Closed Nioca closed 4 years ago
CoroNaut
commented
7 years ago In the real world, we have wireless chargers that are about 60% efficiency compared to cable chargers. Given that CDDA is in the future, it should be at least 60% or better. Also, the distance between the charger and any items exponentially decreases that efficiency. Perhaps we could have a "Spatial Supply UPS" attachment for a car that would charge devices on you within a range of 10 tiles or so?
1skandar
commented
7 years ago Actually, why shouldn't it charge with 100% efficiency? The UPS transfers energy at 100% to any UPS based tools or weapons wirelessly, it's more than a bit silly that the vehicle version is suddenly stupidly wasteful on energy.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago Actually, why shouldn't it charge with 100% efficiency?
Vehicle power is the cheapest kind of power:
Meaning that at 100% efficiency, leaving a solar panel for 6 hours of light would charge 14 welders to full.
Therefore I introduced a 10% efficiency for conversion from vehicle power to anything else:
Balance-wise, allowing 100% conversion means that vehicle power is always the cheapest option where available, despite the repeated nerfs to it.
1skandar
commented
7 years ago So, why shouldn't vehicles be the cheapest form of power, then? It takes a fair amount of skill to build one and hard to find parts and a book.
And besides, three words, battery compartment mod. Yeah, it takes a bit of time to install/uninstall the batteries, but they are both 100% efficient and small storage batteries give more charge than the batteries hey replace.
And, wait, what other types of power out there that aren't generated by a vehicle? Batteries, yeah, but that certainly isn't intended for a long term usage. Bionic power, I guess, but, quite frankly, it's several orders more cheap than vehicles.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago Battery compartment is a problem here. I'm pretty sure I first PRed it as a mod for this exact reason. Could be fixed by giving the same efficiency nerf.
So, why shouldn't vehicles be the cheapest form of power, then?
Because that gets rid of any choices and makes further balancing a problem. Though the problem isn't really that it is the cheapest - even with 1% efficiency it would still be the best in the long term - the problem is that it is nearly free.
For example:
1skandar
commented
7 years ago Again, outside of bionic power, is there any CURRENT way to generate power that is not vehicle mounted? Batteries don't count, they STORE it, not generate it. Solar, gas, diesel, reactors all need to be vehicle mounted.
Now, to actually USE that power you need to store it....that would be batteries. And it really should be a no-brainer that rechargeable batteries of some kind exist. Yes, yes, when next to a vehicle it's easy to get power, but you go exploring away from the vehicle (and you'll need to) all current form of batteries, UPS included, run out in a hurry.
And vehicles aren't free. You need to scavenge a HUGE area to locate a working vehicle and parts to repair it. You'll need quite a bit of mechanical skill to put one together. And getting a welder isn't easy, either. And even once you get everything together it'll take days of work getting a working system up and running. And the parts for the UPS charger and associated mod aren't cheap and require a book.
And for all that, vehicles may be a source of power, but they are a functionally stationary one. You want to explore a lab? You're leaving your vehicle at the top. You may come by to recharge batteries and drop off loot, but you're still going down there with a UPS that only holds 1000 charge. You want to explore that mall/hospital/other big building? Well, your vehicle will need to be parked outside because it isn't fitting in without knocking walls down on your head.
That means, outside of traveling from place to place, you want to do anything meaningful you are still relying on a battery source. The only thing that changes are whether it is consumable or not.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago Now, to actually USE that power you need to store it....that would be batteries.
And battery power is more expensive than "free-flowing" power. That's what the whole 10% efficiency is about.
And vehicles aren't free.
The problem here is that there isn't much of a progression. You have just ~2-3 stages of vehicle progression:
A 4th stage could be "vehicle that has a laser rifle on it and can destroy hordes on its own", but at this point the game is basically finished.
Now, the 10% efficiency thing isn't a solution yet, as it still means a drop of gas provides the equivalent of 25 batteries (making gas 75 times more energy-dense than batteries), but it is a step in the right direction. Other alternatives I see are:
You want to explore that mall/hospital/other big building? Well, your vehicle will need to be parked outside because it isn't fitting in without knocking walls down on your head.
Install a storage battery and a UPS charger on a shopping cart and drag it behind self.
1skandar
commented
7 years ago Install a storage battery and a UPS charger on a shopping cart and drag it behind self.
Have you tried doing that? I mean, you can, but the results end up about 600 pounds+ which gets to be a problem, quickly. And you still can't get that thing up and down stairs easily. And then there is the fact the time it takes to recharge the tool/weapon isn't instant. I think it balances well enough.
And you're still harping about it being free energy, and it isn't. You need electronics 6 first off, and the proper book. Then you need the proper parts, and each tool needs to be modified to draw from UPS if it doesn't already. Weapons need a UPS, which is rare/dangerous to get/difficult to craft. And then you've got to put all the parts together. It's a fun adventure sorting all this out.
