power buildings
Quick asset pass
Today I didn't have much time to spend but I fixed some issues, connected producers and consumers to the power network so they stop working when they're powered and aren't on the network. The code for that is now one line so any modifier that has a powered upgrade in it's tree can just add it to make the building stop working.
I also did a quick asset pass on the power buildings, see them in motion below.
Power network buildings
Adding small animations adds a lot of life to a game, and these are easy targets. I threw together some quick meshes and made them have a consistency of sorts, and it works well enough for now. The animation may need tweaking for visual noise later but for now it seemed fine.
It's also more fun when there's many
Here's the still at night
When things don't work
I found a bug while implementing the animation, apparently up till now I've never animated something around the y axis specifically...
Anyway, when I went to the code to fix it since I knew what it looked like (can you guess it was euler angles)... I found this comment there. Obviously it'll end badly, so I switched the code to use quaternions as intended and hey it all works again.
Turbines that are small enough to potentially hit residents
The first pass of the turbine was a bit too small when imported...
next...
I wanna do a pass over as many buildings as I can, especially the ones with animations that show their functional state. For example the resource producers, they should be animating while producing, and not animating when lacking power or resources.
At the moment since a lot of the buildings are just icons it feels a bit less clear what's going on at a glance.
Gameplay wise there's:
- recreation buildings that need to start coming online
- food and water buildings that produce those
- food and water storage + lifetime
- food and water consumption
- the research centre
I'll probably focus on the food + water since it's one of the key systems.
For now I'll leave you with this calming wind turbine video...