Electric poles: connections not updated correctly if maximum_wire_distance is changed

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Pi-C
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Electric poles: connections not updated correctly if maximum_wire_distance is changed

Post by Pi-C »

I've got a request for Bio Industries to allow for an easy placing of Bio Gardens in bulk. In particular, it was suggested that I should use hidden electric poles so that adjoining Bio Gardens would distribute electricity between themselves. Personally, I consider this to be quite cheaty, so I've provided a setting to enable this behavior.

Now, whenever a Bio Garden (3x3 entity) is built, a hidden pole will be placed at its center. Based on the global option, I set the pole's maximum_wire_distance to 4 (connection enabled) or 0 (no connection). This works, but there's a quirk:
wires.png
wires.png (2.96 MiB) Viewed 812 times
The three gardens at the bottom have been placed when maximum_wire_distance was 4. There's a regular pole that was connected to the hidden pole of the Bio Garden in the center, and that hidden pole would transmit power to the Bio Gardens on the left and right of it. I saved, quit the game, changed the setting, and reloaded. As you can see, the Bio Gardens on the left and right at the bottom don't have power -- but the wires that already existed are still drawn! I've then put up the two Bio Gardens at the top. Both have hidden poles, but because their maximum_wire_distance is 0, they can't connect and no wire is drawn, so that works as expected.

Saved again, changed the setting back, and reloaded. The left Bio Garden on the top still had no power until I mined it and placed it again. But in the bottom row, I just had to replace the regular pole to reconnect it to the hidden pole -- and then the adjoining gardens immediately had power again! I presume this happened because there still was a wire.

What I expected: Connections of existing entities would be updated if maximum_wire_distance is changed in the prototype, and wires would be removed if the pole on the other end was out of reach.
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Rseding91
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Re: Electric poles: connections not updated correctly if maximum_wire_distance is changed

Post by Rseding91 »

Thanks for the report however I'm going to say this is fine as is; the game doesn't do a lot when mods change values and mostly just leaves things as is if it isn't going to cause corruption/crashes.
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