Function Part Discussion

This thread will be used for discussing the uses of function parts. Note that the thread is not about adding new function parts, but to rather give the current ones an actual use. If you would like to join the discussion about adding new function parts, go to this thread.

Here are all of the function parts. They are divided into categories.

"Fully developed" function parts are the ones whose use has been decided and if you have noticed anything that may seem to you as incorrect or you would like to change it, please send me a private message.

"Needs revising" function parts are the ones that have a developed concept, but may be a bit unfinished and have holes in them. If a "needs revising" function part is currently being discussed, you can post about it here, on the thread. If it is, however, no longer being discussed, send me a private message about it. A "needs revising" function part will become "fully developed" once we all agree that the concept is fully developed, it'll be moved to the fully developed category.


Concept fully developed

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Concept developed, but needs revising

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Currently being discussed: None

Other function parts

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Please post any ideas you have. Your contribution will be greatly appreciated.

I'm going to start of with an example. The first and probably most important FP is fire.

Fire can be placed on any flamable FP's, e.g. Handles, flamable material piles, etc. When taken out of the FP slot in the Tech Editor, fire wouldn't be placable until it comes in contact with a flamable material. Once the fire reaches a flamable item and is placed, it will automatically get the same shape and size of the flamable item unless something is preventing it from doing so. Flamable materials would be seperated in to flamable(wooden objects) and highly flamable(torch). The difference between these two is that if a fire is placed on a flamable object, it will not automatically spread onto neighboring flamable objects unless the player says so, however, it will automatically spread onto highly flamable items. This way, you can make a torch with a handle without having to worry about the fire spreading onto the handle. The fires on the tech objects would burn on forever, take into account that the player has enough required resources to have it burn on forever.

We should discuss fire first, but if you have an idea about something more advanced in the FP list post that too.

I have moved fire to the "discussion in progress" category.

Sorry for the delayed reply.

I dont think we need to take that approach. Rather, I think all compounds should have a Boolean property of Combustible/flammable, true or false. Using this, amd some other factors like the number of fires or forges or etc. in the Tech Object, we determine the likelihood of that building catching fire.

It will be hard to have dynamic fire spreading, so I wouldnt go into that.

Also, I think it would just be a pain and too much micro if the player had to supply fuel constantly for every fire. I think a simpler approach would be that every time the FP in question, be it a fire or a forge or a smithy, undergoes a process, in also intakes fuel at that point, instead of at a constant rate. We would also have to keep fuel consumption low for these FPs, since once they all add up they will be a big strain on any economy.


For the next FP, rename it to Stockpile. Congratulations on finding that from earlier on in this thread! Or you came up with it by coincidence, but Ill give you the credit anyways.

Basically, Stockpiles allow the building to store compounds. All transactions of compounds are in mass, usually tons. However, each compound has Density as one of their properties, so the volume of any X mass of a Y compound can be calculated. This will be important because the storage capacity of buildings is in volume, probably m^3. Whenthe player drags the Stockpile FP onto the building area in the Tech Editor, the volume of the box they draw is the volume of storage capacity the Stockpile will provide.

So, to add onto my previous post, a fire takes up a minimum space of
1x1x1 (meters)
It enables the conversion of foods from their raw states to cooked states. In other words, compounds tagged as "food" converted from their raw form to their cooked form. Actually, know that I think about it, should we divide compounds tagged as "food" into raw and cooked? It seems like adding a whole lot of unneccesary compounds into the mix. Also, many species might eat thing that we wouldnt consider eating, so we would have to add cooked counterparts to many extra compounds just to cover for that. It doesnt seem like a pretty solution.

However, I can't think of another way to deal with the problem. Should the compound that is produced from the fire not be a separate compound, but just the same compound with a special tag? That sounds very vague. Can anyone think of a solution to this?

Edit: Here is the list of foods I got in the Crash Couse Economics thread, in case anyone needed it.
Meat
Bone
Fungus
Animal Fluid
Plant Fluid
Wood
Vegetable
Grain
Fruit

I know that separating flamable materials into low-flamable and high-flamable is kind of unneccessary. I was thinking about something, an exception, while I was writing that, but I figure it won't be that common and wouldn't pose such a problem.

