Factorio Forums

Unlike the signal/train stop placement markers the offshore pump placement markers show in every "possible" tile even if a pump can't be placed there due to collision with another pump.
(The "double" pumpe placement is probably not-a-bug so i'm not reporting that seperately for now.)

Looking at that picture I actually think the double placement should be a bug, but whichever dev gets this issue can make that call, (and can probably fix both at the same time).

I am going to flip this and say the offshore pump placement marker won't be changed to check for entity collisions,
but the double placement should be fixed.

@posila:
How do the rail signal markers check for "collision" then? They are aware of neighbouring/opposite side signals. I just said "collision" because that was easiest to describe the behavior.

Rail signal/Train stop markers are rendered by rail entities, so it has to check only positions around the rail.

Offshore pump markers are rendered with tiles - which means they take advantage terrain buffer and not be rechecked and redrawn every tick. If entity collision checks are done too, it would have to invalidate terrain buffer everytime an entity is built or destroyed, or moved (while you are holding an offshore pump in cursor), which I think is not worth it.
Since these markers are between terrain and entities, I don't see problem with having them also on positions that collide with entities.

@posila

Well. If you say updating the cache in on_build/mined is too expensive (computaionally/development time wise) i guess it can't be helped.

From a mechanic/didactic point of view i still don't like having a visually "noisy" "Hey! Build stuff here!" marker like that in places where you can't actually build stuff though, especially because all the other "green marker" things in game are always positions where you can actually build. The (novice) player doesn't know/care about the technical background of why those two types of "green markers" behave differently.

For 0.16.16 I changed offshore pump collision box from 3x1 to 3x2 so they can't be placed so that they overlap.
Thanks for the report.

how will this effect pumps in existing savegames?

Their collision box will be resized but othewise nothing happens. If a pump collides with something after a migration, it still will be there, will work, but if you remove it you won't be able to place it back.