Water Evaporation

[ORMtnMan]

Got another one for you!

 

(I'm full of them because I have a lot of time to  think on my walk to/from work)

 

Water that is exposed to air should evaporate.

 

Easy concept because it happens in real life.

 

Obviously water in pipes, bottles, wells or enclosed storage would not evaporate but those rain barrels we build to collect water... It doesn't make sense I can leave a rain barrel out during a hot summer day and expect my water to still be there.

 

This would open up the requirement for enclosed water barrels and or the opening/closing of current water barrels.

 

I am sure this is achieveable via mods but it seems  like something that should be at the core of the game mechanics.

 

If this gets going I will also make a mad so you can set otu buckets to get water.

 

Let me know what you think, and sorry if it has been suggested before (I didn't see it in a quick search).

[Impetiso]

Well, there are a lot of things to consider to calculate the amount of water that evaporates on a water container. First you have to take the amount of water, temperature each hour, time exposed to that temperature, location, material, water composition...

It might be a little complex to make it in a realistic way, in my opinion.

[migulao]

Has this seriously not been suggested before? it just seems like something that would...

 

Well, either way, nice idea, although I can't think of much feedback to give.

[ORMtnMan]

Well, there are a lot of things to consider to calculate the amount of water that evaporates on a water container. First you have to take the amount of water, temperature each hour, time exposed to that temperature, location, material, water composition...

It might be a little complex to make it in a realistic way, in my opinion.

 

That is a very fair point. though the only evaporatable objects currently in the game (I.E open water containers) is the water barrels. So there would only be the ones that the player places.

 

So that amount of math currently would not be huge drag on the processing speed.

 

You are right that it would be complex and require a fair bit of math functions. It would become  a major drain if the game implemented already open standing water containers to the world (like pools) especially if they were environmental multi square containers.

 

That would definitely kill this idea...

 

Interesting to think about.

 

Has this seriously not been suggested before? it just seems like something that would...

 

Well, either way, nice idea, although I can't think of much feedback to give.

 

Thank you,

 

As I said. I could have  but I didn't see it in my quick search  through and the Common Suggestion post didn't list it.

[migulao]

 

 

 

You are right that it would be complex and require a fair bit of math functions. It would become  a major drain if the game implemented already open standing water containers to the world (like pools) especially if they were environmental multi square containers.

 

 

 

Headline: Sun's heat eats swimming pool.

New Jersey Devastated.

[ORMtnMan]

Har, har, har

 

Anyway, does anyone with more coding experience than I (or the devs ) have any input on the possibility of this?

[ughughugh]

I don't mean to be an ass, but I don't see how water evaporation is a necessary feature at all. So I got garbage bags to collect the water and I can simply place another bag on top of the container as long as it doesn't rain. Right now I just see a poor visual representation. The way water collection works is nonsensical. The area used is way to small. If anything water barrels have to be connected to the rain water downpipe of houses to make sense, but that is more of a minor graphical thing than anything else. And then the player has one more reason to leave the safety of his home.

[ORMtnMan]

I don't mean to be an ass, but I don't see how water evaporation is a necessary feature at all. So I got garbage bags to collect the water and I can simply place another bag on top of the container as long as it doesn't rain. Right now I just see a poor visual representation. The way water collection works is nonsensical. The area used is way to small. If anything water barrels have to be connected to the rain water downpipe of houses to make sense, but that is more of a minor graphical thing than anything else. And then the player has one more reason to leave the safety of his home.

 

Your statement does not seem (to me) a good arguement against having an evaporation as a mechanic.

 

I say this because as I understand your arguement, it flows as follows:

(please be aware I am paraphrasing and can get your intentions wrong)

 

1) I don't think evaporation is a good idea

      - Obviously your thesis, which you are entitled to your opinion.

 

2) You can cover rain barrels to prevent evaporation

      - This is not an arguement against the mechanic, it is a way to prevent (possibly) evaporation. Though garbage bags I don't think would make a good enough seal to prevent evaporation. Either way, I think that covering your rain barrels should be a part of this. If you don't cover them, they evaporate in the sun, if you don't open it back up, it won't collect water when it rains.

 

3) The current rain barrel water collection does not make sense because the rain barrels do not have a big enough opening to operate effectively.

      - This has nothing to do with evaporation as a mechanic. However, to address your point here, They are relatively inefficient at collection of water, but a barrel would still collect water if left out during a rain storm (especially some of those monsoon style thunderstorms they get in the South). Also, from watching them fill up during rain storms they don't fill up quickly. So, as far as I can tell, they seem to make realism sense to me.

[bvhv]

-Looks for river-

 

-finds dirt-

 

Oh....

 

I like this idea but not to the extent where it will dry up rivers xD (maybe lower water levels with the help of tides and all )

[ORMtnMan]

-Looks for river-

 

-finds dirt-

 

Oh....

