A couple of new things that you can see here (click for full-size). Capacitors (the blue components with the lights) allow you to store more total power. So for instance you might make a vehicle which doesn’t generate a whole lot of power (because generators are relatively expensive) but has a couple of capacitors so it can store a lot of power. That way you can hopefully last the length of a fight before your power runs out, and recoup in the next lull.

I’m also aware that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for all weapons to need energy when they look mostly like gunpowder weapons which should be self-powered. I’ll think about it more later, but there will definitely be pure energy weapons as well (e.g. lasers), and there’ll also be cooling required eventually which can apply to all weapon types as well. Gunpowder-y weapons may switch to needing cooling only.

Second new thing is the red boxes like you can see above the chassis. Hopefully it’s sort of obvious in-game what those mean. These are “reserved” areas where you can’t place parts even though there’s nothing there – in this case because the driver’s entrance hatch is there. It didn’t really make sense before where the chassis would have no snap points on top, but you could still build directly above it if you did so off of other parts.

Internally I’ve also made some big changes over the last couple of days. All parts are now loaded on startup and allowed to run their setup scripts, as well as creating their Build Screen inventory previews. When new parts are created, they’re now cloned off of those original parts which have already run their setup. More importantly, the Build Screen no longer reloads every part every time it’s opened! The one set of everything is persistent right throughout the game.