eradicator wrote:@JohnyDL
You're still trying to justify replacing "satisfaction", which is a function of "demand", with "demand" itself. To me what you're saying is on the same level as proposing to replace "acceleration" with "speed" because they're "similar enough" and "speed is a better understood concept". I can not agree with that assertion at all.
I disagree with this as well I'm not talking about a rate of change. I'm talking about stock taking in a shop. This is a much more apt description, I sell crisps, I can store upto 20 bags of crisps, and 17 people come in each day to buy them my supply is 20, my 'production' in this case is 85% because I have to buy 17/20 more to refill to full, my demand is 17 and my satisfaction is 100% because I fulfill all the orders. As a shopkeeper what's more important to me? is it my % or is it my raw numbers? Well the % is important if I'm doing too badly on my % then I'm spending money I don't need to on product and storage that goes to waste, but those raw numbers mean a whole lot more if I'm at 20 with my raw numbers I can maybe buy myself a bag of crisps once a week with my proffit, at 20,000 I can possibly pay my rent.
eradicator wrote:
JohnyDL wrote:
Actually in English and in the context of "Supply and Demand" the notion of the green bar and black bar being taken together is fairly common,
Maybe if they're displayed as one combined bar. But we're dealing with 4 values on two bars here. Each bar showing a relation ratio:
"Current Production == Utilization"(colored) to "Production Capacity == Supply"(black) ratio
and
"Consumed Energy == Satisfaction"(colored) to "Required Energy == Demand"(black) ratio
And when there's only one label on a bar like that it usually describes the colored, more important, part.
this is a fundamental misunderstanding I'm taking the words supply and demand together cause it's easiest to explain the concept of them together but on graphs of supply and demand they're different take this
Its fairly common to see supply and demand graphed against each other or next to each other
the black bits of the bars in factorio are mutually exclusive and represented by the red and blue shaded area in the first image you never put them on the same bar.
Either supply and demand are on the same scale and next to one another so you can see the difference by comparison which wouldn't be terribly useful in factorio, or you have them like factorio's bars where the maximums are displayed and the % used fulfilled is highlighted
eradicator wrote:
JohnyDL wrote:
"the amount actually used by the energy system"/"The amount the system would like to use if there were unlimited power"
I merely stated the fact that brown/blackouts actually increase that second value because of the energy buffer system that factorio employs and the fact that the values on the energy graph are averaged current values and not maximum values. Just becaues an inserter
can constantly consume 100W that doesn't mean that it on average
does. I can agree that two numeric values per bar would be nice though, but they need to be meaningful :<.
Unless I've misunderstood something somewhere but I think the sum of the internal buffers is that amount the system would like to use if there were unlimited power and full useage, each tick an assembler or anything else tries to fill its buffer to full, the speed limit is the size of the buffer per tick, so the internal buffer emptying or not is simply not relevant to that calculation. Demand doesn't accelerate as it outstrips supply.
eradicator wrote:
JohnyDL wrote:
given that a new concept has to be learned anyways isn't learning the more useful one better?
Given the opportunity, isn't it better to teach them the
less common concept? Because obviously they have a higher chance to learn the
more common concept somewhere else. I've personally learend about a lot of uncommon concepts from games. And i'd know a lot less if all of those had been replaced by something i already understood just because someone complained that they had to *gasp*
ask about something instead of it being immediately obvious. And isn't factorio, and aren't games in general, supposed to be about figuring stuff out?
If you really want to go the road of that kind of argument...
There's "less common" and there's counterproductive. This is not a kin to should a snake be called a serpent or vice versa, or should we use precise sword names like rapier over alternatives, because clearly it's a weapon and giving a vocabulary lesson on the side is kinda sneaky awesome. It's more like a cooking game that say's "NaCl dust" instead of "Salt" yes NaCl is table salt, and dust shows it's powdered and not chunks of the stuff, but going into a shop to buy some NaCl dust thinking that's the common way people understand it and looking for that not finding it and then asking for NaCl dust would cause confusion to the person buying the salt and the employee of the store.There may be times and places where using NaCl in a game or real life is better than Salt, say a science game or buying chemistry supplies because in Science salts are any ionic bonded solid, but in the concept of food it's confusing.
