Factorio Forums

What I tried to do:
I wanted to shift the rail signal sprites farther away from the rail centerline, specifically for the Cargo Ships Signal Buoys so they don't get run over by the ships. I tried to do this using the SpriteParamters "shift={-1,0}" and "rotate_shift=true" properties. There was no "unused prototype property" message in the verbose log file, so I assumed they were ingested somehow. Attached is the simple reproduction mod used to make the following screenshot.

What I expected to happen:
I expected the north-facing signal to shift to the left, the south-facing signal to shift to the right, and other directions to shift by a rotated vector away from the placement position. The yellow-and-red squares in this image show where I expected the signals to appear:
What actually happened:
As seen in the above image, the shift took effect without any concern for entity rotation, and every orientation of signal shifted to the left on the screen. The "rotate_shift" option seems to have had no effect. Since there is no documentation on what exactly this parameter does, either in general or in specific contexts, I don't know if I'm misunderstanding it, or if rotate_shift simply doesn't apply to rail signals. I would very much like this to be a bug that can be corrected, so that I don't have to re-render the signal buoys with different rotated offsets the way the original spritesheets did (back in 0.16).

Thansk for the report.
I am moving this to documentation improvement requests, rotate_shift applies only to sprites which are procedurally rotated by engine (like projectiles, sometimes explosions, wires, inserter hands etc.). There is currnetly no other way to achieve what you want to achieve other than edit the spritesheet.

Moving to Documentation improvement requests.

Thanks for clarifying, I was afraid of that. I've run into this on other types of buildings too so a note in the docs would be great.

This was noted in the docs for the next release, thanks.