Currently creating a room, with player made back walls and enclosure don't really function for a real purpose. Arguably, they are a negative impact to existing mechanics, specifically those with a back wall as it prevents players from beaming up to their ship in those locations. Placing items like a campfire, stove or anything else that provides heat do not serve any function within rooms. You can be standing outside the room in the freezing snow as it comes down on you, and you're no less vulnerable to the cold than if you're in the room. Lets just begin however, with basic mechanics being added. I'm going to use heating as a method to explain much, but heat is interchangeable with oxygen and cooling. One of two ways to accomplish this Proposal #1: Planets have an air temperature has a +/- value Torches, campfires, forges, etc would provide +1 through +10 heat. The number can have higher ranges, but the idea is various sources would give off more or less heat. The circular area that a heat source provides for example at +10 from origin point would dissipate, every 5 cells (tbd) by 1 point, this could be customized for each heat source. Rooms provide a 1/2 air temp value. This can be applied to oxygen sources, planets/asteroids etc having a oxygen value +/-, and implementation of overheating could find use for a cooling requirement which behaves similar to heating. This solution would still have heat outside of rooms, though it would dissipate rapidly, where as that same heat source inside a room would provide warmth twice as far (again this could be modified for the desired result). Proposal #2: Enclosed spaces capture heat/oxygen/cooling This would function similar to how using an example, Faster Than Light oxygen system functions. Heat sources increase the rate at which temperature rises in a room. An open door (open back wall or not being completely enclosed) would have a negative effect on that heat, reducing heat in the room until the room was the same temperature as outside, and only heat directly adjacent to the source would prevent freezing. Why cooling?! Elaborated. So why add cooling? Currently, with our starter ships (since they will be upgradeable in the future), we can cram all our crafting tables, forge, refinery etc into our ship. This has been brought up before that because of this, there really isn't much point in having a "home" planet, you don't need to build on a planet, its purely aesthetic. With the addition of heat sources in the above proposals and with magma planets, heat buildup would also be detrimental to players, eventually causing players to perish from overheating just like freezing. Why add another layer to this system? Part of what this system could accomplish is early on, your ship for example would not be suitable for placing a forge or smelter in, due to the small size of the space it would quickly become too hot. In addition, magma planets would have additional threat, perhaps its not the entire planet is too hot to survive on, but especially areas around lava your character would begin to overheat. It also makes building larger production facilities and potentially in the future if we have other crafting stations that produce even more heat, use of ice planets becomes desirable, rather than pretty much avoiding them unless you have enough warmth items. This dynamic could be used to create even warmer or colder planets, such that not all ice planets can easily be countered with top end equipment. Or that the simply oxygen bubble back item becomes insufficient, requiring tanks, that drastically increase your breath meter, but are not indefinite. Cooling would be something meant to place greater emphasis on establishing planet side construction, and deemphasize just dumping everything on your ship. If later in the game this was no longer desired a system could be added onboard the ship to negate this, or partially negate it (flexibility is key). At its simple core of mechanics that exist we should have the following improved upon to include: Rooms can be made through complete enclosure of a space. Oxygen can fill a room to create a breathable environment, if doors are left open or there is an opening rooms will lose oxygen. Heat can warm a room to be suitable for survival, if doors are left open or there is an opening rooms will lose heat.
Yes please, especially as this relates to oxygen. Personally I'd like to take it further with air pressure being involved, where you could punch a hole through some old derelict/abandoned ship or tomb and get sucked inside due to the pressure difference, or if you break into a futuristic base in an asteroid belt or on a moon the pressure inside blows you back. Anyway, the above is an addendum to your idea really. A very rapid loss/increase in heat/air/etc when these structures are in any way open to the outside world would be preferable for me rather than a gradual change since that would make airlocks a practical addition and would make meteor showers or monsters that can damage blocks an additional threat. When it comes to cooling/overheating this is also something I'd like to see, with cooling being necessary on hot desert planets (or perhaps those closer to stars) and heating being, as it is now, necessary on colder ones. Taking it further, certain materials should have a particular level of thermal insulation (perhaps even heat storage) that make them better suited to certain environments. For example you wouldn't want to build with bamboo in a snowy climate, nor would you want to use stone in a desert.