And it isn't like batteries are any better. You're going to get them by the thousands (under default settings) to the point where them being a consumable pretty much becomes a moot point. And it's a much more boring system. Walk into an electronics shop or hardware store....walk out iwth al lthe batteries you'll need.
Now, if you want to say gasoline is producing too much power per unit, that is another argument altogether. And maybe the vehicle system may need balancing, although I'd argue against it given the time cost it takes to use it, but neither has a thing to to do with this issue.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago And you're still harping about it being free energy, and it isn't.
Oh so we're dropping the whole civil part of the discussion. Fine, I can do that.
I mean, you can, but the results end up about 600 pounds+ which gets to be a problem, quickly.
Think harder. Hint: smoke and noise don't matter.
You need electronics 6 first off, and the proper book.
Or a military vehicle. Those aren't that rare. If you get an uncommon lucky drop, you can set up infinite UPS before you have a fully working car. Plus, at this point, you have the energy capacity to run this thing just fine.
Weapons need a UPS, which is rare/dangerous to get/difficult to craft.
By the time you have a laser weapon, you should have 3+ UPSes. And craftable UPS weapons take more skill and materials than UPS itself.
And it isn't like batteries are any better.
And yet you feel the need to set it all up just to avoid using those thousands of batteries, even though reloading a UPS with batteries is faster (both player time and character time) than charging it.
@Nioca has a point: that charger keeps the energy at 0 and is only possible to keep up with massive vehicles or combustion engines. This presents an actual in-game annoyance and not just a conceptual one. But you are just repeating a something equivalent to "it's not a perpetum mobile because you have to wind it up first before it starts producing infinite power".
In general, the idea that "it is balanced because it is a rare drop" is in itself very wrong. It only works if there is a gradient of strong vs. common and not "you have x and are good" vs. "you still need to grind for x".
I could make the charger 10 times more efficient, but first we need to solve at least one of:
Until then, the only valid arguments are those concerned with quality of life, such as "using charger kills lights/stereo", and not with balance - which could not be improved by buffing the charger. Though I still don't see what your argument here is. So far it looks like it is "I don't like the 10% efficiency because I don't like it" or "this reward I get for setting up infinite power isn't giant enough, I want it to be more overwhelming".
Now, if you want to say gasoline is producing too much power per unit, that is another argument altogether. And maybe the vehicle system may need balancing, although I'd argue against it given the time cost it takes to use it, but neither has a thing to to do with this issue.
It has EVERYTHING to do with this issue. Energy availability for vehicles is directly, linearly related to possible energy output of UPS charger.
kolsurma
commented
7 years ago "using charger kills lights/stereo"
I'm going to ignore everything else going on for just a second... Should a character with sufficient mechanics, or electronics, or some combination there of, be allowed to change the order that energy moves in a vehicle?
For instance, the player would get a UI similar to the armor sorting one. You could assign a car battery to be charged before your mounted laser turret (if they even store energy, I'm unsure of that), then your UPS system, and finally your 30 storage batteries. That way you'd never have to worry about not being able to start your car because your UPS system drained all your batteries.
Reclusive-reptile
commented
7 years ago The 10% efficiency of the charger would less annoying if it was more obvious to the player. Right now the player looks at the the vehicle screen, sees that the max charge of a car battery is 2500 charges and is 100% full. Then they look at the the UPS item and see that it has a max charge of 1000 units, drop it into the charger and turn it on before taking a nap. Now there is 250 charges in the the UPS and the car is dead, can't be started until a fresh battery is found and I don't believe any new player is ever told by anything in game that that whole process was going to happen.
kevingranade
commented
7 years ago On Feb 19, 2017 4:30 AM, "Surma" notifications@github.com wrote:
"using charger kills lights/stereo"
I'm going to ignore everything else going on for just a second... Should a character with sufficient mechanics, or electronics, or some combination there of, be allowed to change the order that energy moves in a vehicle?
Not literally by changing the order, but a manual shutoff for each system would be trivial, and something that shuts off non-essential systems if total system charge drops below some threshold would be doable.
kevingranade
commented
7 years ago On Feb 19, 2017 1:35 PM, "Reclusive-reptile" notifications@github.com wrote:
The 10% efficiency of the charger would less annoying if it was more obvious to the player. Right now the player looks at the the vehicle screen, sees that the max charge of a car battery is 2500 charges and is 100% full. Then they look at the the UPS item and see that it has a max charge of 1000 units, drop it into the charger and turn it on before taking a nap. Now there is 250 charges in the the UPS and the car is dead, can't be started until a fresh battery is found and I don't believe any new player is ever told by anything in game that that whole process was going to happen.
Good description of the problem, in other words, whatever the conversion rate, it should be clear how much charge a ups is going to take out of a vehicle. That's certainly fixable.
