Issues and notes and stuff as I play

[JoeStrout]

OK, great stuff!  In no particular order...

• Yes, the camera is perspective rather than isometric (pretty necessary given the non-flat geometry of the habitats).  We'll take a fresh look at the default keys.

• I don't use a U.S. keyboard layout either... mine's Dvorak; out of curiosity, what's yours?

• Camera on street level is something we'd all like to have, but it is a BIG deal, because it requires very different art assets for pretty much everything.

• The bug with part vs. total cost is on our to-do list.  And the disappearing hab issue is already fixed (or so I believe).

• You seem to think there is a fixed grant — but there's not.  The granting agency will size your grant according to how many people they think your colony will attract in the orbit you're choosing to build it in.  But basically if you design a decent (and reasonably-sized) colony, you should be good; if you design a lousy colony, you'll have trouble affording it.

• The stability ratio is calculated for the entire station, but yes, it's not really taking into account the effect of counter-rotating structures.  This is something we hope to get out of that new physics engine we've been working on.  (It's complex!)

• We might be able to increase the number of people drawn, at least as an option (since it could drag down lower-end machines).  Eventually we want to have people sitting at tables, riding bikes/scooters/hoverboards, etc.  For now, we have walking from place to place.

• Weird about the resolution problem.  If you can pin it down, please let us know how!  (Perhaps in a separate thread.)

• Subscribing (with email notifications) does do something: it sends you email when the thread is updated.  I haven't tried the other subscription options.  We are not in the business of writing forum software, and I'll thank you not to tempt me (because believe me, I've been tempted from time to time!).  MyBB sucks less than most, but it's certainly not perfect.

[Permeable Ceiling]

(04-08-2017, 04:53 PM)JoeStrout Wrote: OK, great stuff!  In no particular order...

Camera: What I found useful was assigning 2 and 3 as keys for tilting. Thereby you have most of the camera keys in one location (WASD, Q/E for left/right turn, 2/3 for tilt up/down). I am kind of missing keys that’d allow me to move up and down (along the Y axis) in Design mode. For now I accomplish this by zooming out and moving the station.
Stability: You have my full sympathy with figuring this out. I totally understand it’s difficult to accomplish. Take your time and do it right.
Disappearing hab: Zoom out till the the POV is noticeably outside the herb, tilt camera up/down. Hab disappears across edge of screen.
Keyboard: I’m using QWERTZ (german, Mac), which places symbols and such differently due to a couple more letter (Umlauts). Brackets are entered with SHIFT+8/9, ALT+5/6, ALT+8/9.
Forum: Not to tempt you, but the forums I usually frequent have a button/link that lets one view their subscribed threads. A quick google search revealed its MyBB version is in the User CP (here’s a link to one’s own subscribed threads). It’s useful when dealing with many threads one likes to have an eye on, but at the same time doesn’t want their inbox clogged. So for what it’s worth, I’m satisfied with having found that link *shoves it into bookmarks*
People count: Please, I’d rather you deal with the other issues first before dealing with cosmetics

I think I already mentioned the lack of incentive for progression? It’s partially and somewhat unusually integrated in the projects/tech tree, which I am rather impressed by. That whole thing is a unique approach, at least by my experience. 

A… well, I don’t know how to describe it. I’d call it issue, except maybe it’s a feature? Regardless, I’ll paint you a picture:
I have a small LEO colony. Cylinder, 70m radius, 3.5 rpm or something like that. Makes some inhabitants a bit woozy, but that’s fine with me. What gives me fits is the wildly fluctuating CO2. It goes from 0.000% to 1.243% in the span of a day, and the grass consequently browns regularly (which the population doesn’t like). So… what do? Another atmoreg doesn’t help. 

Incidentally, the information for buildings is, well, too sparse in my opinion. For instance, I don’t know how much volume one atmoreg can reliably provide with or scrub of CO2. 

[Permeable Ceiling]

Weird. There were a couple low density houses built in the commercial zones.

And how come statues decrease value and increase crime rate?

PS: I have NEA expedition, but no new orbit available. If that requires another propulsion progression, it isn’t communicated well.

[JoeStrout]

The main incentive for progression is to get to the outer solar system, where there are some really beautiful places to build. And yes, you do that through the project tree.

And you're right, it sounds like NEA Expedition should provide a new orbit, but it does not. It does lead to some very useful other projects, though (e.g. NEA Mining, which substantially reduces costs throughout cislunar space). I'll look into clarifying that.

The zone check is only done at the center of the lot, so you'll occasionally get a building overlapping another zone substantially. If it's more than that (i.e. if you have houses in the middle of a commercial zone), then that'd be a bug I haven't seen before.