 

I like this idea but not to the extent where it will dry up rivers xD (maybe lower water levels with the help of tides and all )

 

Well this is where my idea hits a snag, environmental water sources like rivers, etc. While they will evaporate and run out of water when it does not rain, the idea of coding a mechanic that checks the water level and evaporation factor for not only the current square, but all the squares around it to see how much it should recede by?

 

That would get a bit ridiculous, though, not impossible.

 

An example of how the math coding would work for larger bodies of water would be as follows:

 

A script is run to agregate all the units of water for any connected squares of water. The easy example is a pool.

 

a 4 square pool with 100 units of water each, equals a total of 400 units of water. Evaporation for the day (or whatever time unit they put in) is 20% (for the sake of an easy calculation). After the day there is 360 units of water, which is then redivided over the original amount of squares so each square now has 80 units of water.

 

A river with varying depth would be a bit more complicated but the calculation for the amount reduced would be the same. Any overage would spill over into the remaining squares.

 

For example, a 6 square section of river (for ease of explanation). 4 have 10 units of water (the banks) while the 2 in the center have 30. A total of 100 units of water in this example. Say for some reason this river is in a desert so the evaporation is ridiculous at 75%. This would make a reduction per square of 12.5. The 4 bank squares only have 10, so the remainder of 10 (2.5x4)  would be subtracted from the center 2 squares. So the outer banks would be dry, the inner ones would only have 12.5 remaining each.

 

When I reason it out like that it doesn't sound as taxing as I thought.

 

Rivers could also have little increases of water units from "off map" fairly easily, it would just operate in the opposite of my calculation above.

[ORMtnMan]

Sorry to double post here but I was thinking more on the mechanics of this.

 

IRL water evaporation rates depend on exposed surface area. the larger the area exposed to the drying element the more evaporates. So a a glass of water would evaporate slower than a bowl with the same amount of water.

 

With that in mind, the evaporation should be a flat value per full square exposed.

 

So in a single period of time say the evaporation is 10 units.

 

So in a barrel example, its exposed surface area is smaller than a full square. The water barrel would have  an evaporation factor of say 0.75 (for ease of example). So it would lose 7.5 units of water

 

A Bucket set out would have an even lower factor like 0.25

 

In the pool example each exposed square would be reduced by the full 10, it would be pretty simple because all squares of the pool are of equal depth.

 

Back to my 6 square river example it would operate the same. However for the sake of full explanation, say the banks of the river have only 8 whereas the center has 20. We are going to get rid of the carry over we had previously as it does not make sense. Without the carry over in this example, it would reduce the banks to -2  which would also not make sense. However if we think that the banks with their low units of watter may not cover a full square anymore, it makes more sense. At that point it would simply be reduced to 0.

 

Filling the river back up would be a bit more tricky because we can't apply the flat value back to empty squares. Instead we would set a value for which a square of water can not go over until the adjacent squares have a set number of water units. So say our limits are that a water square can't go over 15 without the adjacent squares having at least 5.

In our previous example the center 2 tiles were down to 10 units. It rains adding 10 units of water to the river. This would normally put the river at 20 units, but we have our limit at 15. So for now the center squares are capped at 15 with 5 remaining units each. There are two adjacent empty squares to each full one so we split the 5 (each) in two so now the river is 15 at the center 2.5 at the banks.

 

To further the example, say it rains again, this time at 20 units each square, this would normally cause the center to hit 35 and the banks to hit 22.5 however again we hit a limit. So we pause the banks at 15, it would not make sense for the center to keep gaining in water though so we pause that at the difference in increase. So the banks would be stopped at 15, the center at 27.5. The remaining units of water would be 45 (7.5*6). So the additional 4 squares on the outside would be increased to 5 each, reducing the remaining units to 25. There are now 8 squares, andd the remaining 25 units is spread over the 8 squares. So the outer banks would be at 8.125, the 2nd layer would be at 18.125 and the center would be at 30.625.

 

Let me know if this makes sense to any/everyone and if you have any corrections, ideas or suggestions.

[ughughugh]

The number one argument against evaporation is that it is too complicated to code in for too little benefit, hence I proposed to have rain barrels connected to the rain water downpipe. Moving outside your safe house to collect water already increases the difficulty without any calculation. 

 

 

"Though garbage bags I don't think would make a good enough seal to prevent evaporation"

 

One a sidenote though, how does a garbage bag not make it impossible for water to escape? It evaporates still but the garbage bag is 100% waterproof and a wooden cover plate will keep the bag in place. Go ahead and calculate the area around the rim through which water can still get lost. Say it is easily less than a square centimeter, does it make any sense to even bother?! And there is more to add. There is way more than just surface area and these are temperature, wind speed and most importantly direct sunshine, which vastly increases evaporation. Once again, way too much work. I will leave it at that, because I don't see how this is a good suggestion. Wikipedia is a bad source, but it can teach you something about evaporation if you wish to start somewhere to learn about it.

 

Again, no malicious intent here.

[ORMtnMan]

The number one argument against evaporation is that it is too complicated to code in for too little benefit, hence I proposed to have rain barrels connected to the rain water downpipe. Moving outside your safe house to collect water already increases the difficulty without any calculation. 

