Greetings!
My first post is here finally. Have been hard at work making the game demo ready for the Steam Next Fest and it is shaping up to be playable and running well already. The game has some technically demanding features, so it has been quite an effort optimizing and having the architecture in place for everything to work out and run well. - Fluid simulation:
There is no usual voxel game "fake" water that just stays still or magically spreads few blocks, but instead all fluid is fully simulated and mass preserved.
- Temperature simulation:
Biomes have different base temperatures, but machines also generate heat, which needs to be managed.
For example tightly packed computer clusters (bonuses if built adjacent to each other) generate a lot of heat which needs to be dealt with by heat sinks or active coolers as overheating reduces building's efficiency or can even destroy them at extreme temps.
Heat is also useful resource, as one can take advantage of the pre-warmed water coming from heat sinks for example piping it to the boilers, which heat water for steam turbines, saving a lot of fuel as water doesn't need to be heated as much or at all.
- Large scale factories:
The goal is to allow some truly massive factories even if the simulations are complex. Game already runs very well on large scale, but there is still room for optimizations.
- Infinite* fully modifiable world:
The terrain is procedurally generated and expands endlessly, which creates some interesting technical problems to solve related to all the simulations going on with the game. *Technically not infinite, as hardware limitations come at play eventually, but for any practical gameplay no one will hit any limits. Here are some quick videos I recoreded showing some of the test setups I've been trying out with large numbers of belts and items. The quality seems quite bad and blurry on the videos as I'm still figuring out best way to record, in game is definitely much better!
Here is a video of similar large scale setup with foundries smelting iron.
If you got interested about the game, don't forget to wishlist, thanks!
There will be demo out soon, in 1-2 weeks!