Devtober Day #14

Welcome back to Day #14 of Devtober, in which... not much happens really. Kinda anticlimactic for the two-week checkpoint, but hey, what can you do.

Following the same trend as yesterday, today's been yet more coding work on the heat system. Usually I'd have a demo video to go along with the new changes, but I have lecture at 9 tomorrow and kinda want to go to sleep already, so tomorrow's the best I can do. 

As for the specifics, today I implemented the forge heating mechanics, including heat accumulation and dissipation for both the forge and heatable items. The forge has both a "heat" and a "target heat" value, and when the target heat is greater than the current heat, the forge will start increasing in temperature to match it. The target heat has a floor set by the current fuel the forge is using, but can be raised beyond that value through use of the bellows. I don't actually have a model for the bellows yet, though, so it's more of a debug command for now to simulate using a bellows.

When any heatable item is placed into the forge, it, too, will start heating up to the forge's current heat. Since all heatable items have a forging material attached to them, and by extension, a material type, it'll follow that material's specific color gradient to determine what color it should be at a certain temperature. And, of course, whenever they're not currently being heated, heatable items will constantly be dissipating heat as well. 

While there's a few variables at play to determine how fast or slow an item (or the forge) cools down, the general rule is that the hotter something is, the faster it will cool. In real life, these's a million and one other factors at play as to the cooling rate of objects, but my field of study isn't thermodynamics, so we'll just be keeping it simple around here for now.

Tomorrow, I plan to implement the anvil side on things, making it so that only heated ingots can be used to create smithing grids or add voxels to an existing one, as well as only allow smithing grids above their material's forging temperature to be smithed. There's also plenty of other minor bugs that I still have to take care of before I can more or less complete the heating system for now, but that's about the gist of it. 

And, once that's through, I can finally make my way back into the hell that is the pattern system and data saving/loading. 

Joy.

Anyway, that's about it for now. 'Till tomorrow,

- Ian, Lunarium Works