Settlement Concept

Ground Rules

It should not be possible to enter buildings. They might have limited "storage" for certain object types, typically because they consume them. But this should be heavily limited, lorries and other vehicles should be the main way to store stuff.

Buildings can't be rotated (sorry...). Buildings can't be grabbed.

Production Buildings

Production buildings are about giving the settlement access to certain types of items or vehicles. Each production building should cover one class of items or vehicles.

Compared to CR, these buildings should be relatively small. They should generally have no fundament.

Function

There are two ways to produce an item or a vehicle: Either by providing the raw materials required, or by buying it for an amount of gold. The latter requires the building to be currently owned by the player's team.

Both the amount of gold required for buying as well as the amount of raw materials required for building may depend on the item/vehicle to be produced. Note however that the variety of of raw materials used in each production building should be kept low. For example, the chamical lab should only accept sulphur and coal (just skip the intermediate steps from CR).

There are three ways to provide a building with the the raw materials required for a production:

• Throw the material into a collection zone. The collection zone should ignore all material that the building does not consume, as well as any surplus raw material.
• Drag & drop from the inventory
• Place a container vehicle in front of the production building, e.g. a lorry.

Production starts automatically once there is enough material present to produce an item. If there is surplus raw material, it gets placed in front of the building. The production building then enters a production state that might take some time to finish. The time may depend on the type of item being produced.

After production, a produced item or vehicle is either:

• Placed into a container in front of the production building (preferred)
• Dropped in front of the building

User Interface

Each production building has a production menu that is shown as an overlay shown above the building once a Clonk approaches it.

Most prominently, the production menu should show the currently selected product type, and what other product types are available. This should take the form of a menu, with the currently selected product type appropriately highlighted. Clicking on a product type that is not currently selected makes it the new selection. Clicking on a currently selected product attempts to buy it.

Furthermore, the menu must show the raw materials required for the production. This should take the form of a separate row in the production menu, showing all raw material types the building can consume. Each one should be annotated with a caption in the form of "X/Y" where X is the number of raw objects currently present and Y is the number of raw objects required to start production. Note that Y might be 0, in which case the object in question is not required for the selected product, but for other possible products of the building.

Lasty, the menu should show the cost of the object in gold. This could be hidden when the player's does not currently own the production building.

Ideas & Notes

• Exploration: Need a way to find out about stuff *before* you produce it. Mousing over unselected product types could semi-highlight them, show production cost and maybe some info text. Not much a fan of tooltips, need to think about where to place them.

• Automatically getting stuff out of lorries might be a bit too much. We don't really want production buildings to empty lorries while they are pushed through. Two fixes that don't kill the system:
  • Ignore lorries that aren't currently standing
  • Allow to "unselect" product by clicking somewhere neutral in the production menu

• Take over the traditional diagonal item exits? I find them cumbersome.

Structural Buildings

The objective of structural buildings is to give the owner a tactical advantage where it was built. They do this typically by providing shelter from enemy attacks, like providing a solid mask to hide behind.

... to be continued ...