Entity prototype: ignore-transport-belt flag

[akastalker]

Hello,

I am trying to make flying unit ("unit" prototype) and currently struggling with transport belts that my entity cannot fly over despite of having zero-sized collision_box and empty collision_mask.
It can fly over any other entity or tile without any problems.
It's not "colliding" with transport belts, it's stepping onto in, and belt pushing entity away. If I enclose my flying entity within transport belt frame where each tile is facing inward, my unit cannot get out and just keeps struggling. Looks painful.

I checked vanilla flying robots prototypes and couldn't find anything about them not interacting with transport-belts, so I assume this is hardcoded logic for their prototypes.

So, can we have some flag ('ignore-transport-belt' maybe?) to show that this entity will not interact with transport-belts? Or can you make it happen to entities which collision_box/collision_mask are empty?

If I am missing something and this can be dealt with current means (but I want my entity remain "unit"), please point me out.

[akastalker]

Accidentally, I found temporary workaround for my problem.
If I just spam teleport of "flying" unit to its own position on every tick, it somehow manage to ignore transport belts movement and happily fly over them.

Still, it feels like it's a very dirty solution if not a bug than can be fixed in future Factorio releases. So, I'm not giving up the flag idea just yet.

[Rseding91]

I'd like to just remove the entire concept of biters being moved by belts... It would give a nice speedup to biter logic and simplify the code by a large amount at the same time.

[akastalker]

It will be nice. But I think players who like to move spitters closer to their gun turrets with belts will be upset.

Can you by any chance make cars immune to transport belts too? It can be quite challenging to move around heavily belted factories by cars without destroying something just because some belt decided to push you in random direction. Or at least make it moddable if somebody actually using cars as chests on a belt.

[Rseding91]

It will be nice. But I think players who like to move spitters closer to their gun turrets with belts will be upset.

But answer this: when was the last time you saw anyone do that? I haven't seen one save file so far that someone was doing that.

[keyboardhack]

It will be nice. But I think players who like to move spitters closer to their gun turrets with belts will be upset.

But answer this: when was the last time you saw anyone do that? I haven't seen one save file so far that someone was doing that.

¨
Last mmo server i and a few others used belts to kite biters while our defence was at a critical point. Belts are a tactic players can use to get biters close but also to keep them from reaching you which we used extensively at that point. The biters did continiue to eat up the belts so we were pushed back but it was still a very effective method that i will probably use again in such a situation. Besides that it just makes sense that biters, just like everything else, is moved by belts.

[Nexela]

I have seen it for people trying to push biters away.
Another aspect of this would be if belts didn't affect players either. It is such a pain when working on something to constently get moved around by belts. but..... players tend to use belts to "speed" them up in a direction at least in the early game.

I know I would gladly give up the little bit of bonus if I could work on stuff without being shoved around

[aubergine18]

Regarding using belts to move biters, I've used it on a few occasions, however I have a bad habit of turret creeping and when doing so usually don't have enough belts to hand (due to using resources for repair packs, etc) to use the trick. When I have belts to hand, I still use them for this purpose.

I find being able to stand (and sometimes run) on a belt whilst drawing a new belt adjacent to it to be useful on many occasions. And the occasions where I get moved unexpectedly add to the gameplay IMO.

As such, I feel a flag would be most desirable solution, if not too much pain. For example, all vehicles could be given the flag, as could behemoths. Modders could apply the flag elsewhere if desired.