3 – Dactorio: Merging and Concept Art – More progress is being made!

These few weeks were pretty harsh, other stuff taking priority over this project sadly. However, after spending some time getting back to speed after a long break, there is progress again!

I toiled a bit and managed to merge the ECS testing code to the conveyor belt system code. Of course, it didn’t work on the first try:

After fixing the errors, I managed to get 8ms regular update times and 150ms item position update times (that I run four times a second) with 4000 belts and 16000 items… So I can fit the process in a second if I want to. However, it would be very bad to distribute this calculation over so many frames, and this would also leave me a tiny breathing room for all the other processing required.

Given the belt position update logic wasn’t running on DOTS, I could have worked on moving that over to make that code run in parallel. But I decided I need some gameplay already, so I pushed more optimizations further in the development. There will always be time for optimization later. And who knows, maybe I won’t even have people making factories that big.

On the game concept side, I had a great inspiration moment. Instead of the usual boring ‘you need to make stuff and sell it,’ I will go with a different route. Inspired by Frostpunk (Awesome game), I decided to make the game about a mars colony. You start with making the basics using robots, and then the humans arrive to do science and other things. Humans need food and all the other fun things to survive, and they eat even when you are offline! So either you need to log in every now and then to adjust your machinery and keep your humans alive or set up resilient production lines 🙂 Surviving Mars also inspires me, so we will see how it goes. Now it’s time to get to a stage with actual playtesting to adjust the mechanics

Next update post will arrive with actual gameplay, hopefully 🙂