Radars marked for deconstruction eventually loose that marking?

[Usul]

Hi!

To conserve power I have switched off some radars in the wilderness by zooming onto them from the map view, then marking them using the deconstruction planner. After a long time, several days in real-life, to my surprise and confusion, those red X have disappeard and the radars are operating again. I have repeated the process 4 times, unable to reproduce the cause. All I can say is that upon saving and reloading, the red X are still there and stay for a long while. I just haven't noticed when they dissappear.

Using latest.

Can someone explain?

Thanks!

[Usul]

Just received this info from User IronCartographer on Discord:

Turns out that deconstruction plans disappear in under 6 hours
I tested it in a matter of minutes by starting a very small map and setting the UPS to be in the thousands
someone had an issue where ghosts disappeared because they were planned on top of things that needed to be removed first
when the decon marker was removed, so was the ghost image
it's still inconsistent
upgrade planner is infinite
manual ghosts are infinite
and destruction ghosts last a week

[MEOWMI]

So does it happen consistently? If so that sounds like enough cause for a real bug report even though it's a minor issue.

[IronCartographer]

Essentially, it has come to my attention that the planner timers are all over the place with design balance at the moment.

Blueprint ghosts: Infinite
Destruction ghosts: 7 days
Upgrade planner: Infinite
Deconstruction planner: 5 hours

On top of that, the only planner state with a visual timer (remnant ghosts that will expire) being 7 days by default is so long that the scale is meaningless during the course of most gameplay, as it ticks down through the indicator on the scale of...days, without explicitly saying so.

This isn't the Suggestions forum, but if I were to make a post over there, something bringing these into alignment would be a nice improvement for consistency and clarity. Two people in the past week or so have encountered confusing situations due to the expiration of deconstruction plans, and the ghost timer UI is at this point quite disconnected from player experience as well.

It would be a nice touch to have a clear and consistent timer display. If the various overlays have no suitable patterns, perhaps it could be displayed in the tooltip of the affected entity?

On the other hand, the timers could all be made infinite (by default) without too much trouble as well...it just wouldn't address the issue for any future mods or scenarios that might benefit from using custom timers.

[MEOWMI]

That definitely seems wrong to me. First of all, I didn't know anything about the expiring, which is already a shortcoming of the mechanic and its UX. - Is that actually what the purple bar on ghosts is, a countdown timer? That would be very interesting... I always thought it was a weird health bar that could make the ghost disappear if damaged enough.

I would also argue that there is little reason a deconstruction should be time-limited if construction or upgrade isn't. Furthermore, deconstructing via a specific planner (I assume that's what the 5h is) is almost always more intentional than deconstructing via alt+d (the 7 days?) so it even feels like those numbers should be swapped around.

The only reasoning for the timer I can see is preventing mistakes, in which case you need to communicate the existence of a timer and have a consistent predictable scheme for the mechanic, i.e. not different times for everything. Otherwise if it's simply a bug, then it should be fixed.

Mods could always be allowed to have custom timer lengths, if that's not already allowed then its just a limitation of the modding support in general.

Simply put, those timers seem wrong in a lot of ways even though I've never noticed them myself.

[posila]

So ... ghosts used to have very short timer - maybe 15 minutes. The timer was removed completely from ghosts created by blueprints somewhere around the time blueprints were made accessible from start of the game, I think. Destroyed entity ghost timer stayed, and not that long ago kovarex decided they could just not time-out either, but he liked to see the purple bar to be able to differentiate blueprinted entities from destroyed entitites, so he made them time out in 7 days. (If you didn't get to rebuilding that destroyed expansion in 168 hours, I think it is safe to assume it was dead to you and you weren't planning to go to revive it anyway.)

Deconstruction time out was added shortly after personal roboport, because people were leaving trees marked for deconstruction all over the map and then they started reporting that it was taking long time for bots to do the deconstruction jobs. It took long time for construction manager to cycle over all the jobs that could not be fullfilled and get to the jobs player was trying to get done at the moment. So we thought added 1 hour timeout to deconstruction jobs so that the abandoned jobs don't take up slots in the queue forever. Later this was increased to 5 hours.

Just wanted to put some background on how things got to this state.