As for your CO2-fluctuating hab... that's strange indeed. I've never seen that, but then you have an unusually small hab there; perhaps you've found something like a resonant frequency in the CO2 simulation! If I could trouble you to send me the colony file, you'll find it (on Mac) in ~/Library/Application Support/HighFrontier/Games/<game-name>/Colonies. And I think you already have my email address.

[Permeable Ceiling]

So I’ve been thinking.

So far I’m still struggling with the incentive system. I know, getting a colony up to that much population and such is a nice incentive, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way for, well, government grants. The government gives you money to build a space colony, something in the range of billions. At my first LEO colony, I’d return the investment within a century. That is… suboptimal. I know, grant ≠ loan, but still, the government wants to have some, well return money for their investment beyond the propaganda. Which only counts for so much when space colonies are as feasible as the game portrays.

Another way would be disincentives, or goals.
Take the first colony, in LEO. You’re free to design it however you like, within reason, but limited to, say, 2B $ by the grant.
There’s an annual income, but why not have the grant tied to raising the income to amount x in time y? You’d obviously need to see the time you’ve spent with a colony so far, i.e. the colony is in her fifth year and now makes regularly 5M $/a, from the -2M $ in the first and 1M $ in the second. Once a colony is stable, you’re offered to hand management over to an outside agency (Governmental Colony Authority or something) for a more sizeable grant for your next colony. If you don’t manage the 5by5 (depending on colony size, obviously), you’re offered to take over a stock LEO colony. Harder to f*** up, since it’s a proven design and all.

Issues:

• And, I might be wrong, but… is the free design mode gone? I think it was in the demo, where you could design with all tech available? It’d allow one to make a colony one wishes for, as a goal, and then play the career mode with the —found it. Weird to have that as a separate game file, but okay.
• Playing with designs… don’t nuclear and fusion power require cooling? I just made a 1000x1000 cylinder at triton and have 16 GW of power. Comfy 23 degree inside.
• Also, shouldn’t Closed Ecology provide a new building? Since it apparently doesn’t. Or was this meant as one of the automated buildings built by zoning? 
• The Shielded Suit text is incomplete ("Shielding a space colony is one thing" is all that’s there.)
• Gas Gun Launcher… seems really far fetched as an early technology. I’d expect an EM launch tube on the moon far earlier than the equivalent on Earth.
• Statues increase crime rates? Are they, like, Gargoyle Gangsters?
• I think I had a colony with crime rates soaring adjacent to a police station. Yeah, here, at Phoenix Lane, there’s a police station not far. Two water treatment plants would fit between the houses and the station.
• Trees and paths can be placed everywhere, even in/through buildings. Is the reverse also true? Would a zone building be built in a forest, so to speak?
• A stack of toruses has the same windowed lighting conditions despite the torus mirrors being in each other’s way. Unless it’s assumed the primary mirror reflecting light down the axis is curved in such a way to facilitate lighting all toruses? Doubtful, considering the number of toruses that can be stacked this way (I checked with a dozen, the furthest had 100% lighting)
  

Suggestions:

• In Manage, provide an overview of a colony. Selecting (but not loading) a file allows one to see that colony’s statistic tab. Ideally, also the position (i.e. orbit).
• Specialised Colonies, which is probable a whole barrel of suggestions, since it’d require specialised modules and the colony part would be living and recreational. To provide an example: 
  • Base for construction and maintenance of beamed solar power satellites (i.e. the other end of the rectenna). Requires NEA Retrieval (resources) and Space Solar Power. 
  • Spaceship Drydock, requires NEA Retrieval, Ion Drive / Nuclear Rocketry, Magnetic Shield / Shielded Suit
    
• Have more interaction between your (and others’) colonies. For instance, you can build a Rectenna for power, but having a station that builds and maintains SSP lowers power cost (since it’s an in-house power provider). (I’ve never built a rectenna, I assume power beaming is reflected in higher maintenance cost or something.) Another flavour would be Squawker texts mentioning people moving from a previous colony to a new one, or vice versa
• More data on what a building does, in gaming terms. Do I need a government building? I don’t know. Maybe it lowers maintenance or crime rate, not a clue. When would I need a dehumidifier? *shrugs* This’d fit in the hover text before building them.
• Sending a police cruiser to a high crime area lowers crime rate for a set amount of time, after which it increases again. Maybe the same for fire fighters (IRL translates to being taught best practice, fire code checks, and evacuation exercises)
  

PS:
Is there a way to show the footprint of a building? I mean, I need paths for zone buildings to be built next to, and I like to know how close to the buildings I can build these paths, which is especially tricky with wide farms or other buildings with unregular outlines.

