Re: The Kids have won.
Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2025 4:36 pm
Yeah, I hear you especially on the trains, who's going to see having the game do something like that for them as an improvement and who's going to mourn the loss of a (in this case truly great) puzzle is always going to be a real question for people making games.
For the fluids, I figure fluid sim is why we have supercomputers that appear on the national budgets of global superpowers, whatever Wube have to do to get acceptable performance out of *their* fluid sim, for the maps their players build, is what they have to do. It's kinda like temperature, I really liked the original boiler setup where you had to chain them to keep the temperature high enough as the flow rate increase (at least that's how I recall it now) but also had that "it's a fluid sim" in my head and that kinda settled any "but why? I liked that" issues those changes had for me. And as puzzles they were just ordinary, swapping them out for different ones is just the normal noises in here.
I still see the splitter filtering and balancing as separate, but you tying them like that made me realize, hey, used to be you needed some circuitry for common filters but ordinary balancing was built in, now ordinary filtering is built in but you need some circuitry for balancing. Duh. "How… how did I not see that?".
Okay, yeah, probably because the new filters don't afford anything like the opportunities for cleverness XKnight found with the old balancing, but there were easier ways to do what his contraptions did, finding his solutions wasn't really a gameplay thing, more of a toybox-play thing. So, yeah, thanks for that, I wouldn't mention those as losses for the game itself now.p.s. one note, though, I think there's another way of thinking about posting solutions besides just "good players cooperating" and "good players competing", I really do think the best puzzles shouldn't be spoiled and cited evidence that I'm not alone. There's simply no way I was the only one who found that train solution, there's far cleverer people than me here, and there's similarly-challenging or in some cases just cleverly-unobvious puzzles in the other games I mentioned that have produced complaints for just as long, that I *know* I'm not the only one to solve, but nobody spills the beans. Because kids grow up, and at their best games can help them do it.