Sulfuric Acid for Vulcanus Mining Operations and Batteries.

Water on the other hand can be gotten from Spaaaaaaace, so that one doesn't need to be barrelled.

Unfortunate choice of example, Vulcanus is the planet with sulfuric acid flowing out of the ground

I chose it because you might not end up having the acid closeby at your starting spot, and yes i know the starting area is custom generated

[Panzerknacker]

Also the example in the FFF with the chemical plants doesnt make sense. Each of those plants should have it's own dedicated pipeline considering they are fully upgraded/beaconed with max quality level modules. Also, the plants should be situated near the place where they need to deliver their product, not in a dedicated area with just all the plants piled/copypasted in one single location. You are simply doing it wrong.

[Ghulmeister]

i canot express, in any humanly available words, how much i have been anticipating this FFF post. thank you for finally giving up on the (badly) simulated realism of fluids.
lets be real, conveyorbelts have never been realistic at all, carrying up to 8 buildings with a size of 3x3 on a 1x1 size tile. fun over realism has always been the (as perceived by me) philosphophy in factorio and i never understood why this was never applied with fluids.

too bad we still have to wait months before this change will be playable for us, but this makes the wait that much sweeter.

my next, new top-anticipated FFF will be the new enemies and what changes they will have.
i am seriously hoping for infinitely scaling enemy difficulty, where you always have to be wary of enemy attacks and keep evolving your military power through upgrades and use of more advanced turrets.
it would be real unfun if you didnt need the bigger turrets anymore, after upgrading lasers x amount of times.

[Cehash]

I'm surprised people are ready to stop playing just because a single of the challenges that was fighting against a weird-behaving fluid system was removed

They never are. They'll huff and puff about change only to then suck it up and find out the change wasn't that consequential after all.

[gnutrino]

I'm not sure I understand this bit:

Longer pipelines have higher throughput, but take longer to fully empty

I thought the whole point of this was that steady state throughput (i.e. once the network is "full") would be independent of pipe network and depend only on the source and sink machines?

If I'm understanding the system correctly (and the above makes me question whether I actually am), then I also think storage tanks are going to act a bit weirdly unless isolated by pumps - it seems that you could have a pipe network only providing 10% input to a machine because a tank hasn't filled despite intuition telling you that it really shouldn't matter as there's more than enough fluid in the network to fill all the actual pipes. I wonder whether it would make sense to give a segment 2 different capacities - a "full output capacity" and a "storage capacity" where pipes add the same amount to each but tanks add maybe 4 or 5 pipes worth to the "full output capacity" and their full normal storage capacity to the "storage capacity" value. This would also get rid of the need to special case a pump attached to a tank (it's a bit of a weird hack if a single pipe between a tank and the pump will make it act so much differently if you think about it).

[gaelyte]

It's realistic that pipeline length decreases throughput, that's how it works in reality because the longer the pipe the more resistance it imposes. You simply need more paralel pipelines if you require high throughput over a long distance. Or you must produce solid products locally near a oil source and transport them by train.

Being able to teleport a basically infinite amount of liquid over any distance (as long as supply > demand) is utter nonsense.

Isnt it possible to keep the old system and just change that at an intersection, fluid spreads to both directions depending on the fill percentage?

only when the tube is completely filled is it a 100% teleportation. You can extract a percentage of the filling per second.
Let's say a machine can suck in 5l/sec. But the pipe is only 20% full because it is very long. Then your machine only gets 1l/sec.
But the ratio could also be different, the less filled the less she could suck in. So instead of 1/5 at 20% only 1/10 at 20% filling or even more extreme.

What I am saying, is "as long as supply > demand". In that case, the pipeline is eventually going to fill up to 100% which will eventually ALWAYS enable the teleporting/infinite flowrate.

I already think belts are overpowered in this game compared to trains because they allow totally free transportation (no fuel cost like trains). Now you can totally ditch the trains, when it comes to fluids.

You say trains are OP compared to belts, but if you run a belt over 1000 tiles, that'll cost you 3000 plates + 15000 of the resources your putting on the belt if it's a full belt for a grand total of 18000 iron ores taken by your system if you're running a belt for that
Compare that to a train, that'll be around 3500 resources to make your system only assuming you didn't reuse any rail and about 2000 resources in transit

Likewise, if you use pipes to make some sulfuric acid over such distances, you'll have to invest 100000 units of sulfuric acid to fill the pipe, which is about 30 minutes of a factory working to make your pipe work, 2000 plates, and 10000 sulfur, which is a huge waste

So the only way I could see reasonable to use hyper long pipes is to move water, but water is available everywhere

[Terrahertz]

Also the example in the FFF with the chemical plants doesnt make sense. Each of those plants should have it's own dedicated pipeline considering they are fully upgraded/beaconed with max quality level modules. Also, the plants should be situated near the place where they need to deliver their product, not in a dedicated area with just all the plants piled/copypasted in one single location. You are simply doing it wrong.

