Skull's Musings on In-game Engines

[Skull132]

So I'm shooting the shit on Discord about ingame engines (the ones that power the station), and figured I'd toss some of the ideas here for notation's sake.

First, engine needs to be more dynamic. Both inherently and control wise.

Right now, from an automation engineer's point of view, the SM engine is very easy to control. There's no downside to overcooling it. So it's just a matter of generating a cooling force that's equal to or larger than the heat output of the rock. The system is completely static after that, minus the negligible decay in the output energy of the SM over time. This, however, is a slow enough process to be handled manually, if at all. All of this leads to an engine with surprisingly little depth to explore. It's literally a question how, "How will I generate a cooling force stronger than the heat I want out of the system?"

How could we improve upon this? The main idea would be to give negative effects to overcooling the engine. The simplest form of this would be, if you overcool it, the reaction slows down and you generate less energy. This would require that you start balancing the heat input of the system with the heat output of the system, this making you think more about the actual process and how to get exactly the desired effects you're looking for. The issue that's following straight on the tailcoats of this is the lack of control. Basically, there's not enough fine grain control over both the output heat that's generated (emitter is a very large static offset function generator) and the cooling input of the system. Sooo that'd have to be addressed. But once it's done, it'd be possible to explore a lot deeper of a system than what we currently have, since you'd need to start figuring out cooling-to-heat ratios.

To make the last point more fun, we could mess with the heat generation curve. At the moment it's likely somewhere between linear and an exponential continuous function. If we really wanted to have fun with it, we could make it a non-continuous function, or a highly complex function. This would permit us to create safe regions and not-so-safe regions. In the latter case, the heat generation would be very difficult to control and require a lot of work to stabilize. But in return, we could make it give off a lot more heat.

This brings me to the final point. Automation. If we make the system inherently dynamic (the heat output can change over time without anything touching it), then we should also have a way to automate the control over the cooling output of the SM. Otherwise, you'd need to monitor the engine CONSTANTLY. And that'd be a bitch. In reality, this is where you'd apply a standard P(ID) controller. PID control itself is also a very deep topic, and a lot of fun could be had with this for those who are interested, I feel. This also wouldn't be the first time a mechanic solely relying on a deeper understanding of maths would enter the game. For simple setups, we could make an autotuning algorithm that can handle stable regions of the SM. That way, if you're new or whatever, you can follow basic instructions to set it up. But it'd result in less than optimal power output. For those who are interested, give them a full PID controller to tune and enough measuring equipment to figure out what's going on.

There also exist two minor comments that I can't be arsed to figure out right now, as I'm tossing this idea into the void.

First is that power generation is largely irrelevant right now. Not only is the powernet demand very static, it's very easy to overmatch it. And no one wants to deal with an undermatched powernet either, because that'd mean some departments not having access to the tools they need, or whatever. I guess a basic way to address this would be to have a power generation level which keeps everything running, then the next one which also charges the SMES ontop of this, and then the final one be an overmatched powernet. The next ideas would be to generate downsides from overmatching the powernet, either immediately or over time. (Also make these issues appear elsewhere on the station, so you're not always stuck staring at the engine as you try to fix them.) And the last one, likely most difficult, would be to make the demand more dynamic.

Power usage of devices is completely unbalanced and nonsensical, is the other issue. The only way to really address this is similar to how we'd have to address the currency issue. Literally chase down EVERYTHING using power, put it into an excel sheet, categorize, and then normalize. BUT THAT'S A LOT OF WORK.

The second matter is that I'd like there to be more lore-specific nods from engine fuck-ups. The fact that the only thing the SM engine does is explode is a complete waste of potential. It's a magical rock tied to bluespace or something. And the only two exciting things it does is... Generate heat and explode? Come on...

This concludes my morning write-up. Please share with me your thoughts and opinions on the matter of making the in-game engine more FUN and DEEP.

[Meep]

An idea to increase power demand could be giving science something that requires a lot of power to use. That way science can bug engineering to beef up the engine to support their experiments. Other departments getting ways to use surplus power would be good too but the only other department I can think of who could have something is mining, some kind of giant drill that wires to the power network maybe? Again so engineering has a reason to whack up the power.