CoroNaut
commented
7 years ago So should the inconsistency between the battery compartment mod, UPS recharging station and vehicle batteries be fixed? Perhaps the efficiency of all three could be lowered to meet the UPS recharging station or all can be buffed to a certain efficiency that can be easily understood by a new player?
Another interesting topic: Should the standard UPS be nerfed to accommodate the easily accessible energy that a vehicle battery can provide? If so, this could bring up another interesting debate about the advanced UPS. If it retains 100% efficiency and the regular UPS drops efficiency, the atomic items would be getting a buff and I could see them being much more balanced than they already are. Currently they have little to no use because the regular UPS is cheaper and more reliable, but if the advanced UPS promises 100% efficiency, the player would have a better understanding of where the atomic items come from. It would give them a different flavor than inefficient battery powered items in that sense.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago So should the inconsistency between the battery compartment mod, UPS recharging station and vehicle batteries be fixed? Perhaps the efficiency of all three could be lowered to meet the UPS recharging station or all can be buffed to a certain efficiency that can be easily understood by a new player?
I'd favor the option of cutting vehicle batteries to use the same scale as item batteries. That is, cutting it by 10. For example, currently car battery has 2500 charge at 4 volume. Dropping it to 250 charge would make it use the same scale and thus rescaling obsolete. Non-rechargable batteries would be more charge-dense than small vehicle batteries, but that's fine because they are non-rechargable and thus use different technology.
Before, the problem with that was that vehicles had a probabilistic fuel consumption function. Nowadays they store fractions of fuel use (at least that's how I understood it), so consuming 0.001 of an unit shouldn't cause problems.
1skandar
commented
7 years ago That won't work, unless you also nerf the power drain from electric motors significantly. Just running on batteries alone will flat line a storage battery in few hours as it is. that'll turn into a few minutes. And then you'll have to rebalance solar cells again. And recheck every vehicle component that draws energy.
This nerf is unnecessary. Yes, yes, vehicles may be "free" energy, whatever that means, But it requires engagement with the game and underlying systems much more than plain batteries. To make use of it you have to get involved with the vehicle UI and the crafting system, go out and explore the world, scavenge and fight zombies, and gain enough experience to raise your skills sufficiently. Whereas with batteries you just (U)nload everything you find...and that's it. I'm of the opinion that the more creative solution should be rewarded, even if it is a bit unbalanced.
Nioca
commented
7 years ago To be honest, so long as electric motors were rebalanced along with it, I'm all in favor of nerf to power capacity and output of vehicles. As it stands right now, it seems like those two figures are balanced solely around trying to handle the rather obscene energy usage of electric motors, where driving 40 overmap tiles can cost you 8000 charge. You can quite literally build an electric car from scratch, INCLUDING handcrafting all applicable parts, for 7790 energy (I had run the numbers, but unfortunately forgot to save the file that had them).
While we're on factors of ten, I'm actually toying with dropping the density of gasoline/diesel by a factor of ten (as in, a single liter of gasoline consists of 100 units instead of 1000), and am going to be testing that out on my end to see how it plays out. I've already done some fairly basic tests, and it seems to work far better than what we currently have, but that's mostly consisting of debugging in a car and driving it across a full overmap; I'd like to see how it functions in actual play before making a recommendation.
1skandar
commented
7 years ago Meh, I'm all for toning down the potency of gas/diesel. That said, rejiggering the entire power system for vehicles beyond that is asking for trouble, as there is a whole host of things that are balanced against things as they are. Hell, welding costs alone would cause problems.
Let me point to the ill-advised vehicle engine rebalance that was done that ended up being more trouble than it was worth. Great idea in theory, be the execution caused a whole heap of problems that eventually needed a revert to fix.
Nioca
commented
7 years ago That said, rejiggering the entire power system for vehicles beyond that is asking for trouble, as there is a whole host of things that are balanced against things as they are. Hell, welding costs alone would cause problems.
Er, you did read the part about forging the parts for and then welding together an entire car for less than a quarter of a storage battery right now, right? Heck, enter the craft menu with all recipes unlocked and do a search for all tools requiring a welder. You can almost count the number that require 200+ energy on one hand, and most of those are super-high-end stuff; Heavy Rail Rifle, Mininuke Launcher, so forth. Some of these project run long enough that it's possible for a lowly motorbike alternator (or in some cases, a lone solar panel) to completely replace the power used and then some before the craft is even finished. The majority of them don't even require triple-digit energy figures.
I mean, you say that a whole host of things are balanced against it, but from what I can tell, the only thing that's really balanced against vehicle power generation are vehicle parts themselves. And, looping back to the issue at hand, some of the measures currently necessary to balance those involve a 90% efficiency tax, which suggests something is seriously out-of-whack.
