Pykrete – Dev Blog 31
This has been an incredibly busy week – we’ve been working on various optimisations for the game, as well working on some mod tools. We will talk about both in the future – the mod tools are particularly exciting! We’ve also produced a very funky teaser trailer for the game – let us know what you think!
One of the first building materials you encounter in Fringe Planet is that of pykrete – which consists of a mixture of snow and wood fiber. It is a real life material as well, made of sawdust and ice – and as the United Kingdom is currently being hit by a massive snow storm we decide it would be fun to make it in real life. This is the sort of quality content you want from a dev blog post!
We made three blocks. The first block was traditional Fringe Planet material – just snow and wood. It was actually incredibly hard to mix the two together, so in the end we had to layer some snow, then some wood, then some more snow etc; once this was done it was firmly patted down into the container.
This doesn’t look like it would be too structurally sound – so the next thing was to create two more blocks – more traditionally water and wood which then goes into the freezer.
This was much easier to do – and the mixing was a lot more even than just trying to stir snow and wood around. All three were put into the freezer for the same amount of time – about 6 hours. And tada! You have pykrete!
Unfortunately they haven’t quite frozen yet, and we are out of day light for taking photos – we will update this blog post tomorrow with the various experiments we are planning to do!
UPDATE – 02/02/2019
Science has been done! The first test was to see if pykrete actually floated – and we are pleased to say it does.
The snow based pykrete seemed to float the best (it was higher in the water compared to the others – out of the other two the 50% pykrete seemed to float the best. After that we decided to test the strength – by shooting at it with a toy gun. All three did withstood the damage easily (please note: this is dealing with potential ricochets of ice, wood and plastic, we wore safety equipment and if you decide to replicate this – make sure you do as well!)
The best performer here was the snow and wood mix – it seemed to ignore the damage all together (except for the pellets get stuck on the surface). Finally, we decided to test it’s strength – by dropping a hammer on each one multiple times from a fixed height.
The traditional 18% pykrete cracked on the first drop. The snow/wood pykrete broken on the third drop. Finally, the 50% pykrete was withstood ten drops with very little visible damage. This stuff is incredibly strong!
Stay safe and try and stay warm folks, and remember – what we say we are going to do – we do it! (no matter how silly!)
There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try: