the ripoff comes full circle

now that we've got a good building framework in place, it's time to start making shit. after tweaking the building effect a little bit, the first thing i made was a disgusting waste of a class, with only a few variables and no actual code to speak of. this was a universal input/output container, and the machine scripts would look for this when trying to deal with inputs and outputs instead of going through a bunch of convoluted bullshit.

the next thing i made was a gate script, with a bunch of different modes included for each type of gate. i had no idea if it worked, because i had nothing to test it on, so i decided to make something, which was the fan. it was pretty simple, just a thing that blew objects away from it and killed any fluffies that touched it, but i had a hard time trying to get it to actually do it right. sure, it was murdering as it should, but the way it blew things around was pretty broken. however, after at least an hour of fucking around with rays, i managed to do it.

the spinny motherfucker has been awakened.

after doing that, i got rid of the sprite renderer, modified the code to only run when receiving a high input, stole some code from the plant script to tie the fan to its tile, and saved it as a prefab. then, i went into the building script and added a new variable that would allow the script to spawn a specified prefab on top of the tile. upon placing two fans and hacking the shit out of them to make one power the other, i declared it to be pretty neat. then, i just needed to make some more machine prefabs and program that useless extra button in the build menu to be a new mode dedicated to connecting things together.

before anything else, i fucked around in fluffsim for about five seconds to see how it handled this whole thing. then, i wrote instructions for both building and the new mechanical mode to be displayed instead of just 'press escape to go back'. after that, i got started on the new mode. the controls were straightforward: click an object to select it, click it again to deselect it, click another object to link it, click that object again to unlink it. seeing it work relatively well for the first time was exciting!

good shit. it took a significant amount of tweaking to get it working perfectly, but good shit. next thing on the list was making something that would give that system meaning and also let me know if any of it even worked in the first place. the easiest thing i could think of was the button. it just outputted a signal whenever anything touched it, and i decided to test it by constructing a simple murder volcano.

you can kinda see what i was trying to do here. the button was placed away from the structure itself so that the thing triggering it didn't get blown away by the obscene amount of fans under the main hell chamber. the results prove that the system itself works flawlessly, even if the fans weren't quite strong enough to achieve that murder volcano effect i was looking for. now, with the addition of some gates and functional components, this new feature will be pretty much complete! i don't have many ideas for this beyond the basic logic system, so leave a comment if you have an idea for something you think would be useful and/or fun to fuck around with.