You bring up Mugling's vehicle rebalance, but that was a whole different animal which involved completely redoing various mechanics that, to be honest, didn't really need to be redone that badly in the first place. What Coolthulhu's suggesting isn't an overhaul, it's basically just putting a pin in some inflation that's crept into the system.
kevingranade
commented
7 years ago On Feb 20, 2017 11:31 PM, "Coolthulhu" notifications@github.com wrote:
I'd favor the option of cutting vehicle batteries to use the same scale as item batteries. That is, cutting it by 10. For example, currently car battery has 2500 charge at 4 volume. Dropping it to 250 charge would make it use the same scale and thus rescaling obsolete. Non-rechargable batteries would be more charge-dense than small vehicle batteries, but that's fine because they are non-rechargable and thus use different technology.
I know you don't like real units, but I feel like this would all be a hell of a lot easier to reason about if we just used mAH or similar. We could just pin a bunch of things to real-world values and then set whatever for super science stuff.
Before, the problem with that was that vehicles had a probabilistic fuel consumption function. Nowadays they store fractions of fuel use (at least that's how I understood it), so consuming 0.001 of an unit shouldn't cause problems.
Actually no, I updated vehicle::consume_fuel() to carry forward fractional fuel units, but I'm not sure vehicle::drain() calls consume_fuel(). That's an oversight with a simple fix though.
1skandar
commented
7 years ago I know you don't like real units, but I feel like this would all be a hell of a lot easier to reason about if we just used mAH or similar. We could just pin a bunch of things to real-world values and then set whatever for super science stuff.
Yeah, I wasn't going to argue real world stuff, but that's a point. You cut vehicle batteries to a tenth of their current values things get silly. A car battery could then only store slightly more energy that what a heavy duty flashlight runs on. That is.... flat ridiculous. You're trying to equate a twelve volt, high amp car battery to what would be, in the real world, 2 to 4 C or D batteries.
Battery performance is measured in amp/hours and nominal voltage. For car batteries that ranges from 50 to 60 amp/hours at 12 volts. For household batteries (AA, AAA and such) that range is 500 milliamp/hours to 8000 miliamp/hours (or 8 amp/hours) at 1.5 volts.
For Cata we're going to have to make some assumptions. A mp3 player has a max battery charge of 100 batteries. In the real world, a mp3 player would be running on either 2 AAs or 2 AAAs. That is, roughly, 2.5 to 5 amp/hours capacity, meaning that a single Cata battery would have an amp/hour rating of 25 to 50 millamp/hours. Now, a car battery in Cata has 2500 charge. Assuming the real world equivalent having 50 amp/hours that means in Cata each car battery charge would be equivalent to 20 milliamp/hours.
So, as it stands, from a real world perspective, Cata car batteries are already less powerful than they should be. That said, the numbers are close enough where it's fine. However, cutting them down to a tenth of their charge would put things so far out of whack where it would be immediately obvious.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago While we're on factors of ten, I'm actually toying with dropping the density of gasoline/diesel by a factor of ten (as in, a single liter of gasoline consists of 100 units instead of 1000), and am going to be testing that out on my end to see how it plays out.
As far as I recall, gas was specifically rescaled into 1mL per unit. Would be better if you dropped the efficiency 10 times instead. This would require changing the hardcoded fuel definitions, though.
I know you don't like real units, but I feel like this would all be a hell of a lot easier to reason about if we just used mAH or similar. We could just pin a bunch of things to real-world values and then set whatever for super science stuff.
The problems with real life units are that first you need to rebalance everything to fit them (roughly) and then when problems inevitably start due to different scales and misrepresentation, they become a rigid requirement that can be hard to meet. The primary reason I'd rather avoid real life units in vehicle power is that IRL, electric motors have obscene power consumption, comparable to continuous welding. As @Nioca pointed out, currently all in-game jobs involving electricity are orders of magnitude cheaper than just running an electric vehicle.
Even if all jobs were rebalanced to fit real life units, there would still be the problem of power usage scaling with vehicle weight and the system fraying at the edges where less realistic units are used or the formulas don't (and sometimes can't) match the real ones. We'd need to simulate much more vehicle physics for real life units to truly make sense.
Using an arbitrary power unit prevents someone from trying to apply real life data to compute that running a welder should take less power than driving an electric scooter because [insert an attempt to derive tile size in real life units] implies that a tile must be [arbitrarily chosen size]. Well, doesn't prevent, but helps to protect against it.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago A car battery could then only store slightly more energy that what a heavy duty flashlight runs on.
That's a great example of why I don't want real life units. Having to manually reload flashlights is not really fun, so high capacity lights are quality of life. But someone inevitably tries to combine the simplifications for quality of life and rule of fun with stricter, simulationistic systems. The results are invariably perceived as problems, for many reasons:
1skandar
commented
7 years ago I'm not saying we should use real life units, I'm just saying the current system is actually fairly correct to real life as it is.
And I'm still not sure you why want to balance everything around batteries. That's a very, very boring choice with limited ability for creativity, loot an electronic store walk out with all the batteries you'll need for (literally) a year. Or unload everything you find and not worry about it. I've never had a situation where I needed batteries and couldn't easily get more. Normally I have thousands just lying around.
