Buildable Melting Ice

Construction of buildings on meltable ice tiles is no longer forbidden on Aquilo, but the building collapses when the ice melts.

Details

As described in Friday Facts #432, ice tiles on Aquilo which melt into the ocean were originally intended to support buildings that collapse as the ice heats, unless protected by concrete floor.

The mod Ice actually melts brings back this behavior, but building on heated areas still leads to awkward gameplay as described on the blog. In particular, in the current engine:

• Since melting is instantaneous, force-builds with concrete don't succeed because the ice melts before the concrete construction bots arrive.
• Placing ice platforms on heated ocean drains your inventory of this item without visible effect.

This mod makes ice-platform and ice-smooth melt into clones of themselves, which are processed by a runtime script to convert them into ocean tiles after a short time delay. For performance reasons, tiles far away from any player's camera melt more slowly.

This implementation solves the issues above and some polish is added over the incomplete implementation inside the base code: entities die rather than disappear and there is a visual+audio effect to melting.