Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0

[functional]

teleporting mechanics already existed (that's what underground pipes do; they're a single entity with a single tank)

No they are not. They are two entities with two fluid boxes with fluid propagation delay and dynamic level drop.

Fair enough, I've never been able to notice the delay but I suppose I never gave any real effort in figuring it out. The assumption was based on the fact that the throughput between one pipe and two pumps is same as it is between underground pipes and two pumps.

So even if there is delay and the level drop is not uniform, they do not affect throughput the same way as two normal pipes would.

[Goodman599]

I love these changes! Fluids in pipes were already pretty unintuitive. It isn’t even mentioned in the game (I don’t think) that fluid throughput decreases with pipe length. Combine that with the fact that you couldn’t know how much throughput you were losing and also how 2 undergrounds were much better than 10 normal pipes and the fluid system just made 0 sense whenever you tried to build something big.

I do wonder if instant fluid travel can lead to any kind of cheese, though.

[Stalinlover22]

Awesome . Fluids in the late game can be a pain to handle properly. I can´t wait to play the expansion

[mmmPI]

Neither new nor old system is very realistic for lots of reasons, and one can hardly say that one is realistic over other.

Here is a quote from the FFF :

The new system is a fairly large step back in terms of the "realism" of the fluid simulation in Factorio.

And? They're still wrong

I don't believe you know better than the devs, but i respect your opinion.

[RoastCabose]

Neither new nor old system is very realistic for lots of reasons, and one can hardly say that one is realistic over other.

Here is a quote from the FFF :

The new system is a fairly large step back in terms of the "realism" of the fluid simulation in Factorio.

And? They're still wrong

I don't believe you know better than the devs, but i respect your opinion.

In this case, it's a statement about the realism of a fluid model. Either the new and the old are extremely inaccurate and unrealistic. The old one was definitely more granular, but granularity does not on its own impart realism.

I'm no expert on fluid dynamics, but neither are the devs or @functional I'm guessing, so we're all just having relatively uninformed opinions based on half remembered physics and engineering lessons, random text books of questionable age, and whatever we find on the internet. Let's not pretend that this has a ton to do with being right or wrong.

[escfoe2]

I do think seeing which direction the fluid is flowing is an important graphical experience and I would like to see that maintained. With that said, I much prefer abstracting it's actual flow away, as you described.

[Necandum]

I'm relatively conflicted by the changes, but overall am cautiously optimistic that this is a good beginning, and with further development might retroactively be seen as a great change.

Having read many of the comments so far, a common theme is that this completely removes any complications in fluids. Obviously we don't have the full details yet, let alone any demo to play with, but one obvious (but relatively minor) complication I haven't heard anyone mention: the new fluid system throttles throughput to each consumer according to the fill status. So for each consumer to work optimally, the pipe system needs to be full. But if the pipe system is full, producers are capped by what the consumers use each tick. Fine in the steady state, but presents issues in the 'consistent producers, spiking consumers' case.

Not a very hard problem to solve, but I imagine there might be a number of such minor complications that we are not aware of, that while different to the current problem set, nevertheless might make the new system interesting.