Similarly in the concept of energy an "electrical supply" is a reasonable concept most people will understand, "electrical production" well that's how the electricity is made not how
much electricity is made, an "electricity demand" is again a reasonable concept but "electrical satisfaction" is just confusing most people see electricity as on or off, there's either enough power to make the computer turn on or there isn't there's rarely a 50% state they'll understand, so to say an electrical device is satisfied or partially satisfied or not satisfied doesn't enter into it, it's either alive and working or it's dead as a doornail, bereft of power it rests in peace. Even with internal battery power 10% is "the laptop works the same as 100%" but at 5% it shuts down. A clock is the only time I can think of where satisfaction is obvious and most people won't see a low battery turning clock hands slower than expected as the battery unable to satisfy the demand they'll see it as a battery that is at 0%, is useless and needs replacing.
eradicator wrote:
You mentioned a german word "schadenfreude" to demonstrate the discrepancy between a concept and the ability of a (any) language to concisely describe said concept. And i think the problem here is that english simply does not have a word that is both concise and common to describe the concept. So unless you want to drop into the realm of inaccuracy you'll have to drop one or the other. In "buisiness language" it is common to talk about "meeting a demand". But if we nominalize "meet" into "meeting" the meaning completelly changes. And besides during a brownout you're not meeting the demand anymore so the label would be wrong again.
The words "Supply" and "Demand" are more than sufficiently concise and common labels to describe the concept in english, no need to say you're meeting the demand or using the supply, 1 word and a shorter word than the one that's used at the moment with more utility. I also don't think you lose any additional accuracy loss a google search for the concepts couldn't correct, where as to fully understand production and satisfaction, well every youtuber basically adds it as a tutorial every time they open up the electical menu because they feel it needs explaining to newcomers, and each time they basically reference supply and demand.
But the right wording that satisfies power outages and not is "Demand met" as a label for the green bar but really that's not necessary in context demand is enough how much has been met or satisfied or fulfilled, and how much hasn't is obvious because you never say the demand is 50% unless it's in terms of supply (demand is 50% of supply) and in that case you'd have some absolute value for the supply. You'd never see Supply and Demand next to each other in terms of % of each other because well it has no grounding, so if they're next to each other displayed then they're absolute values.
eradicator wrote:And for me satisfaction was immediately obvious and very good wording. While i consider "Demand" plainly wrong and not just "confusing", like i said above.
I'm going to take a bold guess that english isn't your first language (and I might be wrong so don't take offence at the rest of what I have to say if I am). You're very fluent in it but you're viewing this through an internal translation barrier.
Shouldn't you be trying to make your own locale version more better for you if it's so bad you have to use the english one? I know a lot of games don't translate into other languages (or translate poorly) and playing in english can seem like the better version of the game (even if the game doesn't start life in english) but the english locale should be primarily written for people who don't speak other languages like the german locale should be for people who only speak german, etc. I'd never consider going onto the german thread you mentioned and saying that the words should be literal translations of supply and demand because I don't know german, I don't know the coloqualties of the language, and in german maybe the concepts that literally translate as "production" and "satisfaction" might be the right ones for the people there that don't speak other languages to get exactly what the bar means with no extra thought or effort.
I do however know english, it's my only (non trivial) language (I'm pretty sure Navi and Klingon don't count as languages
) so when the opportunity comes up to make my locale version the best it can be for people who only speak my language I'm going to be opinionated. Even if I'm wrong. My opinion is that for english only speakers the single words "Supply" and "Demand" as I've said before are enough to replace "production" and "satisfaction" due to reasons of
- "Supply and Demand" being a well known, widely used, easily researchable and generally better understood general concept that applies in the game where the "production" and "satisfaction" labels sit within electricity.
- Typing into google "production and satisfaction" or "production" or "satisfaction" won't pull up results that are near the same magnitude of usefulness in understanding their use in factorio as "supply", "demand" or "supply and demand" would
- I think more than anything else in the entire game these two words are the biggest "language being the barrier to understanding what something does" that I've came across and there are times it still makes me stop and think rather than be intuitive.
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