Whereas to get a proper rechargeable system set up requires you to engage with nearly every game mechanic Cata has. I really can't see why it's a bad thing to reward a player who does that with easily rechargeable batteries. Yes, you can skip some of that by finding a UPS recharger equipped vehicle, but the weapons to use it are almost exclusively in either dangerous places or craft only and to make tools compatible requires crafting from a recipe from a book.
Actually, this is the reason why I don't mind if gasoline and diesel are made less effective. See, I have this recipe for biodiesel that really isn't that useful right now due to the prevalence of scavenged fuel and how slowly fuel is consumed. Therefore nerfing that adds to the game experience whereas nerfing car batteries subtracts from it.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago I've never had a situation where I needed batteries and couldn't easily get more.
Because you have a nearly-infinite source of energy right beside you. And because fires are too good at satisfying cooking needs. I want to change that some day, but that will take a while because I don't want to make it tedious and would rather use crafting times (hotplate giving a bonus over non-stove fire) than plank hauling time as balancing factor. If you had to pay 7 batteries per cooked meat, that would quickly start adding up.
Whereas to get a proper rechargeable system set up requires you to engage with nearly every game mechanic Cata has.
No need for it to suddenly end all needs for energy. It's not like nerfing vehicle energy will make it not-best - it will only make it more comparable.
nerfing car batteries subtracts from it
How so? They are seriously out of line with regular batteries. The only argument I see on your side right now is quality of life thing regarding reloading vehicle battery compartment tools. Other than that it's complaints about not rewarding setting up a vehicle, which is patently false as vehicle is a mandatory step in every DDA game due to how much it helps with mobility, hauling and crafting.
1skandar
commented
7 years ago Dude, um, have you played this game recently? Do me a favor, go in game, walk into an electronic store, grab all the batteries, unloading everything. Alternatively, walk into a hardware store and unload all those batteries. You can, quite literally, get 2 to 3 thousand batteries with only a little bit of luck.
And no, car batteries are not out of line with regular batteries. They don't serve the same purpose. You can't shove a car battery into a tool (well, non-modded tool at least), and batteries can't power a vehicle (not any more, at least).
In fact, come to think of it, your nerf is pointless. Any proper set up has to be energy positive, otherwise it will drain the batteries no matter the size. As such, as long as there is enough charge to perform the current crafting action the battery will never drain appreciably. The more expensive actions require more time, and thus give the system longer to recover used energy.
And even beyond that, what does your nerf add to the game? It is utterly trivial to add more batteries to a vehicle. Grabbing 10 is only very slightly harder than grabbing one.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago Do me a favor, go in game, walk into an electronic store, grab all the batteries, unloading everything. Alternatively, walk into a hardware store and unload all those batteries. You can, quite literally, get 2 to 3 thousand batteries with only a little bit of luck.
What item spawns are you playing with? And what city spawns? In most of my worlds, I get 1 electronic store per city at most and it doesn't contain thousands of batteries. Hundreds yes, but not thousands. Enough for food, not enough for food+serious welding+full survivor gear. Still too much, but order of magnitude less than what you imply.
In fact, come to think of it, your nerf is pointless.
You expressed that opinion (not fact) multiple times already. No need to pretend you came up with it anytime recently.
And even beyond that, what does your nerf add to the game? It is utterly trivial to add more batteries to a vehicle. Grabbing 10 is only very slightly harder than grabbing one.
The part where vehicle to non-vehicle energy conversion is now 10 times as expensive, and consistently so. Even if it is not an immediate fix, it is in the right direction.
And all that time the only alternative you keep proposing is just giving up and saying "energy must be free because all fixes are imperfect". You don't say "approach the problem by doing x first", but rather "the problem is unsolvable/not a problem, just give up", while it clearly is solvable and clearly a problem.
1skandar
commented
7 years ago I'm saying it isn't a problem. Rechargeable batteries freely exist in reality and are cheap. I mean, I know I'd hook up a solar cell to a car battery and then to a DC/AC converter in the real world to drive things like cordless drills and such, I don't see why doing so in Cata is such a big deal.
And, no, your nerf doesn't do jack shit. Yes, I can now store 1/10 as much power, but I'm not generating 1/10th as much power or using 10x more joice The crafting recipes cost the same amount of charges, the UPS still holds the same amount of charge, any tools I have still hold the same amount of charge and use the charge at the same rate. The only change is that I can now store 1/10th as much. And, well, so what? I don't craft, charge tools, or pretty much anything else off of stored power. I migh use a few percent here or there for the current crafting operation, but I'm mainly running things off of generated power, which your proposed nerf does nothing for.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago And, no, your nerf doesn't do jack shit. Yes, I can now store 1/10 as much power, but I'm not generating 1/10th as much power or using 10x more joice
No, that's just your interpretation. You pick the one you most favorable to you because you don't want problems to be fixed, only to "win" the discussion. Reminder that the whole idea of cutting battery capacity was in context of removing the 10% efficiency on UPS charger. From that, it's pretty obvious it wouldn't be 10 time buff on UPS efficiency just like that, for free. I also explicitly mentioned the idea of nerfing alternator output and electric vehicle consumption.
