[0.17.32] Reading belt with circuit network changes item's position

[luc]

Context: I made a simple music editor that reads a belt and plays different notes on the programmable speaker for different items.



The items were (painstakingly) spaced apart to make a simple tune, but as can be seen in the screenshot, the items have grouped into blocks. "Content read mode" seems to erroneously include moving said contents.

This is in multiplayer, in case that makes a difference.

[tehfreek]

Did you remember to uncheck "Enable"? A blueprint to replicate this would help.

[Klonan]

Can you provide a save file demonstrating the issue?

[luc]

Savefile: https://lgms.nl/tmp/factorio-sound.zip

I just tested it in single player, and it also occurs there. To quickly reproduce, running the game at speed 50 (not sure how much of that I actually reached, probably only like 10× speed or so) for a minute or two shows the effect.

At full zoom, it is also visible that they move a pixel upon entering the section.

Thanks for looking into this!

[Rseding91]

It could be that connecting a wire to a belt changes if the belt-merging is allowed to merge that belt with others. when a wire is connected to a belt it's force-unmerged and has to stay unmerged because wires can mess with item flow on that specific belt.

[luc]

So... I don't completely understand what you said, but sounds like the code could be made to not perform the force-unmerge when the belt is set to read-only mode?

Can we cure it, doctor?

[kovarex]

It is a circular belt, it will always have a transition point somewhere.

[BlueTemplar]

Damn, so belt optimizations have made "simple" designs like this not possible anymore ?
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-175
P.S.: What if you were to make all the belt tiles the same by wiring all of them (all separately?), but only actually reading from one of them ?

[kovarex]

Damn, so belt optimizations have made "simple" designs like this not possible anymore ?
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-175
P.S.: What if you were to make all the belt tiles the same by wiring all of them (all separately?), but only actually reading from one of them ?

The design in the fff would still work the same, the timing would be the same.
It has nothing to do with wiring really, it is just the problem of belt being in a circle, but from what I saw, it hardly made anything broken, it is just a small visual gap (almost hard to notice) in one place for a specific setup.

[luc]

So the workaround is to make sure the items are adjacent? E.g. fill it up with dummy items that do not play a sound if you want spacing?