Factorio Forums

There is no reason I shouldn't be able to align the placement of this blueprint to seven tiles and make the train loading bay. This inability breaks the UX magic of 0.13 train tracks and forces me to think in terms of the 0.12 train-track-design UX -- all of a sudden, I'm not building a train "track" -- that is some high-level concept that has nothing to do with trains -- instead I'm just placing an arbitrary shit pile of completely unrelated 2x2 straight-train-track pieces on the floor, which, did we forget to mention, consists of only 25% valid train-track-tile positions and 75% magical anti-train-track force-fields which hash up the cosmos along every second longitudinal and latitudinal line, etc., etc.

Basically as an end-user there is no comprehensible reason I can't stamp down my train unloading bay in the correct position.

golfmiketango wrote:There is no reason I shouldn't be able to align the placement of this blueprint to seven tiles and make the train loading bay.

Since train tracks are 2x2 tiles, they also align in a 2x2 grid otherwise you could not close the 1x2 gap between the tracks. This might inconvenience you, but it certainly is not a bug.

Loewchen wrote:

golfmiketango wrote:There is no reason I shouldn't be able to align the placement of this blueprint to seven tiles and make the train loading bay.

Since train tracks are 2x2 tiles, they also align in a 2x2 grid otherwise you could not close the 1x2 gap between the tracks. This might inconvenience you, but it certainly is not a bug.

To be clear: I'm not objecting to the 2x2 placement grid of rails in general. I presume there's a good reason for it.

What I'm objecting to is a consequence of this, but, I'm hoping to convince you, not a necessary consequence, which creates unnecessary confusion and inconvenience for the player.

I think from the perspective of "Joe Gamer", it's a bit weird, but acceptable, that this blueprint can only be placed every other tile in the dimension perpendicular to the train track. But to tell Joe Gamer that this blueprint is no good for making every second train loader/unloader because it must align to every second tile in the dimension parallel to the track... OK it's not a bug to you or me, but, to Joe, I think it really looks like a bug as he hasn't thought through this whole 2x2 thing at all, nor should he have to.

You may say "well it's not possible, the rails are 2x2" which is of course true. But why not just add a 2x1 rail "terminus" object which is auto-substituted for the 2x2 at the end of the track in the blueprint, if the end user places rail out of alignment with the 2x2 grid in the direction of the track? Once a connection was completed to this terminus, it could simply be automatically replaced with the standard 2x2 rail object.

So, in effect, I guess what I'm really asking for is, why not use smoke and mirrors make the game behave as though the track pieces were 2x1 instead of 2x2?

I am assuming the rail builder changed in 0.13 to free the player from having to think about stuff like 2x2 rail grids and encourage them to think of the rail network as... well, a rail network. I really feel like this along-the-track blueprint alignment quirk is pretty much inexplicable, if we are of the mindset that "those are train tracks, they're special roads that trains can drive on" as opposed to i.e., "those are 2x2 train-track tiles that are placed on the map, along with rail signals and various other objects, in order to limit the set of potentially valid train routes considered by the combinatorial optimization heuristic that does train pathing..." you get the idea -- the user shouldn't really need to think about the finer points of this 2x2 train-track tile tessellation to play factorio.

Hm. I'd appreciate it if this topic could move to suggested improvements rather than not-a-bug; fwiw it was intended as such despite the word "bug" in the title.

Also: it occurs to me that there is a more radical but probably more elegant way to achieve the same thing as the smoke-and-mirrors approach described above: simply make all the 2x2 straight rail entities into 2x1 entities "for real."

Finally, although I said I'm sure the 2x2 grid is there for a reason, that's more of a rhetorical device than an actual fact. I do wonder if it might instead be some kind of historical accident. If, by any chance, it doesn't actually make life easier for factorio developers, then (and only then) I'm pretty sure it's got a negative impact on gameplay and therefore killing the 2x2 grid, entirely, would be a "Pareto"-improvement. To be clear, I'm not saying there's no good reason for it, only that I don't know of any reason for it myself (I am occasionally vaguely aware that I may not know everything).