How to do placeable electricity cables that work like the ones in "Prison Architect"

Question

I would like to know one (of the probably many) ways to code a (sort of) Prison-Architect-ish electricity cable building system.

Here's a picture of what I mean:

1. How can I detect that cables are connected?
2. How can I detect if the block it's connected to is a power source?

And these 2 (above) will all be placed inside a dictionary when they are placed.

That dictionary does not yet have a key type, but the second type is a sprite.

How should I do this?

Answer 1

The easiest way is giving a variable "conected = false" to every electric item and then, starting from a energy source, do the following:

function adjacents(tile){
    return [
        getTile(tile.x-1,tile.y-1), getTile(tile.x,tile.y-1), getTile(tile.x+1,tile.y-1),
        getTile(tile.x-1,tile.y), tile, getTile(tile.x+1,tile.y),
        getTile(tile.x-1,tile.y+1), getTile(tile.x,tile.y+1), getTile(tile.x+1,tile.y+1),
    ]
}

// DO FOR EVERY TILE DIRECTLY CONECTED TO THE ELECTRICITY SOURCE
tile.checkAdjacents = function(){
    var adjacents = adjacents(this);

    for(var a in adjacents)
    if(adjacents[a].type == "cable" || adjacents[a].type == "electricItem"){
       adjacents[a].connected = true;
       adjacents[a].checkAdjacents();
       return true;
   }
}

return false;

So it'll be setting all conected cables to "connected=true"

Answer 2

Prison Architect uses "pieces" of cables, it is not all one long cable, it is a sum of lots of "pieces" (or squares, not sure how to define it):

Image here (The bright green conected pieces are cables)

I don´t know how they do it, and I bet they are not going to tell us, but I can tell you how I would do it.

1. Assign each "piece" of cable an state (an integer, for example).

   You assign each of this states to two sides (Up and down, Up and left(For turns, for example), Left and Right...., all the combinations).

   (Edit: You can also do this with four booleans, up, down, left, right, This might be a lot easier)

   You then can run a loop checking this state in each piece of cable and determine if they are connected to the left, right, up or down. (They will be conected if there is cable in this position).

2. Assuming (1) is implemented, you only need to check if one of those conected cables is a power source. (For example adding each piece of cable a boolean isPowerSource)

I hope I explained that well, my english is not really good.