Friday Facts #312 - Fluid mixing saga & Landfill terrain

[darkfrei]

The landfill doesn't looks like a stone that it comes from.

It would be nice to make more artificial edge by transition between water tiles and ground. More like transition between tutorial grid to water or out-of-map tiles to water.

[Astrella]

I just came here from Steam and tried hard to remember my login to tell the author what a good read this was.
I once spent back at university 2,5h making a 'simple' recursive function work which ended with just 4 lines of code...

Coding can be like that. Heck, I spent most of the day making an adjustment to something which came down to misunderstanding a boolean flag and was then done by just switching those flags. Changing two words did what I'd been trying to do all day. ;.; (in my defense this is only my second week at this job and the code base is enormous... )

[Arzorth]

Isn’t this a bug?

[Impatient]

I visit the bug report forums on a regular basis, because this is the place where the devs are most (inter)active on the forums imo. Imo it is the best place to get a pulse on the development process besides the FFF.

Everyone who visits there routinely, noticed boskid's cascade of bug reports, I guess. Just this week I thought: "Either they curse boskid and hop for her/his reports to stop or they are going to offer boskid a job as full time software tester".

I don't know if it is going to be the later one (or maybe it is both ) but I like how you, the factorio crew, obviously acknowledge and appreciate boskid's work. And, boskid, I am impressed by your noticable, solid and thorough work.

(boskid is the mention on the occasion, but my respects go to a lot more users contributing to factorio, like the modders, all the bug reporters and players who provide genuine discussion and reflection, ideas and thoughts to the factorio team.)

Factorio is already one of the best games ever and all of you keep making it better and better.

[Hlebuw3k]

Maybe i just dont understand something, but why not ONLY allow placing fluid boxes when it doesnt mix fluids? And dont allow to place them in ANY other case?

[Baruk]

As for fluid mixing, shouldn't it been checked "virtually" beforehand whether 2 fluids get connected and if the check says yes just disallow the placing/rotating/construct by robot-action with a loud *meeep*?

[Antyradek]

What about creating a "Dirty Fluid", that is, anything mixed together would create a dirty pulp, factories would use this pulp without producing anything and emit smog instead?
That way if one mixes fluid, it gets naturally cleaned after a while.

Because, honestly, trying to prevent fluid mixing is impossible and will make a code look dirty.

[AmbitiousMinnow]

When I'm working on a solution that throws up one problem after another, I usually throw it in the garbage and go back to the drawing board for something clean and elegant.

Why not just make the pipes more like electric lines and just check inputs and outputs instead of doing individual calculations for each pipe unit? From what I hear it's hard on UPS and is pretty much the cause of all these issues. Then when you have excess inputs or outputs the system just stays blank. I can't really even see the benefit of computing anything else.

[Ranakastrasz]

Why are you trying to idiotproof Factorio? The game itself needs a certain level of mental dexterity, I do not think you need to go to such extreme level to prevent mixups.

Because unlike most other systems, belts or so on, it is almost trivial to accidently contaminate your entire pipe system and have to tear it out and do it again. Belts have several methods. Smart inserters, splitters as sanity checkers. Circuit network contamination warnings.

The only annoyijg thing for belts is that you can't kust hit emergency stop and so have to break the belt and chase down the unwanted items.

[TheRaph]

Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with this idea that any action by anything anywhere should be prevented if it leads to fluid mixing? It seems silly complicated and overly invasive compared to the alternative, which is to say pipes connect if they they are compatible, and does not connect if they are not compatible (see mockup below). With this method you can even prevent incorrect fluids ending up in your blueprints by having the fluid type of the pipe be a part of the blueprint.

+1 !!!

[T-A-R]

Mixing only happens when you are actively adjusting the pipe network. As far as i can judge, the old fluid system (where mixing could happen) wasnt't that bad,
IF only you could easily empty a contaminated fluid block once you made a fix, similar like how you remove wires: by [ctrl] clicking a pipe. (I imagine that leaving a temporary polluting puddle of gore on the ground) Currently you still have the "replace everything" problem when a pipe filled with the wrong fluid.

in the current system there are way less contaminated pipes (or wrong filled pipes) since assemblers can define the pipe content, but if it makes coding far worse, it don't have to be that arbitrary for me.
But there is still no proper way to drain pipes (either storing by pumping out, or Manually voiding the fluids into pollution).

Respect for your perservance on these fluids. And don't forget that Boskid is actually preventing that these fluids will haunt your nightmares until infinity:p

[foamy]

Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with this idea that any action by anything anywhere should be prevented if it leads to fluid mixing? It seems silly complicated and overly invasive compared to the alternative, which is to say pipes connect if they they are compatible, and does not connect if they are not compatible (see mockup below). With this method you can even prevent incorrect fluids ending up in your blueprints by having the fluid type of the pipe be a part of the blueprint.