[JoeStrout]

More great stuff, as always! Thanks very much for the time you spend typing these things up.

The point of the government grant is really just to encourage good design — before that, people would build completely nonviable designs (having forgotten to spin their colony, or check the temperature, or some such), and then be baffled about why nobody was moving in. Now, if your design is nonviable, you probably can't build it at all; and the better it is, the bigger the grant you get (or that's the idea, anyway).

Yes, fission and fusion generate a lot of heat. If your colony was comfy anyway, then you're lucky, it must have plenty of passive cooling (perhaps due to that crazy skinny-but-wide torus design you showed in the other thread ).

Yes, Closed Ecology should provide a new building. I'll check on that, and also the cut-off text on Shielded Suit.

On the Gas Gun Launcher: at a space conference last fall, I spent lunch with a guy who thinks he could build one today if he can get the funding. This was a real physicist, not some guy off the street, and he made a pretty good case.

Crime, fire, and land value calculations have been substantially revised for the next version, so let's revisit those after that.

Yes, there is (alas) no collision checking among trees, paths, and buildings. This is often quite convenient: you can plant trees right next to buildings, paths that go right up to the door, etc. But it also means you can do silly things, like run paths right through buildings etc.

And you're right, we're not actually ray-tracing the light paths, though we do try to make sure each module has a view of a mirror pointed the right way. I'll see if we can make that more robust, as you've clearly found an exploit!

Good ideas in your suggestions above. Some of these might make good opportunities for mods — we have some mod support (e.g. custom buildings) now, and would like to expand this to allow custom components, specialized colony types, etc. If anybody has an interest in making High Frontier mods, do let me know!

[Permeable Ceiling]

(04-12-2017, 11:54 AM)JoeStrout Wrote: Yes, fission and fusion generate a lot of heat.  If your colony was comfy anyway, then you're lucky, it must have plenty of passive cooling (perhaps due to that crazy skinny-but-wide torus design you showed in the other thread ).

On the Gas Gun Launcher: at a space conference last fall, I spent lunch with a guy who thinks he could build one today if he can get the funding.  This was a real physicist, not some guy off the street, and he made a pretty good case.

Yes, there is (alas) no collision checking among trees, paths, and buildings.  This is often quite convenient: you can plant trees right next to buildings, paths that go right up to the door, etc.  But it also means you can do silly things, like run paths right through buildings etc.

And you're right, we're not actually ray-tracing the light paths, though we do try to make sure each module has a view of a mirror pointed the right way.  I'll see if we can make that more robust, as you've clearly found an exploit!

• Heat: 
  • Well, it’s strange. The temperature range for the described Neptune colony goes from -100° to 1200° C (min power vs max power draw). Funny thing is, once I had enough power to raise the temperature to the prescribed 23°C, adding more power did nothing. No increase in colony temperature. Only the max temperature (as given by the help window) increased. Thing is, so far I’ve always had a decent surplus of power available (enough to heat a colony to 100°C, give or take), but is there actually a reason to? I don’t know. For hypothetical industrial colonies there’d be additional need, for melting and welding and such, sure, but that’s not in the scope of the current game version.
  • My point is, the colony should require radiators when using fusion/fission, since a notable fraction of the generated power is inevitably lost as heat. So far I’ve never been in a position to actually need any radiators. So something’s off here.
    
• Gas Gun Launcher: I never doubted its technological feasibility, but as an economic technology? That’s where I need some serious convincing. It’d be, without a doubt, in the three digit billion range with current tech. Doable, but boy is it expensive.
• Does the autonomous building creation employ collision check? I think so (I’ve never seen buildings being built in a copse. I think.).
• What about buildings being built in water? Because that’s a thing, especially since I usually build roads along the shore of the lakes. Incidentally, bridges? Those’d be nice.
• I don’t think you’d need to accurately ray-trace, since the basic premise of mirrors already assumes an alignment of the colony rotational axis being perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic (parallel to solar system’s north-south). ‘Just’ check superposability with anything between primary mirror and habitat mirror. (I’m not a programmer, and still I know that ‘just do x’ is more often than not incredibly complicated)
• Incidentally, is the ratio of area of habitat mirror by surface area of habitat taken into account to calculate the lighting percentage? I noted you can’t get higher than 100% lighting, which is fine for now. I assume 100% lighting equals equatorial lighting conditions on Earth? Anyway my point is, by adjusting the distance of the habitat mirror from the axis (mirror radius), one can alter the amount of light reflected into the torus. Smaller radius = less light. At cislunar space this slightly lower (mirror radius < habitat radius → mirror area < habitat surface) ratio translates well to Earth ecologies, but farther out the actual amount of light available by mirrors would be less than stellar. Deeper in system on the other hand you’d like to avoid too much light, so less mirrors would be presumably good. Though less reflective mirror’s would work just as well to avoid force-tanning the inhabitants.
• Unrelated, but are orbit-related wear and tear included in the colony’s maintenance costs? LEO and HEO would have lots of space debris, HEO and out have higher rate of radiation damage (noteworthy for solar panels and rectenna and other sensible equipment), Jupiter has stupid large radiation damage, Saturn has rings (and debris), and so forth.
  