I never said there should be dynamic fire spread. I said that the fire would automatically get the width, height and length of the FP. If buildings caught fire during their existence on the players planet, a fire, the width, height and length of the TO would spawn on the TO.

Fuel consumption would only be used when the TO is in question, you're right, and every time the player creates a new TO, the game will tell him how much resources does it consume upon use.

I agree with you on the stockpiles and I'll put what you said in the description.

Meat would be cookable. All TO's that can be used to cook food will have a meter- how much food can they convert into cooked in one TimeOfThrive (I'm just going to call it like that since I don't know what time scale will be used). Raw meat from the storage of the SC would be taken and converted, and cooked food would give more food points.

About the list of foods: I think it's good, but fruits, vegetables and grain should be simply merged into plant matter.

I have some more ideas about fire, I shall post them in my next post.

Fire could also be used to smelt certain ores and can be used to convert oil and coal into energy. It would also not be placable in low oxygen environments (e.g. tubes, I'm adding that as a FP). It can convert sand into glass, clay into ceramics and bricks, wood into charcoal (under certain conditions).

Sorry for the short post, but it was mostly about the uses of fire.

What do you think?

It would be better if fire consumed oxygen, instead of needing it but not consuming it. Ir the fire is in the open on a oxygen-rich atmosfere, it would just draw the required oxygen from the planet's athmosfere's stockpile.

In order to get energy (anything other than heat) from fire, you will need aditional FP, that is, a steam turbine.

The amount of oxygen fire consumes would be very,very small. It would take gigantic amounts of fire for it to actually make a difference in the atmosphere. The game would just scan if there is enough percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. If there is enough oxygen, then the TO would work properly, if not, than well, it won't.

Also, we already have the steam engine on the FP list. What I was saying was that the fire would have to be placed in a certain part of the steam/biofuel engine to make it actually function.

I have thought of a new use for fire too.

If a fire is placed on a TO which has been chosen to be a weapon (this would only work for flamable projectiles) than the projectile would do + a certain amount of damage if it is used against enemy troops (like arrows), and if it is used for damaging buildings, than the projectile would have a medium chance of setting the building on fire.

Do you like the idea? This has been used a lot in the past.

Also, we have developed a lot more concept than I thought we would for fire in such a short time. Do you agree to move it to the "Function developed, but needs revising" category?

Biofuel engine? How is that diferent from a steam engine?

Yes, you need a big amout of fire (or anything similar) to change an athmosfere. But there are diferent places where fire can take place on, and some of them need to keep track of oxygen (anything in space). Plus, it's somewhat similar to greenhouse effect, you need huge amounts of gasses to affect it, yet we are affecting it. Plus, it barely takese a few lines of code to keep track of it.

Just posting this to say that I will reply soon, I have just been busy replying to a bunch of other posts. I will edit this to add in what I want to say.

Edit:

Okay, finally...

Sorry for deviating from the current discussion, but this is from earlier on in the thread.

Ahh, auto fire spread. That would work much better, but I cannot imagine what it would be used for. I think it would be simpler to just keep it as a self contained entity. Well, now that I think of it, things like big bonfires would need it. I dont know, what do you guys think. Would it be easily coded?

The issue was, however, of how to distinguish between cooked and raw "food" compounds.

On the contrary, I think grains, vegetables, and fruits are different enough to be separate. However, I was thinking of renaming vegetables to Plant Matter, as in any part of the plant that isnt hard and sturdy (wood), soft and sweet (fruit), fluid (plant fluid), or seeds (grain).

However, most of those processes you outlined are for the later developments of fire, such as forges, smithies, refineries, etc. Fire itself would undergo relatively few processes compared to them. The ones I can think of are cooking food, converting wood to charcoal (if the latter is included as a compound), and providing heat and light (if it is possible for those to be easily quantifiable measurements for the computer, if not, we scrap it). Any other ideas? I think the idea of setting weapons on fire or burning down buildings is interesting, but would have to be discussed more and would need to be simplified, since this is getting VERY in depth for just the first FP.

