Day 2: Steamy walks

Did some more work on the way steam flows visually and dungeon movement. Tomorrow I'll try to get some combat stuff in.

Work done:

• Basic movement around the dungeon (turning even!) and a grid map that has solid walls
• Nodes which when powered correspond to actions (just whether you can move for now)
• A slightly altered UI which removes the middle tab that was going to be used for loot. I think I will just use the upper right screen instead and make it bigger.
• Playing around with the way you can see steam in the pipes. Right now it's a filled image and the pipes have little windows you can see into the levels. Really what it should be is that the pipe's get a thicker color the more steam is in them. Also the windows may be too small.
  • Windows: Steam can be seen in pipes by their little windows. Some pipes may not have windows. Currently implemented but makes testing hard and playing harder
  • Background steam levels: Change the background of the pipe to the steam color. Will change for now since it's easy and obvious.
  • Tooltip indicator- when you mouse over a pipe it has a visual indicator for it's pressure. Currently have a tooltip that only shows it numerical.
  • X-Ray: A toggle option to see the x-ray of everything. Would be awesome but too much dev time right now.

• More robot drawings of course (next one's a test with a different perspective, not-mirrored)

I also took a look at Factorio's liquid mechanics and found that Zach had posted an explanation Bureau of Steam Engineering's flow equation. Short answer: Factorio ran into the same problem of not calculating multiple connections at the same time, which means that a tee junction will always favor one direction over the other. Reminds me of the Knapsack Problem where calculating the right distribution is mathematical challenging. Was pumped when I found Zach's own explanation of BSE:

For the curious: the pressure algorithm works by iterating over all paired connectors, each with a volume estimate and a pressure, and exchanging a “steam amount” (representing n in the equation PV = nRT) to neutralize the pressure between the two components. This is repeated until the pressures between each pair of connectors are neutralized to an acceptable degree (I believe I used a value of around 0.15 PSI). 

Less pumped when I realized I've forgotten a lot of algebra. Any case I think I'm going in the right direction, will try mess with some numbers and seeing if I can smooth it out. Worse case scenario I just up the tick speed and decrease the incoming steam and it will sort itself out. Also joined a game jam to give me a more of a sense of time-frame and meet some new people. If any are reading, hello! Can't wait to see what you come up with!