This reminds me of the people who tell you that steamstorage and elaborate curcuit networks for nuclear-powerplants are pointless and wrong, given the abundance of Uranium on the map. But there is nothing wrong as long as it is turning fuel-cells into electicity. It might be pointless, but it's fun and challenging. And as the entire argument for keeping the old broken system is around "The Challenge", I find it highly ironic that the arguments start to sound like the typical ramblings of people arguing for the "One TRUE Way" of playing the game.

[ctalkep_]

-1 from me
love the current pipes because they're sexy as fuck, just look at this, you can almost hear it gurgling by

i see the flow animations no longer do their thing in the 2.0 previews and i bet the sound is gone aswell

i consider each pipe capable of doing 1000fluid/s and if more is required, use multiple parallel pipes
having multiple pipelines of water feeding a nuclear reactor/oil refinery/whatever feels much more industrial and "proper"
if the expansion's gonna have that high a demand for fluids, could you perhaps make a tier2 pipe that does the merge and teleport behavior while keeping the normal pipes normal?

though i guess it does fix the issue of evenly splitting fluid(haven't had a need for this yet), spamming ugly underground pipe nubs everywhere for better throughput and some other fun pipe behaviors

[Bi0nicM4n]

The best word to summarize my thoughts on this FFF would be: FINALLY

It's reassuring to see developers understand that the core objective of any game ever developed is to be FUN. There's no point for me to play a game when it's not fun (there's many more opportunities for me to not have fun, and they all come for free), and the "realism" is only allowed in as long as it doesn't destroy FUN.

The fluid system was, indeed, too complicated for it's scope in the gameplay loop, and I expect the new change to also improve performance (even if just a little bit).

So good riddance to "realism", and a warm welcome to fun!

[HoosfoosMcCave]

Grab your best lube, because it's time to talk about fluids!

Literally the only time in history this phrase has been used in a Safe-For-Work context.

[Blaster]

FINALLY

I've been waiting for this ever since pipes were earmarked to be improved post-1.0

As for everyone here that somehow prefers the old system to the new one, I only have this to say:

[gaelyte]

-1 from me
love the current pipes because they're sexy as fuck, just look at this, you can almost hear it gurgling by

i see the flow animations no longer do their thing in the 2.0 previews and i bet the sound is gone aswell

i consider each pipe capable of doing 1000fluid/s and if more is required, use multiple parallel pipes
having multiple pipelines of water feeding a nuclear reactor/oil refinery/whatever feels much more industrial and "proper"
if the expansion's gonna have that high a demand for fluids, could you perhaps make a tier2 pipe that does the merge and teleport behavior while keeping the normal pipes normal?

though i guess it does fix the issue of evenly splitting fluid(haven't had a need for this yet), spamming ugly underground pipe nubs everywhere for better throughput and some other fun pipe behaviors

Graphics were placeholders

[naahuc]

I'll have to chime in on the "I'm skeptical" side of the argument. While raiguard also mentioned that it's still wip and that not all the details have been posted yet, as the FFF describes it, the fluid system becomes quite boring. I can indeed relate to the current system being unintuitive and that learning the intricacies requires at least a visit to the wiki is not ideal. But, the actual issues only arise quite late in the game currently, when you get into very high throughput builds or are using very very long pipe connections.

Assuming I understood everything correctly, and I can transfer any amount of fluids through a single pipe at maximum throughput, assuming I have enough storage, is there any reason I wouldn't "just" incorporate 6-10 pipes into my rail prints and have a single global supply pipe for each fluid I'd draw with n pumps out of? If I already did that, why would I still use fluid wagons at all when I can get better throughput from a pipe while using less trains at the same time? (excepting Fulgora due to lack of a floor of course)

In my insignificant opinion, the limitations the fluid system imposed made it interesting. Having to figure out how to supply a large nuclear plant or advanced oil build with enough water is part of the challenge, same as routing all that water through already packed areas, was/is part of the fun and learning curve. While the realism vs. fun argument was addressed, we also still have belt throughput limitations and feeding 500 reactors from a single skinny pipe, with some tanks attached on one end to up the storage, would just feel wrong.

