Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0

[tolomea]

As a compromise in the interest of UPS performance etc, what about limiting segments to, say, 10 pipe units? That way really long pipes would still suffer as they ought to from a logistics perspective.

A direct segment to segment connection requires something like the old algorithm even if it's just operating on top of the segment logic.

Aside from the segments making less things to update, in the new system everything going in/out of a segment is active push or pull. There is no flow until it's balanced kinda thing. but a direct connection would need that.

[Aquilo]

Thank you, the fluid system consumed up to 20% of the tick time!
Now you can forget about "fluid must flow"

[Panzerknacker]

By the way, the fluid rework was one of the most requested features, I did a little cleanup in the suggestions subforum :

spoiler

2024-06-21 14_51_50-Clipboard.jpg

The problem is that back in the old days of World of Warcraft, the forum was filled with crybabies. They eventually got what they wanted: a completely dumbed down version of the game.

The people that liked the game had no reason to complain on the forums, they just played the game instead. By doing so however, they did not win the 'most requested features' contest.

[ili]

The only "realism" trade-off is that you don't need additional pumps for "really long" pipes. Well, "really long" pipe is a cornercase which can be processed separately. For example, you could limit the size of the segment, starting from the nearest source of fluid, and when a pipe becomes "too long" just don't use it anymore, and show a warning, so that a player knew what he has to do in order to fix his setup.

If I understand the post correctly putting pumps on the way (or maybe a lot of them only at the end) will still be beneficial to move fluid faster in the case that your pipes are not full?

[Gouada]

Good change. To those who stated otherwise I believe pipes are still different enough from belts to be fun, what with the neighboring pipes connecting, pumps, and balancing. I always look forwards to the Friday Facts. Thank you devs

[MeduSalem]

By the way, the fluid rework was one of the most requested features, I did a little cleanup in the suggestions subforum :

spoiler

2024-06-21 14_51_50-Clipboard.jpg

The problem is that back in the old days of World of Warcraft, the forum was filled with crybabies. They eventually got what they wanted: a completely dumbed down version of the game.

The people that liked the game had no reason to complain on the forums, they just played the game instead. By doing so however, they did not win the 'most requested features' contest.

Meh. Even veterans complained about the fluid system all the time. It was like a tavern brawl every time the topic popped up. Almost everyone agreed that the previous system was horrible, but what people usually could not agree on is how to solve the issue and it often devolved into mudslinging until the discussions were locked.

[morse]

The only "realism" trade-off is that you don't need additional pumps for "really long" pipes. Well, "really long" pipe is a cornercase which can be processed separately. For example, you could limit the size of the segment, starting from the nearest source of fluid, and when a pipe becomes "too long" just don't use it anymore, and show a warning, so that a player knew what he has to do in order to fix his setup.

If I understand the post correctly putting pumps on the way (or maybe a lot of them only at the end) will still be beneficial to move fluid faster in the case that your pipes are not full?

Not really. In a way, there is no "moving" anymore. Every piping segment becomes basically a tank, distributed over a large territory. The water goes in one end, and immediately appears on the other. Pipes being "not full" won't be an issue, since the only reason why they'll be "not full", is if your consumption is larger than your production, in which case additional pumps won't help, your consumption buildings will starve anyway.

[Neelost]

Each new FFF makes my current Seablock game more painful, because I want to end it before the expansion, and because the main things I hate about it are slowly added one by one onto the "will be fixed in the expansion" pile
But I guess the pain is what makes Seablock what it is so I guess I'll have to live with it...

[GregoriusT]

Each new FFF makes my current Seablock game more painful, because I want to end it before the expansion, and because the main things I hate about it are slowly added one by one onto the "will be fixed in the expansion" pile
But I guess the pain is what makes Seablock what it is so I guess I'll have to live with it...

If the roadmap is to be believed (still sceptical but also hyped) you got about 2 months to finish your seablock then.


Also why are people complaining about loss of complexity? its is not "complexity" to have a system that is literally unpredictable to even the smartest players there is.

[gaelyte]

A thing I think is really nice is that by having big chunks holding all the liquid, it means that a pipe with very few liquid in it will not see its content disappear due to rounding errors when the liquid tries to spread. I was losing a third of all my Pyroflux in Space Exploration because of that in one of my setups and was forced to create a buffer of 2k pyroflux just to please the algorithm and make it stop losing all of it
Also, for people who think they'll be able to make pipes that go over 1000 tiles, you'll need to put 100000 units of liquid in it to achieve max throughput, which is quite expensive compared to other options such as barelling (except for water I guess)

[CXZman]

You finally understood that Factorio was never about realism. During the previous FFF about fluids, I was stunned by how important it was for the devs to make fluids (and ONLY fluids) be somewhat realistic in the game.

EVERYTHING ELSE was heavily simplified and handwaved, so it didn't make sense that the fluids would be treated with this much realism in mind (compared to the rest of the game's features).

Electricity: no, you CANNOT just switch electricity from low voltage to high voltage with just a copper wire. It's NOT THE SAME to wire machine in series or in parallel. You CANNOT just have all of your energy production in one place and just pull thousands of kilometers of wires across the land and hope to have any juice left at the other side.
That's why electricity is kinda fun to use in Factorio, because it's thankfully not realistic at all.

Conveyor belt: We thankfully never had to handle parts wearing, stuck products that block the whole thing, collisions at junctions, weight load, friction of any sort. That's why it's still fun.

I could easily go on. It was never a good idea to make fluid react realistically.

Even if it would stay realistic, why was no tutorial ever designed to help players get a better grasp of the fluid system? Nowhere in the game does it say that putting pumps everywhere is the only way to go. The rest of the game proves that just connecting input and output with the correct thing (wires, conveyors, rails, pipes) is enough to transport the goods from point A to point B... but not for the fluids. Could have used a small training session or tutorial to clarify that.