 

 

"Though garbage bags I don't think would make a good enough seal to prevent evaporation"

 

One a sidenote though, how does a garbage bag not make it impossible for water to escape? It evaporates still but the garbage bag is 100% waterproof and a wooden cover plate will keep the bag in place. Go ahead and calculate the area around the rim through which water can still get lost. Say it is easily less than a square centimeter, does it make any sense to even bother?! And there is more to add. There is way more than just surface area and these are temperature, wind speed and most importantly direct sunshine, which vastly increases evaporation. Once again, way too much work. I will leave it at that, because I don't see how this is a good suggestion. Wikipedia is a bad source, but it can teach you something about evaporation if you wish to start somewhere to learn about it.

 

Again, no malicious intent here.

 

I agree it would be difficult-ish to code (though not impossible as I point out in my examples), with the only benefit being that extra bit of realism, planning and management to the game... You may well be right it may not really make sense with the main game.

 

I love that kind of minutia planning... though it would get tedious with most players and be difficult to code. Maybe once we get a 1.0 version I will code a mod for this (at least just for me). Not much reason to make something so in-depth whe nthe code is in such a transitory mode.

 

As for the garbage bag. I guess I took you too literally when you said garbage bag (as in only the GB). I already spoke about the possibility of the covers in my previous posts.

 

The other factors are extremely important and those would go into determining the flat evaporation units. I was describing how the subtraction would be applied, not derived in my above examples. you make a good point though that I did not articulate which is the extra layer of coding for the difference of evaporation value in different locations. All my examples were outside exposed to the elements, though a bucket left out inside a house say would recieve less of a subraction than the same bucket left outside in the sun.

 

Which also leads to the possibility of your water collection elements left outside during winter could freeze and be unusable until you thaw it. Which would require more planning on the player's part.

[Impetiso]

Consider that evaporation in a river doesn not work in the same way that evaporation in a pond, a pool or a bucket. And if you treat a river different than a pond, you need to diferenciate river water and lake water, pool water and so.

The main problem with evaporation, and considering you want to evaporate even rivers and lakes, it's not only the difficulty of the evaporation system, is the insane amount of operations you will have each day, rainy or sunny.

If you watch how rain collector barrels work when it rains, you will notice that every N time (I think it works per second, not sure), 1 unit of water is added to every barrel until it gets to 100, so for every barrel we know that first must be asked if the barrel is full and then add if necesary. That means that every N time it's raining, you must ask for any water collector (include natural water squares too) in the world it's filled with water, and if not, add water to every water collector.

Assuming evaporation will work in the same way, you will need to create a function that searches all the water collectors in the world, evaluate if it has water on it, and diminishes the amount of water in a calculated for each water collector. Of course, you will group the water collectors by its propertys to make faster calculations, but even then, I wonder if the that kind of work will do some damage to the game in any way.

[ORMtnMan]

Consider that evaporation in a river doesn not work in the same way that evaporation in a pond, a pool or a bucket. And if you treat a river different than a pond, you need to diferenciate river water and lake water, pool water and so.

The main problem with evaporation, and considering you want to evaporate even rivers and lakes, it's not only the difficulty of the evaporation system, is the insane amount of operations you will have each day, rainy or sunny.

If you watch how rain collector barrels work when it rains, you will notice that every N time (I think it works per second, not sure), 1 unit of water is added to every barrel until it gets to 100, so for every barrel we know that first must be asked if the barrel is full and then add if necesary. That means that every N time it's raining, you must ask for any water collector (include natural water squares too) in the world it's filled with water, and if not, add water to every water collector.

Assuming evaporation will work in the same way, you will need to create a function that searches all the water collectors in the world, evaluate if it has water on it, and diminishes the amount of water in a calculated for each water collector. Of course, you will group the water collectors by its propertys to make faster calculations, but even then, I wonder if the that kind of work will do some damage to the game in any way.

 

You are absolutely right on all counts.

 

The easy-ish (cop-outisg) way of dealing with large bodies of water (rivers/lakes) is to ignore them all together and cite reasons such as they get refilled off map, from a spring, etc.

 

This would leave the smaller pools and water barrels. scattered about the map.

 

The easy way to apply the evaporation would be as you said, to come up with the evaporation unit and do the reverse water add (e.g. get all open containers, check to see if it is empty if not subtract water to a min of 0. Considering the amount of player placed water objects it would not be so man yoperations that it would kill a system. Even pools would be relatively scarce in this area (we aren't in So-Cal after all). So, not many operations there.

 

There is the intention by the Devs to bring back massive hoards (which would be taxing on a system) and this "feature" would add that extra bit of processing that would limit hoard sizes... so with that in mind any extra bit of processing required may be an impossibility.

 

If it comes down to it I may just write a mod for this (my list grows ever more). I hd already intended to make a mod where you can set your bucket out to collect water... so maybe combine the two.