Something else to look into is doing something with the tesla engine. I don't know enough about the in depth mechanics though to really suggest something meaningful, only that you hardly see it used and it'd be nice to see it used instead of or along side the SM engine sometimes.

[Carver]

I miss the singularity. It was simple, extremely easy to learn, and demanded attention if it was sabotaged or at risk of sabotage.

The more complicated Engineering becomes on what it demands from an Engineer, the more Engineering becomes 'micromanage this annoying piece of shit crystal' and takes away from their time spent repairing and doing little construction projects in the second z-level. When something becomes a lot more complex, you have the heightened risk of shitters and players accustomed to set-up on other servers going 'DO IT MY WAY' and overclocking an engine in such a manner that the other (and especially newer) engineers have no fucking idea what to do when it inevitably spirals out of control and the shitter went to cryo.

As for balancing generation and consumption, I can't say much on that. Some things take a ridiculous amount of power for seemingly no reason (rechargers), some things take a ridiculous amount of power for fairly understandable reasons (holodeck). Realistically it should be a fairly static affair, seeing as we're not powering the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

[BurgerBB]

I've been playing on other servers. The supermatter engine on here is pretty shit for a multitude of reasons.

1. Modifications to the engine are seen as not-allowed.

2. The supermatter engine is easy to fuck up and hard to fix.

3. There are persistent repercussions if you fuck up the SM, even if you fix it. (I literally got a criminal record over a filter bug.)

 

On /tg/ and other servers you can go pretty wild with SM setups. It gets even more wild with additional gasses, such as tritium, and the addition of fusion. On Aurora, the features are lame and antagonists aren't allowed to fuck with the SM so it's just a bland feature you're forced to interact with every round.

[Carver]

59 minutes ago, BurgerBB said:

1. Modifications to the engine are seen as not-allowed.

2. The supermatter engine is easy to fuck up and hard to fix.

These are tied together for the reason I stated.

1 hour ago, Carver said:

When something becomes a lot more complex, you have the heightened risk of shitters and players accustomed to set-up on other servers going 'DO IT MY WAY' and overclocking an engine in such a manner that the other (and especially newer) engineers have no fucking idea what to do when it inevitably spirals out of control and the shitter went to cryo.

-

1 hour ago, BurgerBB said:

3. There are persistent repercussions if you fuck up the SM, even if you fix it. (I literally got a criminal record over a filter bug.)

On Aurora, the features are lame and antagonists aren't allowed to fuck with the SM so it's just a bland feature you're forced to interact with every round.

As for these two points, I agree there's a fairly significant problem there in the former punishing new players and the latter being a boring nanny rule.

[Chada1]

My input here would be while changing the engine to be more dynamic and adjustable as outlined in the primary post, we should also adjust policy a bit. Let me explain how policy currently is regarding how the engine works:

Currently, the design is that the Crew aren't to be alerted about the Engine delaminating until the last 30%, 

What I'm saying is we should actually want drama on our space station, and that maybe we should alert the Crew way higher than that, and have the Station begin acting eratic the closer it gets to 0. It could start with mostly harmless sparks on random on APCs/exposed wires from power overflow or the like, around 70, as well as being shown on Station Alert computers with a 'WARNING! WARNING!' underline. Starting at green to yellow to red, and when it hits the lower amount, have the entire Station red alert lights come on as well as the sparking and junk could intensify in many areas. Atmospheric stuff like this could go a long way I think to making the actual delamination feel more intense and meaningful, as if something actually catastrophic is going on, and anyone on the Station could be able to tell from how the Station is acting.

So p. much. Use actual visible effects on the Station to telegraph that it's delaminating, and make it more visible so people around the Station know it's happening, so panic is the default when the Engine begins delaminating.

P. much the delamination feels very isolated to the engine room when it should be effecting the entire powernet in malfunctions and stuff. So nothing that'd destroy the Aurora, but sparks and other visible cues that make it look like everything is being destroyed (Even if it's not for OOC reasons) could make it a lot more fun to roleplay and add a lot to a round.

Edited January 17, 2020 by Chada1