@Royalfluff I will, and thank you!
hi
So since the last post I’ve been working on belts. I love playing Satisfactory, and while this would never be anything to the same level as that, I’m happy with my implementation of it. Was a cool challenge to tackle and today I finalised the last few issues stopping me from posting.
Belts have a few features;
- Can pull resources from certain buildings to place them as an item on the belt (in the above case molten ore from the forge).
- When placing another building to complete the chain, resources will automatically begin to travel and be added to its storage for processing (in this case what I’m tentatively calling an anvil).
- Resources will stagger “realistically”, as if the first object can’t move on thus halting the belt and any objects on it.
- It’s not a feature but just getting the pathing to work was a mathematical nightmare and I want to emphasise that (corners smdh)
Of course you can build them, but you can also destroy them, with a wiggle animation to indicate the entire chain being destroyed. I’m currently working on a method to extract any resources that were on the belt at the time of destruction, and place them in a temporary stockpile for hauling.
building in action 
One thing I wanted to happen when it came to building, was to allow freedom in where items/ buildings can be placed, but because of the modular and static nature of the belts, we’ll need a way to help align buildings they’re connecting to. Which is why I added a snap grid to help with that.
The grid will help with building a factory layout, but you can still place any decorations or standalone buildings freely without it.
I mentioned it at the start, but forges have a simple UI to display the current item being, well, forged, and the queue below that. All items that can be put in the forge have an associated melting point that affects how long it’ll take to cook, and if there’s a belt attached, will send it on its way. The anvil (wip) is the workstation for the new smithing job, and I’m anticipating having at least 3 belt chains per anvil feeding resources for the pawn working there.
The way I’m thinking how material advancement will work in the case of furthering research, and allowing more complex machinery to be built, is building various substations along the belt to affect the outcome by the time it reaches the anvil. Think of it not unlike casting the molten ore into shape, to then be finalised by the smithy at the end. This will have applications later if say we were to replace the ore with food and nutrtional value.
Long post, thanks for reading. Sorry if it wasn’t anything much else, the logic involved was fairly complex and was nothing I’d ever done before. There’s still some things to close out such as resources being dropped like I said and fringe cases with connections when snapping belts, but hopefully I can move on to other systems I have in mind, potentially leading up to an EA release.
