Disposal Adjacency Connections

Disposal connections use the “Disposal Adjacency Connector” script. Disposal connections are based on the basic connections and are similar to the other pipe connections. The disposal models themselves actually reside beneath the floor that the player walks on.

There is no need for the traditional “O” or “U” shapes but there are some unique “U” type shapes (see below). The “I” and “L” shapes act the same as they do in the basic connections.

The “T” shape acts the same in principle as well but is accompanied by arrow overlays. Due to the nature of disposals (objects travel through them), “T” shapes have a designated ‘exit’ connection side to determine which direction the object paths join into. This direction is represented by the arrow overlays (more info in the disposals documentation).

There isn’t a significant need for the “X” shape either but we do have one modeled and in theory the same directional arrows could be made for it to work the same as the “T” shape.

The unique disposal shapes are defined below:

Vertical - A special “U” type variant which connects to the north as well as turning upward and connects vertically to above-ground disposal machines. Pipes & wires cannot exist on a tile with a vertical disposal due to major clipping.

Vertical pipes only connect to pipes directly in front of them.

Broken - A special “U” type variant which replaces a variant when it gets abruptly destroyed (more about this below).

When a disposal pipe variant gets destroyed, instead of alerting nearby connections that there is no longer a connection at this location and to update their own shape as a result; we maintain connections to this tile and replace it with 1 broken variant per undestroyed connection.

This should naturally result with broken ends regardless of the size or shape of the destructive force.

Another interesting trait about disposals is that they can overlap each other in one specific situation.

2 intersecting straight (“I”) shapes can cross each other staying completely isolated from each other (similar to cables and wires).

This works easily in 2D but in 3D we do not have the additional space to actually have one disposal pipe go beneath the other.

Because we don’t have the extra space in 3D, our plan, as goofy as it may look, is to simply resort to allowing the disposal pipes to overlap and clip through each other in this specific situation.

You’ll notice the difference between the overlapping pipes and a true junction is that the overlapping pipes are missing the support rings near the intersection. (Alternatively we could design a new model for this overlap).