At this point you aren't even trying to propose the right way to do anything, just arguing about arguments.
1skandar
commented
7 years ago Uh, I do believe I've said from the get go that the way things currently work is not a problem and doesn't need fixing. I think your line of reasoning is hilariously bass ackward around a concept of balance that doesn't have a reason for existing. I mean, it is like nerfing farming because you can get food for free just by planting seeds. The whole idea is ridiculous.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago If you can't even see the problem, then why are you whining about things that you say do not matter?
1skandar
commented
7 years ago There you go again. What problem? You are trying to fix something that isn't broken. Cata has (literally) hundreds of other issues that need fixing rather than wasting time on something like this.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago What problem?
Oh so you are telling me you not only can't read my posts, but also can't remember what point were you arguing first? Read your own posts.
You are trying to fix something that isn't broken.
Just because you can't see the problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Vehicle power obsoletes all power costs for purposes of crafting. It reduces all crafting to component costs and tool availability.
kevingranade
commented
7 years ago This is going nowhere, sorry you can't see it @1skandar, but I agree with @Coolthulhu, even after these nerfs and others, assembling a working powered vehicle means your power needs are now met, indefinitely. Future changes are going to continue to reign this in more, not less. As far as I recall, the only issue raised here I'm interested in addressing is adjusting power displayed and perhaps adding shutoff circuits so that players don't get surprised by a ups charger or similar totally draining their batteries.
Coolthulhu
commented
7 years ago How about making it slow down when batteries are <10%? Soft caps like that are "natural" and don't need players to configure them or react to them.
kevingranade
commented
7 years ago On Feb 22, 2017 1:04 AM, "Coolthulhu" notifications@github.com wrote:
How about making it slow down when batteries are <10%? Soft caps like that are "natural" and don't need players to configure them or react to them.
I don't think any reasonable amount of slowing it down is going to keep players from accidentally emptying their batteries. If we want to be nice we could simply hard code a reserve value, vehicles would simply shut accessories off if the battery level approaches enough charge to start the engine. Having them shut off seems more friendly to me than just making it slow, if we balance it for being safe overnight, players might develop a false sense of security and then leave the car for a few days. Less nice would be to require the player to install a "charge level protection circuit" to enable the feature. It's certainly not something I've ever heard of in a production car.
Zireael07
commented
7 years ago Shut off auto or by installing yet another car part is fine by me.
Soadreqm
commented
6 years ago @Coolthulhu Where do you think batteries should come from? Right now, if you need a lot of power, you mount half a dozen solar panels on a vehicle and never worry about it again. If that was no longer an option, where should survivors get their electricity?
At the moment, I can also turn two units of blueberries into fruit wine, into vinegar, into 700 units of batteries. That also takes one empty tin or drink can per 100 battery, but once I run out of those, I can forge empty canisters out of scrap metal for 20 a pop. There are time costs at every step, so it's not nearly as easy, but it's still a source of infinite batteries. Do you think farming and cooking are a more legitimate source of power than gasoline/solar, or should these recipes be changed as well?
1skandar talked about raiding electronics stores, and those really are a good source of batteries. There's also the flashlight drops from ordinary zombies, which can actually add up to a decent amount if you're killing a lot of them.
Thematically, diesel generators and pre-apocalypse solar panels seem like fairly reasonable ways to generate electricity. If you think those are too easy, what's your preferred alternative?
Coolthulhu
commented
6 years ago Diesel generators are fine, it's just that you shouldn't be able to satisfy all electricity needed for crafting on a literal cup of oil. Fuel should be noticeably used up during crafting, not just "catalyze" the job. For a recent example of it done well, see Darkwood - there fuel is both necessary for survival and used up at sensible rate. While we can't really put pressure on the player in DDA (it's not possible without hordes/deadly winter/alien invasion/progressing infection/massive starvation event/etc.), we can buff energy usage by crafting jobs.
10% nerf may not be good, but I haven't heard of a good alternative. Though I'm leaning towards just giving up on this issue for now and letting it be broken - while UPS generator has the 10% nerf, there are is still a way to convert vehicle energy to battery power that skips it (battery compartment). And giving it a similar nerf would be rather hard. Sometimes consistently bad is better than inconsistently better.
Soadreqm
commented
6 years ago @Coolthulhu, so basically, solar panels should not exist, and either engine fuel consumption should be higher, or alternator efficiency should be lower? I don't think the word "reasonable" is a good one here - I think it's entirely reasonable for gasoline to have a great energy density, since that's one of the main reasons real-world gasoline even exists.
