shapez.io

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I am hitting a point where wiring exceeds physical space of the factory it controls, in one or both dimensions.

E.g. I have designed extremely narrow (4 squares tall) and long mixer/painter factory to stack vertically x16 and now scratching my head how would I possibly fit the necessary color analyzer into it.

It would be great to decouple dimensions of wiring from dimensions of physical space.

My idea would be a Chip - a wires layer square with 4 connectors, that you can open and edit a wires sub-layer inside of.

why not just make the module larger? it'll look empty on the buildings layer but don't see what's wrong with that. anyway, just like buildings, wires are meant to be able to design for compaction - a chip building would really discourage this

Because I want to design for compaction? :) And size times 16 adds up fast.

I like messing with wires for good layout, but I feel they are finnicky about about touching and orientation, which results in challenging sizes relative to the buildings layer. Wires are more "verbose" than buildings, but forced to exist in same amount of space.

P.S. edited original a bit, I wrote building, but meant to this as wires element, are they called buildings too or not? Fuzzy on terminology. :)

(It should be called a wires building, I think)

The thing is, such a building would leave no incentive to compact wires. (If it had limited space, you'd be designing around the arbitrary shape and size it has.)

anyway, shapez-land is "infinite" for a reason lol

I wonder if these would look like Blender custom nodes. I mean, I wouldn't mind. Another thing could be that they cannot be changed while running, thus allowing them to execute in one tick.

but that would also mean

1. no incentive for reducing gate depth
2. weird sub-tick system and possible performance issues
3. the ability to pause buildings, but under an oddly specific circumstance

I don't totally like this idea, but I will say that it has its merits. Perhaps include this in the sandbox version or Puzzle DLC? Not going to elaborate on how that might work right now though, sorry,

the sandbox version is for testing and debugging - a chip seems overkill and pretty useless there the Puzzle DLC is for puzzles... and it's a game-changing feature in a DLC (unless you mean within a puzzle, but that leads to the overkill part)