Desktop Tuesday: Hydrostatic Bulk Pressure Simulator


http://www.stonehearth.net/desktop-tuesday-hydrodstatic-bulk-pressure-simulator/

Other Announcements

Angelo and Max will do an engineering stream on Thursday at 6:00pm PST! This will be Max’s first stream so be sure to give him a warm welcome.

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Fantastic DT! It’s awesome to see how water has progressed. Looking forward to flooding my town when i’m ready to start over!

:smiling_imp:

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does this mean we’ll be seeing RAIN at some point? and if so will it involve this system? because of water, as it works in this game, fills in any space it can on the same level or lower than where the water pours in. would rain in fact cause puddles and fill in spaces too? also, any word on water collision mechanics with player made structures? right now water flat out ignores anything you’ve built yourself so if you’re mining out an ore deposited under water and you puncture the sides of a river or lake you should be able to plug that hole but you can’t. you also can’t build something over the space you would be digging out to prevent water from pouring in once you’ve cleared the deposited from that space.

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Couple questions for @sdee and @Albert about this DT;


like Chris w/ building, flipped a table on the original system

Don’t get me wrong, I love what’s going on with the water updates with how long it’s been broken, but I’m also curious to any updates on @not_owen_wilson’s progress on the building UX. Been a little while now, and we haven’t heard or seen much for a couple weeks.


Was the two-year-old bug of allowing water through certain blocks finally squished, or is that slowly becoming a “feature”, @Albert?


We’re very aware that all this work treats water purely from a simulationist point of view, rather than from a gameplay one. We look forward to getting to that work but I wouldn’t look for it until after Richard and Luke work through their revisions of number of higher priority gameplay systems.

Any chance, @sdee, you could elaborate on this a little more? Not quite understanding what you mean by it’s a simulation point vs a gameplay point, as well as I’m not familiar with what @Brackhar and Luke would be working on in regards. Would love to hear about it and what their plans are.

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I can. The short answer is that Albert is just fixing water so it flows as expected without causing major performance issues, bugs, or game crashes. He is not making any changes that should affect how we use water in the game. Meaning Hearthlings still can breath and build under water, water doesn’t affect items, farming doesn’t require water, etc.

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I checked with @albert this morning, and water currently does not yet interact in a reliable way with buildings.

Yes, completely correct! There are a number of issues with this version of water including the fact that it doesn’t interact properly with buildings, but we want to wait on Richard and Luke’s water gameplay design before we go nuts adding these things to the simulation in case it doesn’t actually matter.

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I wanted to give building a rest for all the people who felt frustrated that we had 5 updates on conversation all in a row. @not_owen_wilson, @jamiltron and @Sweet are all hard at work on multi-floor designs this week, so we’ll check back in with them soon, I imagine.

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Thanks for the answer. Hopefully it will change later when water system will take a more finished shape.
Meanwhile there is another question I’d like to raise in connection with the topic about possible machinery in Stonehearth.

In particular, what I’ve heard in this DT is “power of cubemitters for waterfalls depends on the pressure”. Does that mean that there exists, or will exist, a way for modders to access pressure values and/or stream speed for arbitrary points in the water volume?
What I have in mind is water wheels/mills, sailing boats and dams. All of these will need a way to access pressure/stream speed to determine their velocity/effectiveness (the dam will obviously also need water collision with artificially added voxels, i.e. buildings).

PS. Dat topic name.

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If you’re encountering bugs with water on the current unstable branch, we have a bunch more fixes queued up for the next release.

Also, regarding the bug with water interacting with buildings, that is on our list to fix, but won’t be part of the upcoming release.

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As someone who took a fluid mechanics class last year, I really appreciate the higher water & higher pressure causing faster streams that travel further. I’m not entirely sold on the way they look but at this point I’m just happy they work!

Also, now you’ve totally got to name some video or stream or blog post “Under Pressure”.

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Is there any chance you could go into what they’re working on, or is it just ideas again at this point?


More of a personal question, but when could we look forward to a bug fix update on unstable? I was hoping it was going to come out today to fix my one map, but I haven’t seen anything on Steam’s updater.


I’m going to second this. Personally, I think the cubiter needs to be more dense and full, but none the less, it’s a step in the right direction.

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Is there any chance you could go into what they’re working on, or is it just ideas again at this point?

Richard and Luke aren’t working on anything remotely near water at the moment. They’re looking at creating a solid economy on top of which we can build more systems. They’re starting with crafting, and trying to get all the objects in the game to mean something.

We tend not to post these in advance because if we miss the date, you’ll be sad. :wink:

Good feedback! Not gonna tweak this more though till Allie has had a lot more time to work on overall biome styles

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I really love this update but i have also a question about it.

It would be nice to have waterfalls in the game that don’t disappeared. But for that you have to insert a kind of endless water source that fills automatically the lake/river.

Will this also come to the game?

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Awesome to see “stable” waterfalls, and to know that we can control their flow reliably! Until we can get ways to move/spawn water we won’t be able to have permanent waterfalls, but we can at least use a couple of tricks to create some very long-lasting ones!

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An idea of mine :smiley: was water stones.
Two stones that can spawn and destroy water (maybe craftable with a lot of rescources) at the same speed, with a button to turn the function on or off.

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That gave me an idea. (I second it as well.)
Maybe you can let the density of the cubemitters be determined by the discharge (the volume of water that it spouts out every second). The game already knows about some physics related variables, so I think you can calculate the discharge with what is currently available. Just be sure to add a tweak-constant to the formula, for modding development purposes.

Also, white cubemitters at the base of the waterfall.

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Also second this. Fire cubemitters look fine but water cubemitters are currently kinda… off. I’m not sure what improvement they need, so I’m very interested in seeing how Allie envisions that.

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Yeah, as Stephanie alluded to, we’re not actively working on water design wise yet, since the core implementation is still a bit in flux. Once Albert gets the foundational implementation in a good place we have a planned conversation to start talking gameplay. Can’t really do much with water if you can’t move it around!

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