Underground Belt Automatic direction selection

[Dysan27]

TL;DR

Choose the direction of the Underground Belt (Up or Down) based on what is in front of it.

What ?

Instead of defaulting an unconnected Underground belt to be a Down belt base it on what the tile it will be interacting with is. If its a belt going away or sideways from the underground make it default to an Underground Up. Here are some examples:

Why ?

If the belt is away or alongside the nderground it probably means you want to unload from the Underground or side load from it, so default the Underground to the direction that is more then likely intended.
I'm making this as I find I build most of my underground from the destination to the source of the items, so I end up having to manually reverse the direction of all of them.

[mrvn]

Two things to add:

1) the direction should be selectable by the user. e.g. rotate 8 times, 4 input and 4 output ways
2) the direction guessing magic must not happen when placing blueprints or when 1 was used. The wrong direction might be intentional.

[Dysan27]

Two things to add:

1) the direction should be selectable by the user. e.g. rotate 8 times, 4 input and 4 output ways
2) the direction guessing magic must not happen when placing blueprints or when 1 was used. The wrong direction might be intentional.

1) Not sure if that's necessary, also not intuitive since a some point you rotate and the opeing direction and the belt direction both change. Though having a "belt direction" key might be useful could also be used for other items like loaders.

2) Agreed on the blueprint, disagree on 1 even if it was implemented. How would you know that 1 was used and not just a normal rotation to line it up? I think that the cases where the player wants the wrong direction would be less then the cases now where having input be the default is the wrong chose.

[mrvn]

Two things to add:

1) the direction should be selectable by the user. e.g. rotate 8 times, 4 input and 4 output ways
2) the direction guessing magic must not happen when placing blueprints or when 1 was used. The wrong direction might be intentional.

1) Not sure if that's necessary, also not intuitive since a some point you rotate and the opeing direction and the belt direction both change. Though having a "belt direction" key might be useful could also be used for other items like loaders.

2) Agreed on the blueprint, disagree on 1 even if it was implemented. How would you know that 1 was used and not just a normal rotation to line it up? I think that the cases where the player wants the wrong direction would be less then the cases now where having input be the default is the wrong chose.

You are right, GUI wise it's better to have one key for rotation and one to change direction. Internally there already is rotation and type=input/output for both underground belts and loaders. Just no way to switch the later from the GUI. Type should be auto/input/output with a hotkey to switch types to input/output.

Shift-click places a ghost. Does ctrl-click do anything special for undergound belts / loaders when placing an entity/ghost? Could be a viable hotkey.

[ssilk]

I think it might be quite irritating at first, but I still like this suggestion, because I asked me also very often, why should I need to rotate it now: in 90% of all cases the above guess would be perfect.