Electricity for buildings a la vehicles

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

So, like, why can’t buildings have electricity much like vehicles? Default buildings are clearly-defined entities. Each building could be like an individual immobile vehicle.

Fuel-operated back-up generators already exist in the game. Install one next to a building, and the building’s electrical network should become operational… as long as the generator gets fuel.

Building tiles could and should conduct electricity. Buildings could be handled in many ways like vehicles. Individual devices could be manipulated on or off. Fridges, ovens and laundry machines could be installed only in buildings and never on vehicles, whereas most vehicle-mounted devices could be installed in buildings as well. Whereas vehicles have “controls”, buildings could have “fuse control panels”. I think we might also need some default interior lights and light switches. And doorbells for the hapless newbies to press, attracting nearby zombies.

Solar panel installation should be an option, just like vehicles can accept them. And storage batteries. After all, solar panels are way quieter than generators.

But there should be more electrical devices as well. Such as the water heater. A hot shower would be a huge morale boost. Water would be supplied from the sky, through funnels and a filter of some sort, and the building could have its own water reservoir tanks, same as vehicles.

I’ll attempt to list the various home appliances (existing ones and potential future ones)

  • laundry machine (future clean clothes? not just plain clothes, but with “clean” status causing a morale boost)
  • fridge
  • oven
  • TV (watch automated repeating broadcasts, or static)
  • DVD-player (to go with the TV; we must have movies and a movie collection)
  • water heater (hot water, hell yeah)
  • tumble dryer (instantly dry towels and clothes?)
  • computer (play games… tons of potential functions)
  • stereo
  • coffee machine (makes hot coffee or tea over 5-10 minutes. Meanwhile the player is free to move and act. Emits sound. chorrrrtle… heeeenk! CHOORRRRRTLLLE)
  • microwave oven (only offers the re-heating function, not able to cook; will not heat anything that contains steel or other future metals)
2

Suggested many times but it’s much harder than it sounds.
Very unlikely to happen.

3

More difficult or more laborous? Are we talking about manually modifying each default building (which there are many), or something more technical?

4

Inventing a robust algorithm that will allow draining energy and supplying energy to unloaded map sections in a way that doesn’t break regardless of which sections are loaded and which sections aren’t.
Nothing a non-programmer can be expected to do, so posting ideas won’t help here.

5

I recall electric vehicles and funnels being cited as examples of cross-map sections mechanics already existing and working when this topic came up before.

6

I should make a wiki article for this. Specifically for “why no electric buildings”.

Electric vehicles are singular entities. It looks like this:
Vehicle: { Parts: [ frame, solar, battery ], State: [ moving forward at 140 km/h ] }
You can address a vehicle. You can bring up a vehicle from memory, since it exists in a “block”.

Buildings aren’t entities. They are just adjacent pieces of terrain.
You can’t address a building. You can’t bring it up into memory without loading map tiles it covers. You can’t determine its bounds without crawling along the edges. You can’t tell if the building is fully loaded without loading all the adjacent map tiles and checking if they do not transmit electricity (or whatever you want to transmit).
This causes problems with things like electricity transmission. For example, generator is a map tile south of consumer. Player goes north and suddenly generator is unloaded from memory and consumer has to either bring generator into memory with some hack or just turn off.

7

So… turn buildings into entities…? What would that require?

8

A giant redesign of what does terrain and furniture mean, basically reimplementing them as vehicles and forcing connection checks everywhere.
99% probability that this won’t happen.

9

It’d honestly be much easier to just create some ‘vehicle’ parts that can achieve those sorts of appliance functions. ‘Vehicle’ frames don’t really care if they are a car or not, its just an abstraction, so I’d be happy installing a TV into a frame on roller wheels, old high school days style. My ‘Kitchen’ in my base is just what I’d expect to have made in the apocalypse, a bunch of scrap metal welded together around a kitchen buddy unit, with a removable battery slot to let me swap its cells with the makeshift solar farm outside.

I ended up writing out some idea on how it could work, based on what I know of the vehicle system, but then the best solution I could come up with would have instances where it could lose thousands of units of charge, or potentially create thousands of charge outta the blue. Unless you could link two vehicles into a list of entities, and be aware of their charge counts. That’d require keeping things that are outta the reality bubble in memory though, or at least select variables, and I don’t know if the engine will like that very much.

10

I guess the real issue here is about powering the appliances in elegant fashion. Current power sources are all outdoors equipment, while the appliances belong indoors. So how would we power the household gadgets, which might reside several squares apart from each other? How would we conduct power through a wall tile neatly?