One interesting thing that could be addressed in one of the follow-up FFFs is how the new system interacts with offset height fluid boxes in flow direction/overflow/underflow pipes as well as how the same interaction would work with the segmentation of fluid networks.

[Sopenas]

I think this change is for good. I remember how much I was fighting with fluids. It was a bit fun of course to make some powerful fluid network, but i think i will have more fun now in other areas.

[kitters]

If you don't do that with belts, you shouldn't do it with pipes. No fun. Electrical fluids.
Formulas are easy and natural - throughputs are proportional to level gradient. Same with heat.
System is definitely in need of fixes and buffs (junction uncertainty), but not like this.

Will you change heat transfer as well, right?

[nova4x]

My own two cents on this. I really like what new opportunities this opens up for how you structure your fluid network. The old system was quite restrictive and often required pump spam for high throughput builds and even then was still inconsistent leading to lost efficiency.

However I don't like the potential infinite throughput of a pipeline which, if supply is greater than demand, will eventually happen. Medium midgame bases would be easily supported by a single pipeline. I don't think that this is a problem though, in and of itself. The advantages are nice and very convenient and do let you discard some of that mental overhead of worrying about flowrate and janky fluid dynamics dependent on placement order.

The issue I have is with the implications that this makes your fluid production and movement feel smaller. Before as you needed to move more and more fluid that pipeline would take up more space within a specific build. Now it just stays static even with ever increasing throughput (as long as supply > demand). I'd like to propose an idea that would still allow for the pipeline to grow, fluid must flow. Something in the vein of limiting output throughput to a specific cap, where output equals fullness percentage or pipeline cap whichever is smaller. You would then still be required to run parallel pipelines to increase throughput. Since having a bunch of sprawling parallel pipes is annoying I propose having pipe tiers that increase throughput, with each tier being physically larger than the previous.

Then the size of the tiers could increase simply as follows. Tier I is the pipe we have now, simple and smaller with a lot of flexibility in its placement. Tier II could be 2x2 like a rail tile which would make it more limited in its placement but would have a greater throughput than just two side by side Tier I pipes. Tier III follows the same pattern, 3x3 but has more throughput than two parallel Tier II pipes. You get the idea.

Now you can easily dismiss this because the existing pipelines in reality are massive meter in diameter pipes. But I raise you that this is a game about excess, massive factories that are massive for the sake of it. I believe that larger pipes corresponding to higher tiers would fit right in with the notion of excessive production. With normal production you build more belt lanes or send out more and more trains. Pipes losing some of their "realism" leaves them behind because there doesn't appear to be much now which shows just how much fluid is being moved. I hope others can get behind my thoughts because this feels very inline with the type of progression you typically have in the game. At least I would much prefer it over pumping fluid into a tiny pipe and the magic of the game handles all fluid dynamics, feels a bit too hands off for me.

Edit: Grammar

[numzero]

So I was disappointed by the loss of realism so I spent the afternoon implementing the main loop of an algorithm that should allow efficient and realistic fluid flow with much better control over the speed decay caused by distance. It also does not depend on the build order of the entities.

Code is here: https://gist.github.com/Lucus16/5c94522 ... 59db5b0582

@Wube I don't expect you'd be interested since you've already implemented the other system, but if you want to know more, you can PM me or comment on the gist or something.

Four passes? IIRC the previous refactor attempt was rejected as that algorithm required two passes while the one in 1.1 is single-pass.
Also, separating edges and nodes doesn’t look cache-friendly. Did you benchmark it on a sizeable system?

Now, I do agree the change looks controversial. For me it was totally unexpected. But, I’m okay with it. I’ve prototyped a more realistic system myself once and, it was O((junctions+endpoints)³) or so which, um, is a bit too much.

Oh and, the “teleporting” people mention isn’t all that unrealistic. When you use a faucet the water starts flowing right away, as if it teleported from the pumping station. And the flow at that station does change almost immediately (IIRC it propagates with the speed of sound which is very high in water), much, much earlier than the water itself would get from there. What is unrealistic is that long pipes get full throughput. IRL the flow resistance would be too high.

Also I didn’t exactly understood how is throughput limited. It sounds like larger segments allow for higher throughput. If so, I hope tanks aren’t included in the computation because, building a tank to the side of a pipeline to increase its throughput?

[Panzerknacker]

It's realistic that pipeline length decreases throughput, that's how it works in reality because the longer the pipe the more resistance it imposes. You simply need more paralel pipelines if you require high throughput over a long distance. Or you must produce solid products locally near a oil source and transport them by train.

Being able to teleport a basically infinite amount of liquid over any distance (as long as supply > demand) is utter nonsense.

