Water Suddenly Flowing Strangely, Gaps Don't Work

[HOAI]

So I jush finished building a new sub and cross-referencing it with both my old subs and vanilla ones, and I'm suddenly getting an issue that persists on ALL submarines. I thought it was me, but I've tried both my own built subs as well as most of the regular submarines now and it's still happening.

Something strange is happening with the water in my game, as rooms that have ducts and gaps seem to just completely ignore those gaps. The only gaps between hull rooms seem to be doors, and even those are kind of jank with the water filling up rooms in a strange pattern. Thing is, water does seem to be going through the gaps, just very little.

Sometimes the top room fills first. Oftentimes a room above will be full and a room below will be dry despite having a clear opening to the room above. You could climb a ladder and open a hatch to only get your head wet.

I've been testing with a number of subs and it's happening to all of them. I don't know what happened. I thought it was my fault but it's universal, and I even double checked a sub we had completed the whole campaign on. It's all wonky.

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Just to be reiterate, I've made several subs before. They work and we even finished the campaign buying and using 3 of them in the one campaign. The hull and gap connections are identical to the vanilla ships, that are also experiencing this issue.

I'm suspecting that there's some kind of bug with my game and my game only but I don't know what it is. I've verified my files, it downloaded 2 files but didn't fix the issue.

[HOAI]

I tried a reinstall and nothing's changed.

Weirder still, is that the ducts seem to be opening in response to water, even though there is literally no water there. Some of the ducts, even the ones far across the room from the leak open like there's water. The ducts immediately under the leak stay open despite (visually it seems) no water coming through at all.

With further investigation, the water does seem to be building up from the lower floors as the top floors fill up at the same time without affecting the floors in between in any way. No splashing, no particles. The water just fills up from the bottom of every sub where the water would logically flow to without actually flowing there first. It's like it's calculating it immediately or something. At the same time the upper floors will fill to full even though it should flow through the gaps. Again, still happening even on vanilla ships.

I'm gonna give up on this for now but I'll leave this here. I have no idea what's going on.

[Buggy Boy]

I wonder if it's to do with linked hulls. I don't expect you've done this on purpose, it sounds more like a game bug as you say, but worth checking anyway - is the top room and the bottom room linked, or do they have the same name, or do they have the key word 'ballast' in their name or tags?

One thing you could try is firstly take a backup of your own mods and submarines, move them out of the way somewhere safe, then completely delete both the game directory (uninstall through Steam as the first step) and also (after taking a backup of any campaign save games etc) the folder for Barotrauma in your Documents folder. Be thorough and make sure there's no trace of Barotrauma remaining, aside from your safe backup files (store them in a zip file or two to hide them from Steam).

Then try installing Barotrauma again. If possible, install Barotrauma on a completely separate machine and just see if the problem persists there too, don't load any of your old mods, subs, or save files.

[HOAI]

Originally posted by Buggy Boy:

I wonder if it's to do with linked hulls. I don't expect you've done this on purpose, it sounds more like a game bug as you say, but worth checking anyway - is the top room and the bottom room linked, or do they have the same name, or do they have the key word 'ballast' in their name or tags?

One thing you could try is firstly take a backup of your own mods and submarines, move them out of the way somewhere safe, then completely delete both the game directory (uninstall through Steam as the first step) and also (after taking a backup of any campaign save games etc) the folder for Barotrauma in your Documents folder. Be thorough and make sure there's no trace of Barotrauma remaining, aside from your safe backup files (store them in a zip file or two to hide them from Steam).

Then try installing Barotrauma again. If possible, install Barotrauma on a completely separate machine and just see if the problem persists there too, don't load any of your old mods, subs, or save files.

I've checked, nothing's linked oddly, room names showing up normal. I've also uninstalled my mods, nothing left.

For reference, I've loaded up the Azimuth that comes with the game and tried to demonstrate. It could be my own misconception of how the game works even though we've kind of beaten it. Unlikely, but might as well. This behaviour is observable on all subs.

There's a working duct block by the captain's room. I shoot the hull open immediately above the duct block and run into the room below. The room above fills, and the duct is wide open but no water comes through at all. The hatch allows water to flow but the duct is doing literally nothing as the room above me fills up.

It's odd because the duct shows water particles coming through it but the water level isn't rising in the lower room. When the room above is full, it just stops showing the water effect entirely.

Video:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/504851389105831960/975846607327232020/2022-05-16_15-43-51.mp4

Update: My friends' subs are getting this as well. Exact same. Is it supposed to be like this? I remember ducts actually... ducting. Water would flow through them and spill down to the bottom, they're not doing anything now.

[HOAI]

So there's really nobody with this issue except for my group of 4?

It's been a while and I've found that what happens above is true. Ducts don't allow any water to pass through, and some do but without any visuals whatsoever. You can see the water flow by ducts opening and closing when rooms above them fill up and water would normally flow down into them. For the most part though, ducts just act like solid walls.