Nonetheless, it is a very important FP.

Biofuel engine is the same as steam engine, I never said they're different. I just put a / between the two as I meant they were the same.

You're somewhat right about the greenhouse effect. If the player, for example, has a heavily industrialized civilization that spans across the entire globe, than the greenhouse effect wouldn't be ignorable. So every TO with fire would decrease the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere by a very small percent per TimeOfThrive. Normally, in a healthy biosphere, the amount of oxygen would be stabilized due to vegetation, but under certain conditions this might not apply, making for a.... rather interesting drastic climate change.

I don't think percentages work. It would be better working on raw numbers (either m³ or kg), so adding and substracting is easier.

Using raw numbers would be really, really messed up. How would you determine how much cubic meters or kilo's does nitrogen (as an example) occupy in the planets atmosphere? Trust me, it would be much more simpler to just have percents.

The problem is how to calculate how a fire consumes that percentage.

Also, you only need to calculate the raw numbers once, when you are generating the planet. We could probably only care about the lower layer (troposphere i believe) and assume it has the same density everywhere. If you have the volume (calculated easily by geometry) and the density, it is really easy to get the mass.

Actually, I never thought of that. Thanks for pointing that out, calculating how much percent would it consume would be impossible, so percents won't probably be an option. Raw numbers are actually okay, now that I look at them. Also, does anyone have any new ideas for the use of fire? I can't think of anything else except for what we said in our previous posts.

I'll just list the uses we have for it:
Heating something up (to cook it, smelt it or to get energy through a steam engine)
Getting light.
As a weapon on projectiles.

To sustain a fire you need:
Combustible material
Oxygen (usually free from the athmosfere)

As byproducts you get:
CO2
H2O
Contamination (reduce it to a single compound)

For contamination generated by the fire we can either:
Have a contamination map
Produce a contamination compound

Finally, fire has an important propierty, other than the usual from any other FP: Temperature. That depends on the material used, and some proceses need specific ranges of temperature to work.

In case you didnt notice, I updated my earlier post with my reply. Fires wont be able to smelt metals. That will be available by the Forge FP, unlocked later by researching Metal Working. Steam Engines as well will be a separate FP.

The light it provides should be simple enough.
I think we should specify how it would b applied to weapons though.

Should we specify the exact amounts of reactants and products in these processes, or save that for later discussion?

What do you mean by contamination?

I think throwing temperature into the mix would be a bit much, especially since smelting metal is the Forge's job, and those would be the only processes that require a significantly different temperature. I would imagine all of the processes it undergoes require relatively similar temperatures. i think it would be better to not concern the player with the specific temperature, and just make some basic simplifications and assumptions.

That works. If we have the forge and steam engine come with their own fire included, we can simplify fire to be able to cook (if big enough) and give off light.

However, then other means of getting heat need to be coded separatedly. What i was thinking was geothermal energy (which IRL uses a steam engine to produce energy and lava-powered smelting and forges)

When you burn a lot of coal, for example, some of the impurities get burned with it. That liberates acids and other contaminants into the athmosfere. Simplified, it makes creatures get sick. It also produces acid rain. Basically, what contamination does on simcity or similar games.

Ah, okay, I get you. So would the amount of contamination produced b dependent on the fuel used? If so, contamination index, or contamination rate, or some property along those lines should as well be added to the list of compound properties, but only if the Boolean for combustible is true.

In reply to Nick about his previous post: I don't think we should have fire spread. A building can either be on fire or not. It wouldn't really be that complicated to make a fire spread system, but still than it would be hard when the TO is slightly on fire (not dangerous) and when the whole thing is up in flames. This would make it very hard to simulate fires as a disaster, since we couldn't differentate the lethal and non-lethal fires.

