[0.18.2] Turret placement in ghost mode doesn't respect direction

[DrLogiq]

The title should be mostly self explanatory, if you place turrets in ghost mode, they will not be placed with the rotation you give them (always facing up).

[Loewchen]

What version of the game?
What type of turret?

[eradicator]

What version of the game?
What type of turret?

Can confirm for 0.18.2 gun+laser. Flamethrowsers work fine. Blueprints work fine, but manual ghost placing with shift+leftclick creates only north-facing ghosts.

[valneq]

Since gun turrets and laser turrets automatically orient themselves toward the enemy, this is a purely visual issue – and only for turrets that have not yet seen enemies, am I correct? Or are you concerned about the time it takes the turret to change its orientation?

[Deadlock989]

Since gun turrets and laser turrets automatically orient themselves toward the enemy, this is a purely visual issue – and only for turrets that have not yet seen enemies, am I correct? Or are you concerned about the time it takes the turret to change its orientation?

You can set the initial facing direction of a turret if you have the turret to build, i.e. you can rotate it while it's a "green ghost in your hand" and you have the turret to place - but if you shift-click instead, the ghost defaults to north and the bots always build one facing north.

This is also inconsistent with copy-paste and blueprints, which do respect the direction of the ghost turrets - if you rotate the paste / blueprint, the resulting ghosts do face in the right directions and the bots do build them the right way.

Turning time can indeed be a factor, especially for modded turrets with a slow turn rate.

I have also had to field "bug reports" / complaints about not being able to rotate pan-directional turrets after placement. You can rotate an existing turret that has a limited arc of fire, but not turrets that can fire in any direction.

[Deadlock989]

I learned that you can kind of fix this by giving all turrets the turret_base_has_direction property, even things like ammo turrets and laser turrets. The placement direction is then respected when the turret is placed as a ghost, and if you don't define a limited firing arc, it continues to engage in all directions. It also makes the turret rotatable by the player after placement. The one disadvantage is that the turret will then always return to its "set" direction setting after it has run out of targets, instead of choosing the nearest defined direction (usually 4 compass points, can be 8 if the turret animations support it). So if you did want these turrets to be able to engage things from literally any direction, the turning time to engagement could be much worse more than half the time. However, you can offset this by giving the turrets an increased "prepare range" so that they are always "ready" by the time the target comes into firing range no matter what.

[Kalpa]

This has been an annoyance for me since forever, never did consider it a bug so didn't bother reporting it. I want my artistic fortress designs to have the turrets face the right way without me having to go cycle them manually during the construction.

Can confirm for .18.6 as well, laser/gun turrets ghosted manually will face northwards.

[Rseding91]

This was brought up internally as well and we decided we don't care since it has zero impact on the game logic.

So, I'm going to move this to not a bug and if another developer comes across it and wants to go change it they can.