This post needs more attention. Couple it in with differential pipe pieces for non-pump flow management and I think it's a winner.

[bNarFProfCrazy]

Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with this idea that any action by anything anywhere should be prevented if it leads to fluid mixing? It seems silly complicated and overly invasive compared to the alternative, which is to say pipes connect if they they are compatible, and does not connect if they are not compatible (see mockup below). With this method you can even prevent incorrect fluids ending up in your blueprints by having the fluid type of the pipe be a part of the blueprint.

This post needs more attention. [...]

Don't forget warning symbols so that it's easily detectable.

------------

IMO the 45° rotated landfill looks better. For the plain grid one I have optical illusion of it being some kind of time-space-continuum that wobbles around and tries to suck me in some kind of black hole. Or my eyes are just tired.

[Ranger_Aurelien]

which is to say pipes connect if they they are compatible, and does not connect if they are not compatible (see mockup below). With this method you can even prevent incorrect fluids ending up in your blueprints by having the fluid type of the pipe be a part of the blueprint.

I just thought of this: employ some sort of mechanism similar to the interface of a filter inserter to declare as a user "This pipe should hold THIS fluid", and it then will then display that icon across that segment of pipe and treat it as having that liquid... and this filter then could be picked up in templates/BP. Either on a piece of normal surface pipe, say, turned bright white to be consistent with the idea of "filter" (I'd prefer not to add another object, but I suppose someone could mod something).

Thoughts?

I suppose the other extreme would be to allow mixing then have parts corresponding to belts' such as splitters (with filters), and some sort of filter parts that just let one fluid in (to assemblers, say).

[Philip017]

well i for one really appreciate the "optional" fixes for pipe fluid mixing, because having to rip up a huge pile of pipes because of one pipe that i placed badly makes for frustrations beyond a little annoying, so a great many thanks to you for patching all the multitude of bugs that come as part of this qol feature! Thank You!

so now instead of grass to look at we have dirt for landfills, hum, we need to get fertilizer to get the grassy look back, or maybe we can get tree planting and fertilizer in vanilla? but other than pollution control, trees aren't of much use in vanilla other than fuel, and early game electric poles and boxes. so maybe we need a use for wood beyond that for a reason to plant trees in vanilla... either way i use a mod for early tree planting from bio industries for early pollution control before modules, because if i plant enough trees, they will soak up all that pollution before it gets to the biters, resulting in fewer attacks.

[astroshak]

Isn’t this a bug?

I don’t understand, what do you think is a bug there?

[urza99814]

Just wanna throw my vote in for reconsidering the ban on fluid mixing.

I think the current mechanic is more annoying than the occasional accidental mixing. And honestly, a lot of that is just because "well that was stupid" is far less frustrating to me than "WHY won't it let me build this here?"

But mostly I've always wanted fluid mixing to be a useful mechanic, and it's been SO CLOSE, so many times. When you introduced nuclear and we could mix different steam types I played around with that quite a bit, trying to find a useful way to mix the steam and water to upgrade power production in stages or something like that. And I've made numerous, somewhat successful universal train stops and fluid filters, and was super hopeful that the "fluid squashing" discussed a while back in FFF would finally make that more than just an experiment... But instead we got a system where that kind of experimentation isn't even conceivable. Personally, I find that to be more frustrating than fun. It just feels like an arbitrary, unnecessary restriction...

[Ranger_Aurelien]

Isn’t this a bug?

I don’t understand, what do you think is a bug there?

The red robot arm passing through the superstructure of the power pole to the south?

[eradicator]

I think the current mechanic is more annoying than the occasional accidental mixing. And honestly, a lot of that is just because "well that was stupid" is far less frustrating to me than "WHY won't it let me build this here?"

I think (pure speculation) the main motivation for the removal of mixing was probably ease of implementation. Because an algorithm that only has to handle one fluid at a time is easier to write, less bug prone, and potentially faster than if you have to handle a random mixed chaos in every edge case. Also there wasn't really ever any simulation of "mixing", there was only "this pipe has A and this adjacent pipe has B, and neither of them can move". Oxygen not Included use that kind of non-mixing "mixing" exclusively and i found it so frustrating to use that i quit playing that. So while i'm not "anti-mixing", i also lack the imagination how it could possibly be implemented as a fun mechanic. Maybe a mod could implement a circuit-connected valve that can completely drain+seperate a fluid system?

[Enderdraak]

What about creating a "Dirty Fluid", that is, anything mixed together would create a dirty pulp, factories would use this pulp without producing anything and emit smog instead?
That way if one mixes fluid, it gets naturally cleaned after a while.

Because, honestly, trying to prevent fluid mixing is impossible and will make a code look dirty.

make the dirty fluid exist out of % of the other fluids and only let it mix when the % differs more than x%, to prevent it tagging all your oil into dirty Fluid.