DevBlog #86 | Foundry Fridays: High Voltage Quality of Life
Hello everyone!
In the previous dev blog I was asking for feedback about removing powerline collisions and I received a surprising amount of suggestions surrounding the high voltage system. Many of them were interesting and not a huge amount of work, so I’ve decided to do a quality of life pass and implement the best and most do-able suggestions.
[h3]Removed Collisions[/h3]
The majority of people wanted the powerline collisions to be removed, but many of you still preferred to be able to tell if it happens so clipping can be avoided if desired. So we removed the collisions and now show yellow warning boxes if something clips.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Those warning boxes (and the message on the screen) can be disabled in the game settings. For me it’s not yet clear if they should be enabled by default. While it can be a bit noisy, it seems worse in the preview video since we’re explicitly trying to highlight it. Any thoughts on that?
[h3]Increased Cable Range[/h3]
In an effort to make working with high voltage powerlines more comfortable I drastically increased the cable & build range when using the powerline tool. Stack size for the poles has been increased as well.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Cable Tension Setting[/h3]
I really liked the suggestion about adding the ability to build perfectly straight powerlines to bury them in underground tunnels, so I added a toggle that lets you swap powerline tension.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Radial Menu Pole Selection[/h3]
Those of you who have been playing the game for a long time will remember the old powerline tool having a radial menu for Connecting/Disconnecting powerlines. This has been removed when we changed it so that you have to use demolition mode to get rid of powerlines. Since that the radial menu isn’t used on the powerline tool and that allowed for adding support for toggling the active power pole by radial menu while placing them. We still had to go for the middle mouse button (can be changed) since right click is already used for resetting the powerline.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Transformer Group Names[/h3]
This one has been requested for a long time and we never really had the time to work on it because it’s quite complex to solve. But now I was finally able to implement names for transformer groups (grouped by the low voltage grid they are placed on). In your powerline frame you can now add labels to groups of transformers.
What made the feature tricky is that it’s not obvious how to handle when those groups merge or split. But I think I found acceptable solutions for most of those scenarios and I’m looking forward to player reception.
We also have other quality of life improvements in the works for the next update, and I will share those in future dev blogs.
Thank you for reading and keep the suggestions (about all sorts of things!) coming,
-mrmcd
Follow us on socials:
Stay tuned for more news!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/
In the previous dev blog I was asking for feedback about removing powerline collisions and I received a surprising amount of suggestions surrounding the high voltage system. Many of them were interesting and not a huge amount of work, so I’ve decided to do a quality of life pass and implement the best and most do-able suggestions.
[h3]Removed Collisions[/h3]
The majority of people wanted the powerline collisions to be removed, but many of you still preferred to be able to tell if it happens so clipping can be avoided if desired. So we removed the collisions and now show yellow warning boxes if something clips.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Those warning boxes (and the message on the screen) can be disabled in the game settings. For me it’s not yet clear if they should be enabled by default. While it can be a bit noisy, it seems worse in the preview video since we’re explicitly trying to highlight it. Any thoughts on that?
[h3]Increased Cable Range[/h3]
In an effort to make working with high voltage powerlines more comfortable I drastically increased the cable & build range when using the powerline tool. Stack size for the poles has been increased as well.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Cable Tension Setting[/h3]
I really liked the suggestion about adding the ability to build perfectly straight powerlines to bury them in underground tunnels, so I added a toggle that lets you swap powerline tension.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Radial Menu Pole Selection[/h3]
Those of you who have been playing the game for a long time will remember the old powerline tool having a radial menu for Connecting/Disconnecting powerlines. This has been removed when we changed it so that you have to use demolition mode to get rid of powerlines. Since that the radial menu isn’t used on the powerline tool and that allowed for adding support for toggling the active power pole by radial menu while placing them. We still had to go for the middle mouse button (can be changed) since right click is already used for resetting the powerline.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Transformer Group Names[/h3]
This one has been requested for a long time and we never really had the time to work on it because it’s quite complex to solve. But now I was finally able to implement names for transformer groups (grouped by the low voltage grid they are placed on). In your powerline frame you can now add labels to groups of transformers.
What made the feature tricky is that it’s not obvious how to handle when those groups merge or split. But I think I found acceptable solutions for most of those scenarios and I’m looking forward to player reception.
We also have other quality of life improvements in the works for the next update, and I will share those in future dev blogs.
Thank you for reading and keep the suggestions (about all sorts of things!) coming,
-mrmcd
Follow us on socials:
Stay tuned for more news!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/