Better Melting Ice

Buildings can be placed upon meltable ice, but collapse when the ice melts.

Description

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 elegant mod Ice actually melts brings back this behavior, but building on heated areas still leads to the awkward gameplay described on the blog.

In particular, in the current game:

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 the player's camera melt more slowly. This effect solves the issues above, and some polish is added over Wube's incomplete implementation: entities visibly die (rather than disappear) and water splashes are created for a visual+audio cue.