Storages are one of the main gameplay elements, so its important to make them act understandable are easy configurable.
Old Storages
Since the last iteration, the there existed input and output storages, that are related to the activity. Activities needed an input storage for consuming and output storages for producing resource boxes. Beside that there are general storages that can have in and out behaviors, special storages e.g. for the dock or the shuttle bay and many more.
The old design had several hardcoded behaviors, depending on the type of the storage and how they are used. It was build at the start of the development and being improved a lot of times, but the major design survived till these days.
New Storages
Now all of that has been replaced by just one kind of storages with several options. These options replacing the old special behaviors and make them way easier to understand and as a good side effect, the player can change them to their needs. It depends a bit on the kind of storage what options are changeable by the player or not, due to for some special storages, it doesn't make sense to change them.
To make it easy, the activity storages get automatically options, depending on what interior items are placed in the blueprints. So if activities just using it as an input storage, the storage will be preconfigured as only input behavior, but it can be changed later afterwards.
The Options
Input Storage Option
Not Allowed
No Input connections are allowed.
Request Only Full Boxes
This is the default behavior for the Activity storages. They just request boxes when they are full, so not so many transport actions are triggered.
Request Partial If Empty
In some cases the other box is filling very slow, but its essential to get that as fast as possible, to get the activity to be able to work. This will be only triggered when the storage has no more boxes, so its not filling all up.
Request Partial
This is a special option that is default for construction storages to be able to grab all resources they need at the building lot.
Output Storage Option
Not Allowed
No output connections are allowed.
Auto Send Only Full Boxes
This is the default behavior for Activity storages. They just send boxes when they are full.
Auto Send Unused
In some cases it can be useful to send a box out, when its not used by the room anymore, e.g. when an activity stopped.
Force Empty
This is a special option and is used e.g. for the Dock or dismantle building lots.
Problem Option
There are 2 different problems that can be configured. Full storage and empty storage. After several playtests i figured out, that players use the storage in different ways, so sometimes, the "full" is good, sometimes its bad.
For each Storage, the player can now configure them depending on the usage:
- Error (Red Icon)
- Warning (Yellow Icon)
- or nothing should be shown
Choose Connection Overlay
To round the storage changes up, i also improved the Connect Storage Overlay. I used the new approach what i developed for the Person Activity and added also existing ones and show problems e.g. for maximum connections.
Thanks
to the growing community for all the ideas and feedback.
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