I like this idea of ventilation. The concept that a room should effectively be sealed is a practical concept and a concern the fact that most living creatures have upper as well as lower limits to temperatures they can comfortably survive in I think this works out nicely. The concept of overheating can also be coupled with the status of burning, so that if a player is exposed to hot enough temperatures they can ignite and start sustaining damage just as if they've fallen into lava or been fighting fire-breathing birds. Nightcat's addendum regarding pressure differences becomes too unwieldly in a simple environment like in starbound. Overheating can simply be an extension or even a mirror of the current temp gauge, flipping it around and causing the screen to get red as the temperature rises above survivable norms, eventually causing spontaneuous burning status. (Yes, Starbound will have spontaneous human combustion. ) This can and most like should be further elaborated with things like blocks and doors and windows each having an insulative value corresponding to the quality and tier of the material in question. for example, a room constructed with cobble stone would hold heat better than one made of wood panels. One made of actual cobblstone bricks would be even better, and a room made of steel blocks would be better still. Encourage players to slowly rebuild and replace areas of their construction with better and better materials, or to save higher end materials for more demanding environment.s It would promote more judicious usage of materials and force the player to consider not just how to build, but what to build out of given the environment wherever they happen to be. Further more, doors and windows crafted by the player or make of of materials like bamboo would be drafty and thus poor insulaters allowing heat and oxygen to pass through. Barred doors as can be found in USMC Penal colonies would be useless on a freezing ing asteroid as the wide open spaces between the bars wouldn't hold anything. On the other hand, an Apex security door, ot a titanium door would probably hold both heat and oxygen alot better. Some materials might be good and holding heat, but not trapping oxygen or vice versa. Air locks would still be required to prevent structures from losing all their oxygen at once. A room opened to the outside in an airless environment would simply lose all the oxygen inside instantly , Oxygen genterators could then be tiered and give varying rates in terms of volume(or in this case the area ) of the room. Here are some changes as to how these mechanics should be implimented Temperature Scale: Scale should range from 0 to 200. Temperature values are assessed every 5 seconds. Player Temperature safety range: Player's Normal base temperature is 100. Player should receive no ill effects as long as their gauge has a value between 50-150. At 0, the player freezes solid. From 1-50, player i freezing, all movements and actions occur at 1/2 speed, and the player takes damage. Screen gradually turns white below 50 and gets whiter as the temperature drops. At 200, the player burns to ashe. From 150-200 the player gains burning status and takes damage, screen gradually turn red, getting redder as the temperature rises. This is already similar to what currently happens and has for the most part been mirrored for the higher temperature effects Ambient Temperature: I like your system of giving planetary air temps a +/- value, it should function on 5-sec intervals ex: an ice planet with a temperature of -10 would reduce the player's temp gauge by 10 degrees every 5 seconds. This value can change according to whether it is currently day or night, much like it does now. Heating/Cooling: It has often been said that if you don't have a campfire you can put down 3 torches and that will be enough to keep you alive. Using that statement as a guide, let's then compare those two heat sources. A torch with have a heat generation value of +1, given the above that means every 5 seconds, a player near the torch will have their temp gauge value rise by one. provided they are lose enough to the torch. However, this now mean that even a torch can eventually burn the player , a reasonable assumption under the right conditions. When you play with fire..... A standing fan might have a cooling effect of -5 so it would drop the temp gauge by 5 points every 5 seconds. Insulation: Just as heating and cooling source have varying ability according to implied quality/tier, the same will be true of building materials. A dirt block will have an insulation of 1, while a Junk Tech block might have an insulation value of 6. For rooms, the end insulation value will be an average based on the total materials to build it, The average will include the different kinds of blocks used to make the floor, ceiling, side walls, and back wall, It will also include the insulation values of any windows and doors. By using an average, smaller rooms can benefit greatly from small change, such as upgrading a door, while larger rooms won't see much change without more effort involved in upgrading materials. It should be noted that insulation will function as an absolute value with air temperature and will never cross 0 because walls and doors are neither heating nor cooling sources. The average insulation value of the room will the be used to mitigate the outside air by an appropriate factor. So a room made with a mixture of steel blocks, cobble stone bricks, iron blocks, and packed dirt blocks might have an average insulation value of 4 on a world a night time air temp -3 and day temp of +10 would have the following effects: At night, the ambient temp would be 0 and so no heat sources would be necessary, but during the day the ambient temp inside the room would still be +6 so some cooling devices would be required to prevent overheating . Dissipation: The range at which heating/cooling sources will be effective will be governed by the contents of the back tiles and the the capacity of the source in question. let's say a camp fire has a heat value of +3 and you are some distance away from that fire. Whether or not that fire will keep you from freezing to death will depend on the number of spaces between you and the fire, and the average insulation values or the back tiles in those spaces. If the average insulation value of those back tiles is say.....5, and fire is +3, then that means that every 5 space away from the fire, the heat effect drops by one. so you would be able to feel the full effect of the fire from as much as 5 spaces away, but after 16 space that fire won't be during you any good. But if you had a solid wall of impervium as back tile maybe you'd still feel as if your were standing ontop of the flame from 20 spaces away. Empty (open air) back tiles will have an insulation value of zero in order to make holes in a back