How about cabling? Invisible cabling, that could be installed on any construction tile. It would be a vehicle part, which would mean that a vehicle part would have to be able to co-exist with a construct in the same tile. Create an exception for it. And by laying the cable, you’d get power.

I mean, we have power sources and perfectly plausible household appliances, but the issue is connecting all of them. How would we achieve that? Maybe a generator or a solar array should just “wirelessly” power all appliances within X tile radius?

Here’s what I’m thinking. We make a special new frame that no one would want in their vehicle. It’s weak, and requires Construction skill to craft and install. It’s not designed to take damage at all. That frame, let’s call it “household device frame”, would accept only certain appliances, such as RV kitchen unit or a TV, and not car wheels or any other obvious vehicle parts. We then make “wireless” solar panels called “household solar panels”. These panels would wirelessly power “household storage batteries” (HHSB for short) within X tile radius. HHSBs in turn would provide their electricity to household appliances (device frames) within X tile radius.

They wouldn’t be wireless lore-wise but just without the representation of cabling.

I’d think the HHSB would be at the center of it all. It could be the central distance reference point for A) the solar panels or the generator and B) the household devices. The player would install the devices and the solar panels within the range of the battery, but the solar panels would of course have to reside outdoors.

Or the HH solar panel could have its own built-in battery, and we skip HHSB entirely.

I think we’d specifically need new solar panel type because it would have to be wireless. Or maybe make household devices check if there’s an appropriate power source installed nearby. All in all, battery charge count could be skipped entirely. It could be a binary thing. The household device could either have a power source in range or not. The narrative could be that “This is a set of solar panels, meant for large households. Installing this set close to your home would surely power all of its devices. The set includes a hefty battery, meaning you won’t run out of juice at night. Or probably ever, for that matter.”

11

That still seems to be an excessive amount of work and coding to replace the current process, which would be:

  1. Build solar rig/Generator outside. Install battery receptacle.
  2. Build appliance rig inside. Install battery receptacle.
  3. Whenever you drain the battery inside, swap with a battery that’s been charging outside.

The entire solution you’ve outlined only removes step 3. Until we end up with equipment that consumes VAST amounts of power, rapidly, outside of a crafting situation, that’s also located inside (Laser turrets go outside the base, after all), I just don’t see what gain it’d have. Unless we end up having to build HVAC systems into our bases to keep breathing, we’ll be fine. The programming time would probably be better spent on any number of things.

12

[quote=“Profugo Barbatus, post:11, topic:12540”]That still seems to be an excessive amount of work and coding to replace the current process, which would be:

  1. Build solar rig/Generator outside. Install battery receptacle.
  2. Build appliance rig inside. Install battery receptacle.
  3. Whenever you drain the battery inside, swap with a battery that’s been charging outside.

The entire solution you’ve outlined only removes step 3. Until we end up with equipment that consumes VAST amounts of power, rapidly, outside of a crafting situation, that’s also located inside (Laser turrets go outside the base, after all), I just don’t see what gain it’d have. Unless we end up having to build HVAC systems into our bases to keep breathing, we’ll be fine. The programming time would probably be better spent on any number of things.[/quote]

As long as you’re on the same Z level you can skip step 2 and 3 by simply knocking down a window or wall and replacing it with a vehicle frame and board mounted on it. Put the solar charging rig on the outside of the wall, connected to this frame. On the other end you can mount your electrical stuff.

I used to have a floodlight linked up to a rig like this for lighting the shelter.

13

This is just an idea, but what about taking the car creation system and then make new parts that would be circuits, connections, etc, and those would be invisible unless you examine one tile with them, and they would be able to go under the floor, never pose an obstacle for anything, and connect certain parts of furniture that could be powered (that would need to be converted to car parts). So each house could come with this weird invisible exoskeleton of electric connections, and if you would hook up a generator into it, it would start working.

I don’t think it would ever be implemented, but hey, it wouldn’t be that bad of an idea in my opinion?

14

The problem here would be the one vehicle per tile rule/technical limitation. You wouldn’t be able to drag a shopping cart over cables.

15

Damn, i had forgotten about that. Still, nice to daydream i guess!

16

[quote=“Profugo Barbatus, post:11, topic:12540”]That still seems to be an excessive amount of work and coding to replace the current process, which would be:

  1. Build solar rig/Generator outside. Install battery receptacle.
  2. Build appliance rig inside. Install battery receptacle.
  3. Whenever you drain the battery inside, swap with a battery that’s been charging outside.