Coolthulhu
commented
6 years ago I don't think the word "reasonable" is a good one here
So you're saying it's totally reasonable that the car produces enough electricity from a literal cup of gasoline that you can cook on it (assuming you only ever eat boiled food) for a whole week? That a 1L bottle of gasoline in a generator is enough to power a welder long enough to weld a complete car body from a bunch of malformed lumps of steel?
Because this is what is happening right now (when using compartment/rig) and this is what you're defending here.
Soadreqm
commented
6 years ago Well, yeah, kinda. A 1/4 liter cup of gasoline contains about enough energy to heat 20 liters of water to boil, or to completely melt 9 kilograms of steel. One kilogram of gasoline is worth 90 kilograms of alkaline batteries. That's why they run cars on gasoline. Because it holds a lot of chemical energy in a compact and convenient package.
I know that it's sometimes better to take a break from reality to make things more interesting for the player, and I'm not really sure how vehemently I want to defend real-world numbers, but I do think they're basically defensible. If you think it would be best to determine the energy density of gasoline based on how much oatmeal you think the player should be allowed to cook with the average amount of gasoline he's likely to have, fine, I don't have any real objections to that. I still think it's also completely reasonable to do the exact opposite. To take the energy density as your constant, and derive the oatmeal number from that.
Coolthulhu
commented
6 years ago To take the energy density as your constant, and derive the oatmeal number from that.
This leads to a rather big problem of balancing all of those at once:
All of those use different scales and - importantly - are scaled completely differently from their real world counterparts. There is no mile in the game, so there can't be mpg. Values for cooking are all over the place, with only loose correlation.
Going with abstract first and then converging on realistic values (instead of the opposite) has the advantage of not having to change gorillion recipes.
I don't insist on 10%, but I'd prefer to have an alternative to go towards instead of just plain revert and surrender. Though if someone just removed the multiplier, I'd be more "for" than "against".
kevingranade
commented
6 years ago Well, yeah, kinda. A 1/4 liter cup of gasoline contains about enough energy to heat 20 liters of water to boil, or to completely melt 9 kilograms of steel.
If you calculate the total energy in the gasoline, yes those numbers sound about right, but in practical terms there are massive* energy losses when performing these activities. Cooking floods the surrounding environment with heat in addition to doing work with it, loses energy to light, doesn't burn the fuel at full efficiency, etc. Meanwhile welding is dealing with internal resistance in tools, wastes heat that gets absorbed by the work piece or is lost to the environment, and consumes power when left on between welding tasks. In both cases you're probably also losing energy to an idling engine, incomplete combustion, internal resistance in your generator and more waste heat.
You can take a look at some pages: http://portablegeneratormaster.com/cost-of-grid-power-versus-running-a-portable-generator/ https://settysoutham.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/portable-generators-about-half-as-efficient-as-power-plants/ that attempt to quantify some of the generator-side inefficiencies. There are similar resources for energy loss from other activities.
Actually, I did some fact checking, and AFAICT your numbers are wildly* off...
1/4L Petrol has ~2,000kCal of potential energy, which is enough to raise the temperature of 20L of water by about 100C, which I assume is what you mean (it's somewhat less if the water starts at higher than 0C, but not by that much), but the energy consumed to take water "just below" 100C and cook food by boiling it is immensely higher than the energy required to get it to "just below" 100C in the first place. As a simple estimate, if during cooking you boil away 10% of your water, you've expended an additional 1,000kcal of energy. This is dwarfed by the inefficiencies I list above, but highlights how easy it is to miss important details.
Your number for melting steel adds up, but neglects the inefficiencies I mention above, practically speaking you're going to expend orders of magnitude more than 2,000Kcal of energy to weld even a small vehicle.
Some napkin math here: http://weldingweb.com/showthread.php?47264-KW-consumption leads to an estimate of about 5KW power consumption for an entry-level welder, which turns into ~5,000Kcal / hour. You don't operate a welder continuously, but even assuming something like a 1/10 duty cycle, you're still burning up that 1/4L of gasoline in about 4 hrs, which is nowhere close to long enough to assemble a tiny vehicle, much less the "whole car" in the example, and still ignores things like generator efficiency, which is somewhere below 10%
The problem with this approach:
Going with abstract first and then converging on realistic values (instead of the opposite) has the advantage of not having to change gorillion recipes.
is that it doesn't provide a mechanism for "converging on realistic values". As far as I can tell the objections to moving to real-world values will never disappear, so the convergence never happens. The only path to ending up at a sustainable point is to set as many things to real-world values as is feasible, and then tuning the scenario itself to achieve desired game balance, though IMO just setting things to consistent values is going to get us most of the way there. To be more concrete, there are readily available numbers for i.e. generator efficiency, battery storage efficiency, energy to cook foods, energy to weld, etc... If we just apply those, we'll have a lot of things locked down to sensible values, and we can tune from there by e.g. making fuel more or less scarce.