Suggestion:

• Space Debris Removal: New Component
  Early space exploration littered LEO and HEO with debris, from small screws to giant rocket boosters. By using laser we can change the orbits of this dangerous littering to our colony and let it burn up in the atmosphere.Decreases Maintenance cost for LEO and HEO colonies at expense of notable power requirements.
  

[Permeable Ceiling]

Damn. I forgot to add lighting. Now my habitat cylinder is dark. I’ve no idea how to remedy that. Do the street lamps actually help, or are they cosmetic? And shouldn’t pretty much every plant die, more or less? A warning would’ve been nice, something like “Not all your habitats are properly lit. Continue building? Apply for Grant / Back to the Drawing Board”

[JoeStrout]

Heh. People can (and will) live in a dark colony, but yes, they're not super-happy about it, and the street lamps are mostly cosmetic. Yes, your grass and trees should die.

Building a dark colony is kind of the High Frontier equivalent of building an explody rocket in KSP... yes, you'll probably want to delete (or overwrite) it with a fixed design.

Note that I'm not ignoring all your other excellent suggestions, either. There are just too many to respond to individually! But we're making lists and working our way steadily through them over here. Stay tuned for updates.

[JoeStrout]

No, OK, you have real questions here that need answers.  

(04-12-2017, 02:49 PM)Permeable Ceiling Wrote: Thing is, so far I’ve always had a decent surplus of power available (enough to heat a colony to 100°C, give or take), but is there actually a reason to?

No.  As long as you've got enough power to raise the temperature to 23°C, you're good.

Quote:My point is, the colony should require radiators when using fusion/fission, since a notable fraction of the generated power is inevitably lost as heat. So far I’ve never been in a position to actually need any radiators. So something’s off here.

That's surprising; I often need rather large ones.  Again I suspect it's the unusually high surface-area-to-volume ratio of your colonies.  Also consider how much insulation (shielding and soil) you have.  With any decent sized colony with a reasonable amount of shielding and/or soil, cooling is a much bigger problem than heating.

Quote:Does the autonomous building creation employ collision check? I think so (I’ve never seen buildings being built in a copse. I think.).

It's the same collision check you get when you place buildings manually, which is basically just a radius... I don't think that it includes trees, but I could be wrong (it's been a while since I looked at that code).

Quote:What about buildings being built in water? Because that’s a thing, especially since I usually build roads along the shore of the lakes.

Indeed.  It's on the to-do list.  Agreed about the bridges too.

Quote:Incidentally, is the ratio of area of habitat mirror by surface area of habitat taken into account to calculate the lighting percentage?

Sort of. It's actually the overlap between the mirror radius range, and the window radius range. So yes, you can easily get less than 100% lighting, though there is no advantage in doing so. (Your residents will never bake from lighting — we assume the window tint or mirror reflectivity is adjusted if it's too high.) Distance of the mirror from the hab actually makes no difference; the sun's rays are essentially parallel.

However, the window lighting predates the outer solar system orbits... and it looks like we're not actually taking distance from the sun into account. Flat mirrors and windows wouldn't be very helpful out in the black. (Parabolic mirrors would solve this, but I think that's beyond scope, at least for now.) Note that it does take into account occlusion — try building a window-lit colony in low Earth orbit sometime, for a bit of fun.

Quote:Unrelated, but are orbit-related wear and tear included in the colony’s maintenance costs? LEO and HEO would have lots of space debris, HEO and out have higher rate of radiation damage (noteworthy for solar panels and rectenna and other sensible equipment), Jupiter has stupid large radiation damage, Saturn has rings (and debris), and so forth.

No. Radiation is reflected in the radiation levels in the colony, but not in maintenance costs. Nor is there any model of orbital debris. That's an interesting idea (along with the debris removal component).

Thanks, as always!