2/20/2023 0 Comments Poly bridge 1 13Maybe your bridge needs to have clearance for large ships to travel the waterway below, or maybe it needs to climb to a much higher elevation on the other side of a canyon. In the campaign, you're given a series of scenarios with different requirements and geographic features to take into account. I spent most of my time playing the campaign challenges, which are probably the most appealing part of Poly Bridge for someone like me. Also, if I'm being honest, it's pretty annoying to try and build a fairly standard truss bridge that I've seen a million time in my life, and end up with something that looks like it came out of a Doctor Seuss book. Most of the time I didn't need to be too obsessive about the details of my designs, but the more challenging the terrain and the more efficient you want to be, the more you need to sweat those details. The difference between 60 degrees and 70 isn't easy to eyeball in isolation, but it's easy to see the effects of a misjudged angle as an elegant substructure turns into a groaning mass of redundant pieces and excess weight. Eventually, I was pretty glad that Poly Bridge includes a subtle graphing-paper backdrop that you can use as you move pieces around. A latticework of support beams leading down to a single pillar in the middle of a span requires some pretty exact angles in order to deliver the load at the right place, at the right angle. Still, while it's easy to start slapping together joints beams in Poly Bridge, it requires a bit more precision that it might let on at first. A (slightly grating) bluegrassy playlist gives the whole thing a relaxed atmosphere that's more reminiscent of a backyard cookout than a math and physics test. Pieces snap together with satisfying physicality that reminds me of World of Goo, and the aesthetic isn't that far removed from a Road Runner cartoon. I've always considered engineering to be a rather dry subject matter, but Poly Bridge makes it all relatively effortless and fun to get into. Yet Poly Bridge delights me, even as it puts me in charge of one impending engineering disaster after another, forcing me to think about all the forces trying to knock a bridge right out from under a car, and all the work required to overcome those forces. With 58,000 bridges in the United States in need of repairs and rated structurally deficient, it's not something I like to think about. How many, I wonder, exist in that red zone under their full legal load? How many are just a bad cable or rivet away from dumping me into a river or ravine, just for the sake of saving a few grand in construction costs? But it's under-budget, and it did its job, so let's move on." It's at the exact moment that I conclude my, "Good enough!" calculation that I think about all the bridges I cross every day near my house, or on the long drive back to my family's home at the holidays. Then it holds and I get the option to move on to a new bridge-building challenge or modify my structure, and I think, "Boy, that bridge is barely holding it together. The troubling part is when I watch one of my bridges just barely survive its loading and unloading, where I can visibly observe the structure trembling on the verge of failure. Alternately, the piece will wobble, collapse, and dump your passengers and a good part of your bridge into a canyon or a river. If that piece can just hold, and the car rolls onto the other half of the span with its added supports and pillars, then you've done your job and built a useful bridge. A car followed by a heavy bus turns a set of struts and arches from a cheerful green to a neutral yellow to a wary orange to a bloody red, and it's right at that moment the excitement of civil engineering comes to life. Sometimes the path across is perilous, sometimes it is as sturdy as a horizontal oak.Īs something rolls across a painstakingly-constructed series of spans and supports in Dry Cactus' Poly Bridge, you can see the structural elements changing color as load is added or subtracted and they draw closer to their failure point. Every week, Rob Zacny crosses the chasm of Early Access to find a treat on the other side.
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