Making a simple raw-cooked food system would be simple. When food is produced or imported in a SC, it enters it storage. Food would be divided into several subgroups. Meat is one of them. We'll just assume ever "meat" is cookable. When you have a TO that cooks stuff in your SC, the TO would take the amount of food it can convert in one TimeOfThrive and add that converted food into the "cooked" subgroup.

But how would you make a difference between fruits and vegetables? Grain is okay, and it can be separated, but you can't exactly say which part of a plant is soft and what not. Usable parts of the plants would be divided into plant matter (fruits and leaves), plant fluids and wood.

Charcoal is the same as coal. Let's ignore temp. for now.

Also, I think it is safe to move fire to the "Function developed, but needs revising" category.

Yes, I agree that there shouldnt be fire spread. I was merely speculating on some further uses of fire in case we didnt consider these enough.

I get all that. What I'm trying to say is... Actually, wait a second. I just realized only meat really requires cooking, so it would be fineto just add an extra compound so that there is:
Raw Meat
Meat

For fruits, they should be easy to distinguish from plant matter, and they are quite significant too. In terms of the OE, fruits can be easily identified on a plant, if it bears them. Simply saying that it is soft is not enough, true, but they are specific entities taht are attached to the plant, so the computer has easy access to identifying them.

We can't really define what contamination is. On Earth, for example, emitting carbon-dioxide is considered bad for the environment. This is because it increases the greenhouse effect, which in return increases the temperature which is already relatively high.

However, now let's look at another planet with life, that is not Earth. It has a low average temperature, before water freezing point (somewhere around 0 degrees Celsius). Life here would be stuck living around geothermal vents or something similar, and wouldn't be able advance. However, if the amount of CO2 increased in the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect would too. The temperature would increase as well, making it for water to be possible in liquid form in much more places than before. Over time, the simple organisms would no longer be restricted to geothermal vents only. They would evolve and spread. They would eventually start colonizing the land as well (if there is any) and finally, probably reach sentience.

On this planet, more CO2 is good, while on ours, more CO2 is bad.

This is why we can't define contamination.

Even if you take poisonous gases and/or materials, we would still have organisms that tolerate a certain element and some that don't.

That's why we should just let the player decide himself what is "contamination" and what is not.

@Current Discussion:
Contamination in this sense means smog or poisonous chemicals or substances to your organism. We can assume that there will be things that are hazardous to the health of all oxygen-breathing carbon based lifeforms, at least insofar as the game goes. Atmospheric composition should probably be calculated using a Greenhouse Gases byproduct, to increase or decrease global temp.

So my revision of fire would be like this.
Fire
Requires:
Combustible Material
Oxygen

Produces:
Heat
Light
CO2
H2O
Contamination
Greenhouse Gases



Now, on to the Function Parts list. Where did we get the list of Function Parts from? I am confused by a few of them. Things like Prison Cell, Observatory and Tavern seem more like TO tags than FPs. Also, cog and pulley seem more like things that should be assimilated into the actual systems of the Tech Editor. For instance if i wanted to use a treadmill to power a crane arm then i as a player shouldn't have to worry about making the pulleys and cogs and ropes in the right spot, but simply connect them. The game should have algorithms for defining how complex my joining can be based upon technology level.

What about Photosynthetic organisms or organism able to do both eat and photosynthesis... CO2 would be a bonus.

Here's my suggestion
Fire
requires:
Combustible material.
Produces/action:
heat (for organisms not cold tolerant)
Cooks
Smelts (kiln)

However on more global phases like civilization and space age, where you have factories and such.

Fire will produce CO2... And you can keep track of the planets %co2 to keep the planets temperature in check. CO2 will dissipate with time from plants and other carbon scrubbing tech.
Also burning certain substances other fumes, I.E. SO2 which is toxic.

Well, my whole sugestion for CO2 was as a green house gas. CO2 is not directly dangerous to any living creature, unless there is so much there is no space left for oxigen. The contamination was to simplify all general toxic gases, like the alredy mentioned SO2, NO2, or many of the other byproducts.