But there's nothing. I guess this is one of those bugs that we just have to deal with. We'll just stop playing until there's a fix, because this just ruins the whole experience. I don't know if it'll ever be fixed if we're the only ones, so fingers crossed I guess.

[The Flaming Pike]

Hi! I'll be honest, I'm a bit confused. Maybe I misunderstood your issue(s), so pardon me if I did. I'm going to be as thorough as possible just in case.

Since you said you finished a campaign in the past, I'm wondering if you did that several updates ago, spent some time off from playing the game and returned after a few updates? This could explain why you are noticing drastic changes. As you probably know, Barotrauma updates always bring a lot of tiny new changes that stand in the shadow of the big additions such as new monsters, for example.

If your duct blocks open without any water flowing inside and you have no breaches ( no sound of running water can be heard and the breach icon is not flashing in any room ) there's definitely something wrong, but I wouldn't focus on the duct blocks if that's the case, I'd look for the water detectors that trigger the duct blocks instead and see where their detection "square" is located first. Duct blocks will open as soon as a single "droplet" falls in their detection area. Sometimes you don't even have time to notice the water and it's already gone to the lower floor.

Duct blocks don't drain water very quickly. That's a fact. It may have been faster several updates ago when you finished your campaign. Perhaps have they been nerfed and we didn't really notice it. I don't think a change was made in the last couple of updates, I don't remember any mentions of it. I suggest you test if duct blocks truly work or not by removing the nearby hatches and destroying the hull in a room with a duct block so only the duct block can drain water down below. Once the room is filled, repair the hull and see if the duct block is doing its job.

Ballast pumps drain water faster than duct blocks can deliver it. If there are regular ballast pumps in the room below, where your duct block unloads water, the water level won't rise just from the duct block. You would require a bigger load, like opening a hatch that connects the flooded room and the pump or, of course having a breach.

I watched your video and I don't see anything wrong. Water flows slowly when only the duct block operates - you can see water rising slowly in the bottom floor. Water flows a lot more when you open the hatch. I think the damage you did to your wall may be causing a confusion here. The water particles you see in your video are caused by the breach in the wall between the upper and lower floor, not the duct block.

Was there an animation of water flowing through duct blocks? I'm not even sure myself. I think this may be one of those "Mandela Effects".

[HOAI]

Originally posted by The Flaming Pike:

Hi! I'll be honest, I'm a bit confused. Maybe I misunderstood your issue(s), so pardon me if I did. I'm going to be as thorough as possible just in case.

Since you said you finished a campaign in the past, I'm wondering if you did that several updates ago, spent some time off from playing the game and returned after a few updates? This could explain why you are noticing drastic changes. As you probably know, Barotrauma updates always bring a lot of tiny new changes that stand in the shadow of the big additions such as new monsters, for example.

If your duct blocks open without any water flowing inside and you have no breaches ( no sound of running water can be heard and the breach icon is not flashing in any room ) there's definitely something wrong, but I wouldn't focus on the duct blocks if that's the case, I'd look for the water detectors that trigger the duct blocks instead and see where their detection "square" is located first. Duct blocks will open as soon as a single "droplet" falls in their detection area. Sometimes you don't even have time to notice the water and it's already gone to the lower floor.

Duct blocks don't drain water very quickly. That's a fact. It may have been faster several updates ago when you finished your campaign. Perhaps have they been nerfed and we didn't really notice it. I don't think a change was made in the last couple of updates, I don't remember any mentions of it. I suggest you test if duct blocks truly work or not by removing the nearby hatches and destroying the hull in a room with a duct block so only the duct block can drain water down below. Once the room is filled, repair the hull and see if the duct block is doing its job.

Ballast pumps drain water faster than duct blocks can deliver it. If there are regular ballast pumps in the room below, where your duct block unloads water, the water level won't rise just from the duct block. You would require a bigger load, like opening a hatch that connects the flooded room and the pump or, of course having a breach.

I watched your video and I don't see anything wrong. Water flows slowly when only the duct block operates - you can see water rising slowly in the bottom floor. Water flows a lot more when you open the hatch. I think the damage you did to your wall may be causing a confusion here. The water particles you see in your video are caused by the breach in the wall between the upper and lower floor, not the duct block.

Was there an animation of water flowing through duct blocks? I'm not even sure myself. I think this may be one of those "Mandela Effects". :lunar2020thinkingtiger:

Hm if this is true, I'm really wondering if that much changed between our run and this update since we had just finished it during the Ancients update. Still, this is pretty helpful I think?

I just find it weird that the duct block doesn't seem to be transferring water at all sometimes. The room above me will be completely full and the room below just doesn't have any water coming through at all. But like you say maybe the water never flowed like that and it always just went straight to the bottom where the pump is emptying it out already? Man it's messing with my head.

Wish I had some footage of prior versions or something because now I'm just confusing myself. Thanks for the word though, at least now it might just be poor memory.

[DuckieMcduck]

If you can put up the submarine on the workshop I can take a look, otherwise it's very difficult to troubleshoot.