The entire solution you’ve outlined only removes step 3. Until we end up with equipment that consumes VAST amounts of power, rapidly, outside of a crafting situation, that’s also located inside (Laser turrets go outside the base, after all), I just don’t see what gain it’d have. Unless we end up having to build HVAC systems into our bases to keep breathing, we’ll be fine. The programming time would probably be better spent on any number of things.[/quote]

No. Nononono…

Actually no batteries. At all. The battery is a lie. It would be invisible and make-believe, existing only in the power source’s description. Just have the special household power source in range of the home appliance, be it 20 squares or 50 squares or whatever, and it would have power.

And you wouldn’t be able to power turrets or anything deadly with it.

I will absolutely respect the argument that dev time might be better used on other goals, but that’s subjective. I just think it’s a small crime that we have all those abandoned homes and little means to… turn them into appropriate homes. And it’s been like that for so long.

Oh God…

But…

What if we go the other way? I mean what if a vehicle could be a one-level building? Many of the vehicle tiles already have desirable properties in this regard. We’d need a “foundation frame”, and “concrete walls” to exist as vehicle parts. These parts could be incredibly heavy or otherwise unsuitable for any mobile vehicle.

This could be as simple as adding a number of vehicle parts (house parts) and a new frame type. o_O

17
This could be as simple as adding a number of vehicle parts (house parts) and a new frame type. o_O

And rewriting every single building into a vehicle, translating every single piece of furniture that exists in buildings into a vehicle component, and every single mod out there that adds buildings will have to be modified, or abandoned as well. Its not trivial in the code to support that the way one would expect it to work, and its absolutely not trivial to put the effort converting everything over either. At best, a SIGNIFICANT number of man hours has been spent to achieve the exact same result.

And then you get into dealing with the ability to drag furniture. Vehicles expect their components to stay on their one spot. Rewriting that isn’t trivial. Writing vehicles to permit other vehicles to drive over them without crashing (Say, parking in a garage, or a cart in a grocery store) gets REALLY weird as you start going into vehicle nesting levels, if the engine is even capable of supporting such a concept. You can’t just say “Ignore ‘house’ vehicles” because then your going through walls. Then there’s the issue that vehicles, as they stand, don’t have ‘floor’ storage space where stuff can just be, it has to be in a dedicated storage unit, or it’ll be under it, and invisible. This would also permit things to end up inside walls. In a vehicle, it can be said its under the car. Can’t make that explanation with a house, so now you’ve gotta figure out how to handle items inside a ‘vehicle’ style house.

Actually no batteries. At all. The battery is a lie. It would be invisible and make-believe, existing only in the power source's description. Just have the special household power source in range of the home appliance, be it 20 squares or 50 squares or whatever, and it would have power.

My point wasn’t about batteries in your system. My point was that the automagical device your proposing removes literally just the one, uncommon, step that the current solution which involves moving batteries does require. And then the point DG123 made 'bout taking out walls and building ‘vehicles’ through them lets you take out that step, without refactoring the entire building system the game uses.

18

[quote=“Profugo Barbatus, post:17, topic:12540”]

This could be as simple as adding a number of vehicle parts (house parts) and a new frame type. o_O

And rewriting every single building into a vehicle, translating every single piece of furniture that exists in buildings into a vehicle component, and every single mod out there that adds buildings will have to be modified, or abandoned as well. Its not trivial in the code to support that the way one would expect it to work, and its absolutely not trivial to put the effort converting everything over either. At best, a SIGNIFICANT number of man hours has been spent to achieve the exact same result.[/quote]
No! You got it all wrong! I’m not looking to convert every single building into the vehicle format! Christ! I’m looking for a way to build custom buildings using the vehicle format.

While I didn’t think about dragging furniture or, say shopping carts, there are ways around it. At least you probably wouldn’t be forced to build vehicle floors but maintain construction floors. And you CAN drag objects on them. Only walls would have to be “vehicle”. But admittedly only walls would conduct electricity then. That may or may not be an issue. It would still allow traditional (sane) housing designs, in which electrical devices are close to walls.

19
No! You got it all wrong! I'm not looking to convert every single building into the vehicle format! Christ! I'm looking for a way to build custom buildings using the vehicle format.

And that’s not what you were just saying though…

I just think it's a small crime that we have all those abandoned homes and little means to... turn them into appropriate homes. And it's been like that for so long.

Which implies you want houses to be working with this new system you want. I’m starting to get confused about what you want to achieve here. If you want buildings to behave as vehicles, we’d need to convert them over into vehicles. If you want the ability to build a vehicle and treat it like a house… There’s nothing stopping you.

20

Yep.

I basically live in an Atomic Minitank I’ve filled with kitchen equipment, welding rigs, forges and chemistry labs etc.