As an aside, I find it amusing that the new fluid system was heavily derided in a previous FFF as something Wube would never stoop to implementing.

~~~ Overly long rumination: ~~~
For the change itself, on the one hand, from an engineering/challenge for challenge sake perspective, its certainly disappointing. It feels like giving up. Instead of building something bigger, better, higher, the choice has been made to retreat to something simpler and apparently more primitive. And aesthetically, the knowledge that the game is actually simulating the fluids at some level adds a certain je ne sais quoi of immersion. Many other things in the game have what some may call unnecessary levels of simulation (inserter swinging, belts, trains), and this feels like a departure.

On the other hand, to be honest, this is already how I treat pipe networks. Each one gets rated for a certain flow rate, then as long as I make sure everything connected to it stays below that magic number, I treat it as if the fluid is just teleported around. Admittedly the highest flow I had to deal with was 8000/s for a nuclear power plant, so not very much compared to some megabases. However I didn't find the puzzle of squeezing that much flow down some pipes very challenging. Its just 4x2k, splitting into 8x1k. Honestly, pretty trivial. Train station were a bit more fun, but once you have a solution, there's not that much point in varying it, so the only a small amount of puzzle is lost with the new system.

On the other other hand, factorio seems to be all about giving the player a bunch of problems, and having them do the simplifying for themselves. Making ever more useful bluprints, increasing their own efficiency and effectiveness through clever design. This change feels like a case of 'the devs are playing for you', with something that used to be a problem now solved without any player engagement or thought.

On the other other other hand, the general vibe of problem solving in factorio is that the game is composed of relatively simple systems, the workings of which in isolation are easy to grasp. The complexity comes from the interactions of all the systems together. It is emergent. And fluids were an exception to that, with complexity build into the base layer of the system. The rules for the system are inscrutable. Experienced players have many rules of thumbs, and need to consult tables. Engineers have posted on this forum, showing many graphs and using python simulations (!!!) to explain how the system works. Very, very few people have a total understanding. It is quite easy to just completely break the system (try connect ~35 EDIT: heat exchangers in a row. The first 25 have water available, and the last 5. I'm the middle, 5 are just...skipped. This is understandable given the algorithm, but completely broken from a realism and gameplay point of view).
And I imagine its also not easy on the devs: if they want to make ANY changes to the fluid system, they have to consider a relatively complicated algorithm while doing so. Seems harder than it needs to be.

Whereas the new system is much more in keeping with the rest of the game. Easy to understand at its basic level and performant to boot. But it also makes it much easier to add complications on top, in a way that's easier for both players to understand and developers to implement. The question then becomes, what happens next? How will the new system be used by the developers to create interesting challenges for the players? I don't think we have enough information at the moment to judge.

Just to brainstorm some ideas of varying levels of awful:

1. Total output from a segment is limited.
   1. The limit can correlate with the number of entities in the segment.
   2. Budgets can be separate for consumers and pumps.
2. Segments are limited in size, either by number of connected consumers/producers, number of constituent entities, or by the geographical space which they occupy (e.g the area of the smallest square to fully contain the segment is limited).
   1. This might require direct segment to segment connections without a pump in between, but the algorithm would be dealing with entities with much larger total volumes and thus a lot of momentum, and would need to be invoked many less times, so could be allowed to do a better job.
3. The amount of flow through any one pipe can be arbitrarily set
   1. This would probably require an extra algorithm on top: e.g drawing connections between a producer and all possible consumers, designating nodes in the segment where these connections converge, and ensuring that all nodes sit below the desired threshold. Such an algorithm may or may not be easy to deploy, but would be able to replicate most of the interesting behaviour of the current system

Of these, (1) seems most promising and trivially easy to implement. It can mimic most of the current behaviour: simply set maximum output as a function of the number of pipes/storage tanks. Ta daa!
(3) seems more and more like either nightmare fuel or a fascinating algorithm problem.

So basically, the new system leaves plenty of room for Wube/modders to add in plenty of complications to create fun and interesting puzzles to solve. The only question is to what extent will they do so.

[Ludwitch]

This is a godsend! I always hated fluid mechanics and consequently everything connected to oil. Now I'm looking foward to trying out the new mechanic!

[Panzerknacker]

Let's not forget another downside of removing the fluid system and putting the new solution in. What is gonna happen if say a year or two after the release of 2.0 someone comes up with a brilliant way to program a more realistic and more deep/fun fluid system. This new system is also very fast, but obviously not as fast as the currently proposed system (which can be extremely fast because it removes and kind of simulation factor whatsoever). Obviously, the right thing to do would be to move to said new system because it makes the game simply better overal. BUT, people have already built their megabases and are sitting at the UPS limit, how are you going to ever get this to go through without a storm of angry players that will drop below playable on UPS on their megabase? And not only that, because the new system works different, they also might have to rebuilt part of their setups.

It's really hard to change this back once you do it, or even change it to something better. Especially changing to something that removes any simulation aspect and therefore is unrealistically fast in terms of computation might be a move that you will regret.

I understand the main reason for changing the fluid system is because it apparently can't keep up with certain high-end builds involving Quality-modules. I have not seen a good example of this yet, could you maybe show one? The example in the FFF does not count imo because it obviously tries to squeeze fluid from 8(!) fully upgraded/beaconed chem plants through a single pipeline while each of those plants could have it's own dedicated pipeline. I see no issues here yet, especially knowing that Quality-modules are optional. Even if you are going to use them, it will take a long time in a game until you can reach (and need to reach) this amount of fluid movement, by then you should have learned or should be prepared to learn the limits of pipelines and know to use a dedicated pipeline per production building and maybe move that production closer to the fluid's destination.

