⭐ Forensic Friday 7: Fire, Gas, Temperature, Power Galore!
Welcome back to forensic friday! As we are coming to the first year anniversary of Containcorp we have a lot of new features to show off! Over the past 2 weeks Dillan has been finishing up the power system whilst I’ve been toying up a gas system for the upcoming Chefs. Since we have been quite involved in development this fortnight, we have unfortunately been lacking with anomaly documents, so patience is greatly appreciated in that department. Now onto the new features!
Fire Frenzy #
Fire Effects #
Fire now has a pretty neat fire distortion effect, it uses a distortion shader I personally wrote to achieve the effect. I believe it helps fire feel much more real and dangerous. Check it out below!
Foam Walls #
A new wall type which aids you in extinguishing those pesky fires. Facility wide blazes are no longer a threat! Well if you’re smart about the placement that is. They explode on contact with fire, releasing a foamy mixture of fire suppressive surfactants, hopefully putting out the fire
(⊙﹏⊙).
Below is a demonstration of it in action, plus a poorly orchestrated comparison between different thicknesses. 
Gas System #
Overview #
Now to the main event, the gas system, oooOOOooo. The gas system is quite a necessary system as if facilitates a lot of future features such as refrigeration (already implemented), anomaly containment, ventilation etc etc. In basic terms, every room creates a “gas volume” which describes all the gases in that room. Gas volumes, aside from having data about gases in the room, have a temperature, and can even hold gases at pressure. There will likely be many tweaks to the gas system, but for now I am happy with the implementation. The gas system results in some interesting effects such as doors exploding if the room pressure is too great, or fires putting themselves out if they run out of oxygen! How exciting!
Gas viewer #
There is also a new button! To view deadly gases accumulation. What is a deadly gas accumulation? One example would be a room filling up with dangerous levels of carbon dioxide, or a room running out of oxygen. I hope this gives you a good idea
Explosions (BWAHHH) #
Partly related and unrelated to the gas system is explosions! Now things can go wrong in a more explosive manner. Explosions propagate a fireball in a set radius, leaving damage and destruction in its wake. Not all explosions need to be so fiery though. Foam walls are an example of a non burn-inducing explosion. Explosions can damage tiles and NPCs and are generally not something to play around with, unless you are testing the game; in that case, go ham! An interesting revelation to this is that NUKES are now totally 100% possible. The potential is endless…
Gas explosion from highly pressurised room
Refrigeration #
Coolers cooling things down #
I feel like we gotta cool things down a bit…introducing THE COOLING UNIT. A handy appliance which allows you too cool down rooms to make that freezer you have always wanted. In all seriousness, rooms being able to be cool directly ties into the function of chefs and cooking since where else will you store your meats and other frozen produce and such? Coolers work by having 2 sides, a blue side and a red side. Hot air on the blue side gets shoved out onto the red side. Mixing the sides up could lead to a non-functioning freezer, so the sides are clearly labelled before placement. See below!
Power System #
After going fully in-depth about power last week, I’ll keep this short. In the last week, I’ve worked on implementing more power items such as switches and floor lights, as well as stabilising both types of transformers. These are a lot less buggy but are still prone to creating random errors that aren’t re-creatable, so the testing progress is going to be fun! However, it is so nearly finished now that by the next blog post I should be working on something new – fingers crossed.
Alongside these new power devices, I’ve also implemented a special “power mode”. When toggled on, power lines change colours to represent the power type that they are, and any devices that are low on power, or have no power show flashing icons alerting you to that fact. Power mode isn’t a necessary feature for the power system to exist but is extremely useful when working with multiple power types and building complex power networks, where all the black wires can seem very overwhelming.
You are also able to directly connect wires if you so please. When connecting power devices together, a preview line shows up to make it easier to see the actions you are doing. There are small features such as the line turning red if it’s unable to connect together that sum up to make it seem quite intuitive
Batteries/Accumulators/Capacitors (We don’t know what we call em) #
David implemented a cool design for accumulators, which are currently 0% functional as of now. David jutting in here. I designed the sprites for a accumulator/battery component and decided to add a useful bar to show how full it is. In the original design the bars had blending modes, so I spent an hour or 2 working on the shaders the bring the design to life in game. Here’s a side by side of the design with the final look, plus a GIF of the batteries charging.
The color of the bar had to change to make it more readable
infinite energy?
Case Closed #
It seems that forensic friday is wrapping up for the 7th time, crazy to think after a year plus on working on Containcorp we have come this far. We never thought we would actually see the project to the end, but as the weeks go on, it feels like the summit of the dev mountain is almost in sight. Anyways, the past 2 weeks have been quite a feature intensive bout, and we can only hope the next 2 weeks follow the trend. We thank all active and inactive (not that the server is very alive right now anyways) members for sticking around. Any to the people reading this blog post right now, you are helping us more than you could know! Anyways that’s a wrap from Dillan and I. Until the next forensic case!
The Team,
Plasmarc Studios