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Topics - Trylobyte

#1
This may be a vanilla game issue since I don't have any mods that affect temperature calculations (that I know of) but the item that triggered the problem is in a mod so I put it here.

Full mod list is here if it's needed:  https://git.io/fxHo1

So, here's what happened:
I have an RF Solar Shield in a 9x9 indoor room, because the shield shorts out if it gets wet.  This item protects me from solar flares when they activate, but consumes an insane amount of power and generates an insane amount of heat when active.  As such, I have one wall that is nothing but vents (except for one door) leading to a 2x9 enclosed outdoor space; I set it up in this janky way because raiders love to destroy vents and coolers and such to get inside and I wanted to deny them that.  A solar flare happened and the room with the shield immediately began fluctuating between 60-100 degrees as the vents dispersed the hot air to the outdoor enclosure, which in turn sent it outside, just like I'd designed it to do. 

For the sake of visuals, here's the setup.  X is a wall, V is a vent, D is a door, S is the Solar Shield:
XXXXXXXXXXX
X  No Roof    X
X                 X
XVVVVDVVVVX
XSS             X
XSS             X
X                 X
X                 X
X     Roof      X
X                 X
X                 X
X                 X
X                 X
XXXXXDXXXXX

This was still too hot for my tastes, so I decided to remove the door in the vent wall to give it some extra space to vent.  Removing the door between the two rooms sent the temperature flying over 300!  I think this happened because removing the door turned the setup from two rooms, one entirely indoors and one entirely outdoors, to one single room that was mostly indoors.  This affected the heat distribution calculation, causing much more heat to stay inside despite the fact that the setup as a whole had the exact amount of exposure to the outside (18 tiles) as it always had.

This shouldn't happen.  What I would have expected would be for the initial setup to either have the same temperature (due to the enclosure not being large enough to vent that much heat) or for the interior room to immediately heat up to 300 (due to the heat buildup in the room exceeding the vents' ability to get rid of it).  In either case, removing the door between the two areas should not have made the situation worse.

I can see this being a fringe case not really worthy of dev time or attention, but I thought I'd mention it anyway!
#2
Mod bugs / [A17] The (Half)Dollar Store Traders
June 28, 2017, 10:20:08 PM
Important Mods:  Mad Skills, EPoE, Glitter Tech

Problem:  I have managed to get a colonist up to Social 20 and have fully augmented them to a ludicrous degree with the best available cybernetic and bionics in every slot.  It was a long project!  Now that I've done it, however, this character's Negotiation bonus has apparently become so high (+/- 127%) that the prices overflow and traders buy and sell almost everything for half a silver.
#3
Ideas / 'Innocent' Prisoner Died
June 22, 2017, 09:33:12 AM
As I've started playing more on bigger maps I've noticed a bit of a problem.  Sometimes when I try to capture a prisoner the colonist who's capturing them up gets distracted or just doesn't make it in time and the prisoner bleeds out.  The problem is, if I've already captured them this results in a colony-wide -5 for several days because they're 'innocent.'  That'll teach me to try and be a nice guy, I guess.

Raiders should be considered guilty for 24-36 hours after they arrive on the map whether or not they successfully damage a colonist.  Everyone knows why they're there, just because they failed to do it doesn't make them innocent.
#4
I noticed this on my last toxic fallout and confirmed it without any mods enabled, but colonists will path through off-limits areas to get to allowed areas if they see no other way to get between them.  While this can happen intentionally if you set two allowed areas that have no route between them it can also happen if their route becomes blocked, such as by a pawn using a door when another pawn wants to go through it, so they will instead run out another door and through forbidden areas to get where they want to go.  This is generally only mildly annoying (such as during toxic fallout) but I've lost a few colonists who have decided to path along the outside of a defensive wall instead of the inside because I forgot to forbid a door somewhere.
#5
Ideas / Mining AI...
June 16, 2017, 07:31:09 AM
I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but the working AI for mining probably needs to be redone.

Case in point.  I designated some steel near the edge of the map to be mined.  My two miners woke up and went off to mine.  They got halfway to the steel before they got hungry, turned around, went back to base, ate, and began their trek back.  As they arrived the crops finished growing, so they arrived and didn't even take a swing before turning around to go help with the harvest (as they were both growers too).  Then they went back, swung their picks twice, got in a social fight, and went to bed to heal for the rest of the day.  They managed to waste an entire day and accomplished no mining.  Add to this the fact the pathfinding likes to take them along very slow paths (through trees/rubble they could walk around) and it's not uncommon for my miners to spend most of their mining time not actually mining.

As it is now, mining is a chore to do, with the suffering increasing as the distance the resource is from your base also increases.  Mining doesn't seem to work like most other tasks do, where they will at least complete one action cycle before they stop to do something else.  Instead there are myriad chances for interruption that can lead to absolutely no work getting done unless they're micromanaged.  I'd like to see Mining use something more like the Research AI where they will start doing it then keep doing it for a while, ignoring other work for at least an hour or two.
#6
As it is now, factions are generated when the world is created - The factions you get are the factions you get.  What I'd like to see is for world generation to finish, then a second menu pops up allowing you to customize what factions are present and what their relations are before it populates the world with them.  Maybe I want a world of nothing but tribals.  Maybe I'm a masochist and want a world of nothing but permanently hostile pirates.  Maybe I want an Outlander faction that's actually hostile to me without me declaring war on them.  Maybe I don't want any factions at all for a truly lonesome experience.  Maybe I have mods installed that add new factions and I'd like to add a bunch of those.  Whatever the case may be, I think this would be a nice addition to the core game to add a second layer to planet creation.
#7
Bugs / [A17] Faction Loss During Raids
May 29, 2017, 11:20:44 PM
So, something odd that I've noticed...