Coolthulhu
commented
6 years ago To be more concrete, there are readily available numbers for i.e. generator efficiency, battery storage efficiency, energy to cook foods, energy to weld, etc... If we just apply those, we'll have a lot of things locked down to sensible values, and we can tune from there by e.g. making fuel more or less scarce.
battery storage efficiency
One of the few "anti-fun" things that I'd actually really like to see in the game - some penalty for storing power, as opposed to generating it on the spot. Though doing it well would require making alternators scale down their output when not needed. Not that it's hard or a bad idea, just not done yet.
At the moment all vehicle batteries are 100% efficient at charging, discharging, and storage.
Soadreqm
commented
6 years ago Actually, I did some fact checking, and AFAICT your numbers are wildly off
I think my numbers are pretty good for the specific examples I gave. Gasoline contains that much chemical energy, even if you can't utilize it. :)
For water, heating it from 0°C to 100°C is exactly what you'd be dealing with if cooking with liquid water in winter. If you needed to boil off water, that would increase the energy requirement considerably, but unless you're distilling something, you don't actually need to do that. You just need to maintain temperature, which will still consume some energy, but not nearly as much. And you can mitigate that somewhat, by wrapping the pot in thermal insulation. And since you can just burn gasoline directly to heat water, you can skip the part where you run a car engine (that probably has an active cooling system) to crank an alternator to charge a battery to run an electric heater.
One thing I ignored is that you also spend energy on heating up the fuel (and the oxidizer, and the inert nitrogen in the air) when you burn the stuff. I can't hunt down the numbers right now, but you'd be dealing with the enthalpy change of 0.25L of gasoline evaporating and heating up, along with quite a lot of air, several kilos at least, since we're burning the gas in an excess of air for more complete burning. The target temperature won't be the gasoline's burning temperature, but the temperature of the exhaust leaving your cooking system. You could do something clever here, like force the exhaust through a long pipe that winds inside the cooking pot, but on an open fire it'll be pretty bad.
And welding would be worse still. With the huge temperature difference between the workpiece and the surrounding air, the thermal conductivity of steel, and the fact that you can't easily burn gasoline hot enough to weld with it (i.e. jet fuel can't melt steel beams), you'll be bleeding energy left and right. The heat of fusion of nine kilos of steel plus heating it up to the melting point adds up to about quarter liter of gasoline, but nine kilos worth of welded seam isn't going to happen in any real scenario, and even if it could, you wouldn't make a car with it.
I think a lot of the energy values in the game right now are neither realistic nor optimally balanced for the best gameplay experience, and it's difficult to change them because they're all used in tens of different recipes. It's even worse with food, where you need to deal with shit like cooking oil turning into mayo turning into sandwiches.
stale[bot]
commented
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stale[bot]
commented
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kevingranade
commented
4 years ago We're solidly on the path to transitioning power production, consumption and storage to real world units in order to achieve the balance we're looking for, rendering this issue moot.
Experimental Build 0.C-6235 Windows 7 SDLRight now, vehicle-based UPS-Compatible Recharging Stations are woefully inefficient. Whereas most power transfers to or from UPS (bionic or otherwise) occur on a 1-for-1 basis, using a recharging station consumes 10 or more units of power in exchange for a single unit of charge on the device in question. I ran tests using Electric Cars, installing a UPS-Compatible Recharging Station in one of the trunk compartments, and then dropping UPSes in the station to charge, turning the charger off once the UPSes hit 1000 charge. The results:
1000 UPS Charge (1 UPS) = 10513 Vehicle Charge (9.51% Efficiency) 5000 UPS Charge (5 UPS) = 49943 Vehicle Charge (10.01% Efficiency) 7997 UPS Charge (100 UPS) = 80000 Vehicle Charge (9.99% Efficiency) *I forgot to take the solar panels off the spawned Electric car for the latter two tests, which likely pulled results upward a slight bit.
Needless to say, this makes using a UPS-Compatible Recharging Station completely and wildly impractical for smaller vehicles, since utilizing it puts a massive drain on vehicle power. Gas/Diesel powered vehicles still function with a UPS-Compatible Recharging Station operating, but they'll be operating on 0% battery until the device finishes charging or the recharger gets turned off, and to add insult to injury, attempting to charge from a running vehicle with stock car/truck batteries takes much, MUCH longer than a straight drain from a storage battery (ideal charge time for an empty UPS from a full storage battery clocks in a bit under two hours, but from a stock Humvee with the engine running, it took over 7 hours). For larger vehicles, it only becomes worth it if the vehicle is producing more energy than it can actually use or has a massive surplus of energy.
For what it's worth, I don't think UPS-Compatible Recharging Stations should recharge with 100% efficiency; however, the results I'm getting suggests there's a bug or faulty formula somewhere that's causing the excessive drain.