[mcdjfp]

A question came up when I read the description a good beginning.

This simplifies a feature of the base game. Is the base game going to receive any of the improvements/complexity substitutions that this allows, or will they all be reserved for the paid add-on?

[mmmPI]

In this case, it's a statement about the realism of a fluid model. Either the new and the old are extremely inaccurate and unrealistic.

I can hear your opinion about what you personnaly consider realistic, but i trust more the words of the devs who made and tested the system when they explain that it is a step back in the realism of the simulation of fluid.

[Nemoricus]

Considering that “realism” was in quotes in the post, I’m not sure the developers really thought it was more realistic.

The new system is a fairly large step back in terms of the "realism" of the fluid simulation in Factorio.

[Tertius]

It is quite easy to just completely break the system (try connect 30 steam turbines in a row. The first 20 have availability, and the last 5. 5 are just...skipped. This is understandable given the algorithm, but completely broken from a realism and gameplay point of view).

35 steam turbines in one row behind 20 heat exchangers (2 rows of 10 exchangers, with some intelligent pipe merging/splitting to handle the combined steam throughput of 2026/s) work perfectly, is tileable, and even completely without pumps. Full 200 MW.

That's actually about the limit you can go comfortably. Water supply is the bottleneck here, in terms of space. The 2.0 system is for the case you want to go beyond that, with more and bigger and faster, and still be comfortable.

Screenshot 2024-06-24 180912.png (259.36 KiB) Viewed 1460 times

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Copy blueprint

Complete tileable reactor setup:

Screenshot 2024-06-24 181515.png (114.66 KiB) Viewed 1455 times

[mmmPI]

Considering that “realism” was in quotes in the post, I’m not sure the developers really thought it was more realistic.

There is no quotes in the title of the conclusion Fun over Realism though

Edit : Send PM with rest of answer to avoid the exchange becoming toxic

[Panzerknacker]

Considering that “realism” was in quotes in the post, I’m not sure the developers really thought it was more realistic.

There is no quotes in the title of the conclusion Fun over Realism though

And realism with quotes is still more realism than no realism.

[Koub]

A question came up when I read the description a good beginning.

This simplifies a feature of the base game. Is the base game going to receive any of the improvements/complexity substitutions that this allows, or will they all be reserved for the paid add-on?

It's not explicitly stated in the FFF, but my intuition is that such a core mechanic will be included in the free 2.0 version (and therefore the paid expansion will also rely on it, as it builds upon the 2.0 version).

[GregoriusT]

Isn't the old System basically letting each individual pipe spread its contents to adjacent pipes? That may seem "realistic" to most people at first, but it actually is just a simplistic/atomic algorithm that has a LOT of issues.

It requires forcefully moving fluids a random direction in order to drain a pipe for example. since when is a fluid puddle moving in an empty Pipe realistic?

There is so much jank required to make the "simplistic" or "atomic" old System work, that it rightfully turned out that a better and actually simple new System needed to replace it, to fix the glaring Issues.

If the Devs come up with an even betterer newerer System to replace this new "every section is ONE tank"-System, then wonderful, that would surely still take any type of lag and throughput Issues into account without trying to hammer in some bad design choices.

But the old System definitely needs to go the way of the Dodo.


to make it short

old System: broken, please delete, will not be missed, gimme back my lost lifetime and UPS!

new System: good, quite a few neat and consistent mechanics in there people didnt notice because of prejudicial "hurr durr, teleport no fun, trains dead somehow" without even thinking about some of the new emerging gameplay. You literally just need to place the Pumps at storage tanks and some junctions as opposed to inline everywhere.

[Nemoricus]

Edit : Send PM with rest of answer to avoid the exchange becoming toxic

If you’re concerned about that I’d rather not be messaged, if you don’t mind.

[functional]

A question came up when I read the description a good beginning.

This simplifies a feature of the base game. Is the base game going to receive any of the improvements/complexity substitutions that this allows, or will they all be reserved for the paid add-on?

It's not explicitly stated in the FFF, but my intuition is that such a core mechanic will be included in the free 2.0 version (and therefore the paid expansion will also rely on it, as it builds upon the 2.0 version).

I think the question is "Since the new fluid system simplifies fluid networks significantly, and there may presumably be some new ways of adding complexity to fluid networks in SA, will vanilla also be introduced to such systems?"

For exampe, a simple reason to build two segments instead of one is to have a machine that needs fluid but cannot have too much or too little of it, thus you want pumps adding to the network whenever its below half. This is just something off the top of my head, but maybe SA will have something like this meanwhile the base game will not and instead will only have the simplified fluid network.

[mmmPI]

Edit : Send PM with rest of answer to avoid the exchange becoming toxic

If you’re concerned about that I’d rather not be messaged, if you don’t mind.

I don't mind not sending PM anymore, on the other hand i do mind you not sending PM when what you say is only adressed to me and add nothing at all to the current thread like your last post, i would have said that in PM , but you blocked me ^^

I realized it could actually be posted publicly (again ) the picture of the FFF where the title of the conclusion FUN OVER REALISM is visible without quotation mark :

onecanhardlylol.jpg (249.38 KiB) Viewed 1358 times

This is because you took the time to post the same quote as i did expressing a doubt just after me but without the picture in this post :

Considering that “realism” was in quotes in the post, I’m not sure the developers really thought it was more realistic.

The new system is a fairly large step back in terms of the "realism" of the fluid simulation in Factorio.

So i thought it was maybe what caused you to be unsure, and i wanted to help.