Progress on the conduit based power system has been moving at a pace of a sort.
It’s a hard concept and I don’t get to dedicate as much time to the project as I would like. This makes for slow going.
Bit of background: The conduits are made to be placed by the player to connect references to the power system, build networks and decide if you can or cannot turn on lights, and devices. They reference an overarching “power network“ and pass all information through it. This works.
Conduits also need to procedurally generate in the rooms so that they link up in a meaningful way. I used a set of nodes that link up at ends to build a pathable network. the path moves from room to room until it finds it’s chosen power source or bumps into an existing power conduit. This also works.
Conduits also can only be so long so if the path they are taking is too long they need to split up and connect two or more lines. This mostly works.
The crux of the issue is the system has become so large and so convoluted that finding and fixing all of it’s many edge case errors is proving quite complicated.
Stuff like: links not connecting pointed at eachother.
Or: Conduits misjudging their maximum length and falling short.
Or: Whatever happened here? I think It generated a conduit with no target. Quite bad.
Positive side? It’s fun!
The mechanic really feels like problem solving with limited resources and that is exactly what I wanted. It will take some time but it’s going somewhere really interesting and (I think) quite unique.
-Peter