wall very problematic but also to use them as a mean to avoid over heating in small room on hot planets with breathable environments. Note that while open air will have a value of Zero, the bottom limit for dissipation will be 1 (otherwise there would be no meaningful heat radiating from any sources while outside of a room) Oxygen Generators: Devices like this should not be able to INSTANTLY fill a room with atmosphere, it will take time, especially larger rooms. Oxygen generators should have a capacity similar to heating and cooling generators but work in terms of volume (area). A Oxygen generator with a rating of say.....16 will create a 4X4 space of breathable air. and it will do this a rate of 16 spaces at 5 second. In open air this just means the machine will make a 4X4 breathable zone centered around the machine. In a room, this determines how long it will take to fill up all foreground space not occupied by blocks or doors. So in a room with 1600 spaces the player can occupy without having to destroy floors, ceilings, or walls, it will take 100 seconds for that lone oxygen generator to fill that room with breathable atmosphere, extending out from the machine. Open doors, holes in walls or back walls will cause an instant loss of pressure. The room will not fill AT ALL until the breaches are sealed and doors closed. Until the room is sealed again, the breathable atmosphere is once again reduced to being just a 4X4 space centered on the generator again. Small airlocks can be made to avoid depressurizing the entire structure every time you want to go outside. Leakage Value: Leakage Value will reflect how well or poorly certain doors, windows, and building materials keep water or oxygen from passing through them. Open space, holes in walls or back wall, or an open door will compromise a rooms seal and remove the atmosphere inside a room at rate 200 space per second. Just like in space, it doesn't take a big hole, to cause a big problem. Once the integrity of a room is sealed, and all doors closed, will determine how easy it it ease to keep air in, and water out. The higher the leak Value, the faster air leaks out. Anything with a leak value over a certain maximum is not water tight and subject to water droplets coming in through the walls and ceiling or through door. Leakage values for surfaces and back walls made of a mixture of different kinds of blocks will be an average of all the blocks used multipied by the area of the back wall, plus the value of any doors or windows, plus 200 for each individual hole or breach in the structure so that you can't ignore a bunch of holes caused by boss fights or meteor damage just by making a ton of generators.
I agree, the functionality of a room should be enclosed and serve a degree of purpose other then, looks good. Would add an element of practicality and immersion. If anything a room should be practical. Good
Just three notes: Give items a certain limit after which they stop affecting the temperature. We should not be able to achieve sub-zero with a fan and insulated room. Same goes for spontaneusly combusting... inside a glacier... because of a torch. Perhaps make oxygen work like a very simplified (no "levels", it fills entire tiles at once, only slightly affected by gravity) liquid to make sure it spreads evenly? Or maybe how the Creep spreads in Creeper World (the top-view ones) to make it even less CPU-heavy. And make the calculations start working only when they're really needed, by that I mean no simulating air on the surface, because well... why do we need that? Air would be simulated only inside rooms and caves (with "open air" blocks adjancement to them working as infinite oxygen spawn sources) and when a life support device is activated... So making at least one opening (vents for bunkers!) would be necessary if you don't want to suffocate inside your "100% safe" house. Make temperature take more time to spread. Y'know, air is an insulator. We don't want players suddenly catching fire because someone dropped a blob of lava in a big but insulated room. BTW, if this ever gets implemented, please make snow has high insulation because igloos.
You make some interesting points, but allow me to point out some issues with implementation. If you treat oxygen like a liquid, one could concievably not require a roof and simply allow the atmosphere to pool, and events like a metroe nolonger cause an issue to your breathing as long as you are below the height of the impact. So having it work as an extension in all directtion of the breathable space created by a oygen generator is more realistic since you're dealing with gases. A hole at the top of your base on an asteroid or moon should eventually cause your entire base to lose all oxygen, or atleast that particular chamber, not just reduce the level to be even with the bottom of the hole in the walls/ceiling. Also, be including the concept of leakage one can logically assume that if air can flow out through a door, windoe, or material, air can by definition flow in through it as well. That said, I do see your point in not wanting to suffocate because you made your house air tight on a breathable planet, there aren't that many dumber ways to die than that. I point out that currently there is no mechanic which makes the player actually consume oxygen. True, they can't breath when under water, but that isn't a function of consumption, rather it is one of absence. There is no air underwater, so one must hold your breath. There is no air on an asteroid, so you must hold your breath. There is air in your house, so the meter is not activated. Now, unless the developers decide to make Oxygen consumption part of the mechanics governing character breath meters, no one's going to suffocate in their 100% airtight base. However, if that changes, you will have every right to slap a giant "I told you so" on my forehead with a rusty stapler from that Glitch desk over in the corner, and I will deserve every agonizing second of it. Kudos for realizing a possible unintended consequence that hadn't been thought of.
It just occurred to me that, if we are suggesting the addition and removal of oxygen, this would also open up a raft of possibilities for other gases. Perhaps those sewer dungeons will have noxious fumes in? Maybe certain animals generate poisonous gas? Perhaps Apex labs have a fire suppression system that reacts to any open flame and sucks out all the air? Having some sort of gas/atmosphere handling mechanic in place would have so many other potential uses beyond the obvious.
That's actually a fun idea, poisonous gases escaping from the outhouse over a sewer, volcanic fumes when down in the magma layer, entire planets with toxic atmospheres. This does indeed bring in a whole slew of ideas that can be later brought in as additional updates once those initial mechanics are hammered out. Well played.