Isnt it possible to keep the old system and just change that at an intersection, fluid spreads to both directions depending on the fill percentage?

only when the tube is completely filled is it a 100% teleportation. You can extract a percentage of the filling per second.
Let's say a machine can suck in 5l/sec. But the pipe is only 20% full because it is very long. Then your machine only gets 1l/sec.
But the ratio could also be different, the less filled the less she could suck in. So instead of 1/5 at 20% only 1/10 at 20% filling or even more extreme.

What I am saying, is "as long as supply > demand". In that case, the pipeline is eventually going to fill up to 100% which will eventually ALWAYS enable the teleporting/infinite flowrate.

I already think belts are overpowered in this game compared to trains because they allow totally free transportation (no fuel cost like trains). Now you can totally ditch the trains, when it comes to fluids.

You say trains are OP compared to belts, but if you run a belt over 1000 tiles, that'll cost you 3000 plates + 15000 of the resources your putting on the belt if it's a full belt for a grand total of 18000 iron ores taken by your system if you're running a belt for that
Compare that to a train, that'll be around 3500 resources to make your system only assuming you didn't reuse any rail and about 2000 resources in transit

Likewise, if you use pipes to make some sulfuric acid over such distances, you'll have to invest 100000 units of sulfuric acid to fill the pipe, which is about 30 minutes of a factory working to make your pipe work, 2000 plates, and 10000 sulfur, which is a huge waste

So the only way I could see reasonable to use hyper long pipes is to move water, but water is available everywhere

These are false arguments considering that if you lay a belt towards a iron mine (as in your example) you are going to mine there until the mine is empty. So the ore that is sitting on the belt will eventually make it to the factory, it does not make a difference that the belt is acting as a huge buffer. Also, the belts can be picked up and re-used just like the rails. Even if the initial cost to lay a belt was higher than the railway, the running cost of the belt is equal to zero, so it will win out in the end.

[nova4x]

I'll have to chime in on the "I'm skeptical" side of the argument. While raiguard also mentioned that it's still wip and that not all the details have been posted yet, as the FFF describes it, the fluid system becomes quite boring. I can indeed relate to the current system being unintuitive and that learning the intricacies requires at least a visit to the wiki is not ideal. But, the actual issues only arise quite late in the game currently, when you get into very high throughput builds or are using very very long pipe connections.

Assuming I understood everything correctly, and I can transfer any amount of fluids through a single pipe at maximum throughput, assuming I have enough storage, is there any reason I wouldn't "just" incorporate 6-10 pipes into my rail prints and have a single global supply pipe for each fluid I'd draw with n pumps out of? If I already did that, why would I still use fluid wagons at all when I can get better throughput from a pipe while using less trains at the same time? (excepting Fulgora due to lack of a floor of course)

In my insignificant opinion, the limitations the fluid system imposed made it interesting. Having to figure out how to supply a large nuclear plant or advanced oil build with enough water is part of the challenge, same as routing all that water through already packed areas, was/is part of the fun and learning curve. While the realism vs. fun argument was addressed, we also still have belt throughput limitations and feeding 500 reactors from a single skinny pipe, with some tanks attached on one end to up the storage, would just feel wrong.

One interesting thing that could be addressed in one of the follow-up FFFs is how the new system interacts with offset height fluid boxes in flow direction/overflow/underflow pipes as well as how the same interaction would work with the segmentation of fluid networks.

I think the same, up a bit I compiled some of my ideas that would address this with caps on output throughput and dinky single tile pipes.
here

[Panzerknacker]

Also the example in the FFF with the chemical plants doesnt make sense. Each of those plants should have it's own dedicated pipeline considering they are fully upgraded/beaconed with max quality level modules. Also, the plants should be situated near the place where they need to deliver their product, not in a dedicated area with just all the plants piled/copypasted in one single location. You are simply doing it wrong.

This reminds me of the people who tell you that steamstorage and elaborate curcuit networks for nuclear-powerplants are pointless and wrong, given the abundance of Uranium on the map. But there is nothing wrong as long as it is turning fuel-cells into electicity. It might be pointless, but it's fun and challenging. And as the entire argument for keeping the old broken system is around "The Challenge", I find it highly ironic that the arguments start to sound like the typical ramblings of people arguing for the "One TRUE Way" of playing the game.

You are slapping yourself in the face with your own arguments. 'But there is nothing wrong as long as it is turning fuel-cells into electicity.' So what is wrong with the pipes than, as long as it is turning light oil into petroleum gas? You could just lay down dedicated pipes for every chem plant, no need to mess with the way pipes work.