If a faction raids me I can kill or capture them, which is expected.  This doesn't seem to have any impact on my faction relation with them.  However if a tribal raider dies because of a mechanoid raid or a manhunter pack (or some other cause of death that is not another faction) then I will lose faction relation with the raiding tribe as if they were a friendly visiting my colony rather than a raider attacking it.  Though I first noticed this in a game with mods I replicated it without mods.
#8
Ideas / Stop! (Drop and Roll optional)
May 28, 2017, 04:10:48 PM
A simple suggestion, but a very useful one.  When a pawn catches fire they will run all over the place.  Not only does this often make them run out in front of hostile gunfire but it also means that any other pawn you have can't catch them to put the fire out due to their erratic movement and constant running.  Pawns who are on fire should certainly flail around a bit but they should eventually stop moving so they can either put the fire out themselves or let someone else do it.  Perhaps they can even shed burning clothing items as they run, putting the fire on them out (people don't burn nearly as well as their clothes) and stopping their panicky flailing.

As it is, extinguishing a flaming pawn seems to be as much luck as anything.  Some pawns will run around all day while burning to death, never making any effort to put themselves out and actively denying their allies' attempts to help them.  Most people are smarter than that and our pawns should be too.
#9
General Discussion / New Manhunter Packs
May 27, 2017, 07:08:40 PM
With A17 it now seems that manhunter packs can include any animal...  literally any animal.  I play a custom scenario with frequent repeating manhunter packs and it's been amusing to see everything from enormous hordes of squirrels (surprisingly hard to deal with since they wash over everything like a furry tsunami) to attacks by polar bears in the rainforest.  Anyone else seen any interesting manhunter packs?  Anyone seen a manhunter thrumbo pack yet?
#10
This is a bug that requires some doing to notice, so I'm not sure if it's a bug or an exploit strategy.  I posted it here because I haven't found a way to exploit it yet.

Disclaimer:  I did have one mod active, EdB Prepare Carefully.  This mod was used to set up the situation for rapid testing and I am convinced it has no impact on the bug.

Two identical 5x5 rooms were built (Steel walls, no floor, roof).  A heater was placed in the middle of one room and turned up to an absurdly high temperature, a cooler was placed on the wall of the second (heated side facing the inside) and set to an absurdly cool temperature, to ensure they would both max out.

The cooler did not work right away.  Coolers will not try to cool the outside.  However, a quick bit of testing later, and it was learned coolers will try to cool a room with a partial roof (so long as the room is mostly roofed) and held-open doors, effectively making it the outside.

With the test so arranged, it was observed that the waste heat of a cooler could heat a room better than a dedicated heater by about 10-25%.  It will also heat up the room significantly faster.  This runs counter to expectations, which would be that a dedicated heater is a better heater than an air conditioner.

Edit:  To give context to the testing below, the outside temperature was about 10 C for this test.
#11
Putting this here because I do have mods installed, even if none of them seem relevant to the problem.

I had an NPC bulk trader arrive at my colony.  As soon as the caravan arrived at my base, the trader (and only the trader) fell asleep on the floor, where he remained for the entire day.  When he woke up the caravan left immediately, leaving me no time to interact with the caravan in any way.
#12
General Discussion / Colonists Wasting Construction Time
November 13, 2016, 02:55:15 PM
This is a hard topic to sum up in the title!  Anyway.  I'm hoping someone can help me figure out how to make sure my colonists stop wasting time while building large constructions.

Here's the specifics.  I like geothermal power and I play on large maps.  In order to keep my power cables safe I put floors over and around them so they can't burn in the many, many brushfires that dominate forest maps.  There's just one problem - Trees.  Trees will grind the construction project to a halt because of the painfully stupid way colonists deal with them.  Here's what I see:

1)  Colonists build everything except the blueprints underneath trees first without problem.
2)  Colonist A brings up enough bricks for one tile, places it, then goes to a single nearby tree, cuts it down, and leaves.
3)  Colonist B is now summoned to build the one tile Colonist A placed.
4)  Colonist C sees the wood from the tree Colonist A cut down and goes to haul it.
5)  Colonist D sees there is a tile he can build where Colonist A cut the tree down, so he grabs materials for that one tile and heads up to build it.
6)  Colonist D repeats Colonist A's actions and the cycle begins anew.

So now we have anywhere from 4 to 6+ colonists (distance depending) tied up with building this thing per tile because no one colonist will cut down the trees all at once unless manually ordered to over and over (and even then, the builders will still screw that up by reserving trees from across the map).  It would be nice if there were a way around this without having to manually designate the whole area for plant-cutting before putting down the construction (and watching as saplings sprout up while building is underway, causing the same problem).

Any suggestions or tips?
#13
Ideas / Insulated Walls
November 13, 2016, 09:33:48 AM
A simple enough idea, and one that could probably even be done with a mod.  Insulated walls would come as an Industrial-level research project.  They would have a significantly reduced thermal transfer rate but would cost more (perhaps requiring some amount of plasteel) and take longer to build than regular walls.  This would provide a mid to late-game solution to heating and cooling issues without putting large numbers of heaters and coolers everywhere.  And hey, we insulate houses in real life, why not in the far future of Rimworld?