Anyway, I'm thankful this decision was made. It can be daunting to backtrack on a such design intention, it can sometimes feel like defeat that you couldn't make it work just the way you intended to work, but it's almost always for the better, especially if the problem is "a majority of our players just still don't get it after hundred of hours of gameplay".

So thank you Vube, not everyone would have had the courage to do this switch! <3

[Dogmai]

I think it would be interesting if, for example, we had tier 4 assembly machines that required cooling liquid and instead of having one input like normal recipes they have a throughput through (e.g. from left to right) it like steam engines currently do so they can still be chained together.

You pump in 20°C cooling liquid and each machine increases the temperature by 1° per craft, on the other side you pump out the too hot liquid and somehow cool it down again.

I really like this idea mate, making use of a heat exchanger, especially on a planet like Vulcanus where the ambient temperature is much higher, therefore your super fast machines would overheat faster.

On the ice planet, you could run everything at full speed no issue.

[mrudat]

Yay! We now have pipes instead of aqueducts!

Liquid in real-life pipes (effectively) teleports.


I'd like pipes and storage tanks to be treated separately.

You have four classes of fluid boxes: input fluid boxes, pipes, tanks and output fluid boxes.

First, pipes fill up, and you get very low flow rates to input fluid boxes until they're full; pipes should never drain in normal operation.

Tanks should count as one or two pipe segments if more than one connection is in use (one segment for an adjacent connection, two if both tank corners are connected).

Once the pipes are full, you fill up tank fluid boxes (if any), and once tanks are full, fluid backs up in output fluid boxes.

Newly added pipe segments get filled from tanks/output fluid boxes, and if sufficient fluid is available, fill on the same tick they're added, avoiding a dip in throughput.

The system's available throughput is proportional to the amount of fluid in tanks + output fluid boxes.

Ideally, you'd also factor in pipe geometry, e.g. bendy pipes slow things down, two parallel pipes increase throughput, a long pipe slows things down, etc.

It would be complicated to work out a realistic ruleset, but on the other hand, the result is static until the network changes, so it's more a question of whether it's worth expending developer effort as opposed to runtime performance impact.

[Plop and run]

Imagine doing a similar "Belts 2.0" update next. There is no belt, just a long chest of arbitrary shape.

[kirkbauer]

Overall I think this is a positive change since I had a lot of issues figuring out fluid throughput in 1.1.

But I don't understand why throughput will be higher for longer pipelines, that doesn't make sense to me. I think that throughput in a segment should be based on the component in that segment with the lowest throughput. But if everything is simply pipes, then I think throughput should simply be the same no matter how many pipes are in that segment.

What am I missing here?

[gangan]

1. Will simple valves be added? I know you can use pumps, but pumps always pull actively from their input-side. A valve would simple cut off or connect a segment. E.g disconnecting some chem-plants when input-storage of a liquid is low. Or to react to changing demands.

2.As others said before I'm a bit concerned that long pipes would be to powerful for transferring fluids other huge distances. Kind of like the concept of building pumpstations into my pipelines e.g to to supply my coal-plants with water.

[Grob]

I kinda disagree with the idea that the new system is less realist. I mean, the old system wasn't really realist.

I mean, the flow of a pipeline does not work at all the way the old system was written.
I would actually have implemented it like an electric circuit. Without local comparison, but with a segment idea like you are currently going.
- The size of a segment gives a resistance
- There is a base resistance, to simulate the one of the pump or the machine, (so it is affine and not linear, which remove the problems with very low amount of pipes)
- Flow is relative to the power of the pumps/machines (which simulate an electric potential) and to the resistance.
- There are nodes in the middle of segments, like when many machines are connected, each one gives a node.

Your approach is way better than the old one IMO, but it may too OP and/or too simple ?
I mean, I really had fun twisting my brain to understand the old system... Having complex behavior is part of the game IMO.

[tolomea]

Imagine doing a similar "Belts 2.0" update next. There is no belt, just a long chest of arbitrary shape.

Belts are the heart and soul of this game and their current behaviour is very consistent and easy to see.

Pipes are at most a small side thing and their current behaviour is arguably the most broken thing left in the game (after the other 2.0 changes).

[mcdjfp]

The fluid system definitely needed some work, but not this. This takes the life out of it.

As someone mentioned above, where is the joy in solving a bottleneck. Now instead of pipes we have a single magic tank. Storage tanks are likely only needed if there is a short segment (say an intermediate product) and a high output machine that needs output space in the magic tank. Otherwise, due to the way output works, storage tanks would only serve to slow start up times by making the magic tank take longer to fill and reach peak output.

Tell me why I should play Factorio if all of the quirks are removed and replaced with high efficiency blandness? Even Applied Energistics (a Minecraft Mod) added channel mechanics to version 2 of the mod to give something to design around the giant magic storage box.

Depending on the state of construction bots, and unless there is a surprise announcement that due to the drastically reduced number of fluid boxes fluid temperatures are back, this move may drive me away from the expansion despite the features I was looking forward to.

Can you remind me what game it was with the fluid packets on a belt? I think I have it on Steam somewhere, but I could never get into it because of the lifeless fluid system (and lack of a fail state like the biters). Now, maybe I should take another look at it. That or another game of the type.

[Loewchen]

I was worried something like this would come after the last approach was abandoned and I understand that you did not want the n-th trial of a new complex system, but what is essentially the removal of any fluid simulation altogether is a tough pill to swallow.

It feels like there were always two factions: those who generally disliked building fluid setups and those who loved doing exactly that and had no issue dealing with the distribution problems. Now that fluid networks are hardly more complex than the electric network we have a fluid system preferred by those that don't like fluids, while those who do like fluids lose all they liked about them.