Adds a game map and searchlights which sweep for foes at great range, alerting you while directing adjacent turrets to snipe spotted foes.
Designed to dovetail with the early-mid game, searchlights provide:
- Circuit network interfaces for search & detection I/O
- Incentive to automate lamp & combinator production in the early game
- New tactics to assault biter bases without leap-frogging turrets!
Create a connected circuit network, for eg connect a constant combinator to a decider combinator with a red wire. Now press CTRL+X and drag over the const combinator. In vanilla 2.0/space-age, you will see the wires remain connected while you drag the selection around, the wires will remain connected while in range. With this mod active, the wires are lost as seen as you pick up the selection and remain lost when you paste the selection.
This has been an issue since 2.0 dropped nearing 8 months now, I REALLY want to use the mod but if you use circuits at all its completely unsable, doubly so because the mod itself is so circuit dependant.
Sucks that its been in a more or less unplayable state for the entirety of space age :/
Hey y'all, I figured this was taking long enough that you deserve an explanation.
Ever since the API changes for 2.0 launched, a lot of new issues cropped up that have been tricky to fix. Some of them I've just been hoping would be patched away by Wube, so I haven't been super motivated to address them. This particular issue though doesn't seem like it will solve itself.
Usually, when I get a crash report, I can tell instantly what the fix should be since I'm given a line number and a little context about what the change is that I need to make.
Unfortunately, in this case, the solution is vague. I've been chipping away at reading the the updated api documentation & patch notes every week or so, but nothing has leapt out to me as a solution.
What this mod has been doing since 1.0 is, whenever the player makes any kind of blueprint, the mod iterates through the blueprint's contents as a stack and removes the various "hidden" entities that this mod uses. The hidden entities are workarounds for how the game normally didn't let you connect turrets to wires, boost the range of turrets, sleep expensive entity logic, etc.
Unfortunately, when you cut & paste entities and then iterate that blueprint content stack, the blueprint stack doesn't show the wires where I'd expect (see gif below). So, when I try to copy back the "cleaned" item stack that has had all the hidden entities purged, the wires get dropped.
local old = itemStack.get_blueprint_entities()
for index, e in pairs(old) do
if e.wires ~= nil then
game.print(serpent.block(e.wires))
else
game.print("no wires")
end
end
I'm still looking at this, and I really do hope to have the solution soon, but I genuinely don't know when I'll stumble upon the answer. It might be this weekend or it might be a few more months. I usually have a few hours a week to work on the mod, but often not the motivation. My personal life has unfortunately taken several downward turns over the past few years, but I do still enjoy working on the mod when I have the energy for problem solving. Thank you all for your patience, compliments, bug reports, and even your gripes. I'm sorry this has been an issue for so long, but I will try to double down on this issue since I know it affects the "base game" and that's an unacceptable bug for a mod to have.
I don't recall if this is a 2.0 feature, but wires are connectable to turrets now in the basegame.
As for the rest, I don't know how feasible this is, but would it be possible to have the mod's temporary workaround of removable hidden entities only trigger if searchlights are in the blueprint cut/paste?
That way even if you can't fix it, at least the rest of the base game should work fine and would be a lot easier for the end user to work around the issue.
Either way, thanks for your work on the mod. I understand you're doing this as a hobby, I appreciate all your work on it.
I don't recall if this is a 2.0 feature, but wires are connectable to turrets now in the basegame.
That's right, wires to turrets was introduced in 2.0.
I might do away with that particular hidden entity in the far future, but for now the entity is embedded so deeply into the mod it's gotta stay.
As for the rest, I don't know how feasible this is, but would it be possible to have the mod's temporary workaround of removable hidden entities only trigger if searchlights are in the blueprint cut/paste?
That's what it's looking like I'll have to do.
I found a blog post from Wube stating that the wire behavior demonstrated above is pretty intentional: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-402
"To minimize problems, these connections are only remembered when using the cut tool, and are not (and cannot) ever be transferred into the blueprint library or blueprint export string."
It's not very satisfying, to me at least, but I'll probably be able to get a work around done sometime this weekend.
In the meanwhile, thank you all for the encouragement and kind words!
I've just released version 2.3.13 which has the work around which tries to fix dropped wire connections.
Since I can't modify the blueprint while in the cursor, I now wait for a ghost to be built, and then update the ghost.
Hopefully this doesn't cause much of a performance lost when pasting down giant blueprints...
1.) The configuration interface is missing. Like you know, the one in the second screenshot in the mod page that lets you set guard position and define the patrol area.
2.) Blueprints with searchlights cannot be rotated which is an issue for anyone that has "wall" blueprints with turrets. I don't remember if this is new or old issue though.
1) I've seen that before, usually rebuilding the searchlight fixes that. I'm not sure what I can do to fix this myself, but I've been tracking it since one of the earlier space age patches. It might be a longer while before I figure out the fix for that.
2) The searchlight blueprints not being able to rotate is new to me, I had no idea but I'm seeing it now. I could swear that rotating was working in an earlier space age save I had... I should be able to take a look at this soon.
I'm designing stuff on the editor and I cannot get the interface to show up no matter how many times I take it down and rebuild it.
Interesting, I just tried using the editor and both the vanilla turret GUI popped up and the searchlight config GUI.
Would you mind sending me your save file @Ellthan ?
@Ellthan
Thanks! Ah yeah I see what's happening, the regular turret interface seems to be exactly in the way of the config panel, at least when I try running your save on my game.. I'm still trying to find a solution for this.
In the meanwhile, can you try dragging the interface bar around, or closing just the top-most UI?
