I was experimenting with using item-on-ground entities as a visual representation of a chests content (i.e. a "stockpile").
Which has two problems:
a) I can't prevent inserters from directly interacting with the item-entity (though this can supposedly already be done in 0.17)
b) I can't prevent players from picking up the item-entities.
What?
Either add a flag that makes item-entities un-interactable, or add a new prototype that is soley used to show an item-icon in-world. Bonus points if there's some way to scale the icon in-world.
Why?
Because it looks nice ;). Yea...not the most convincing argument, so i'll just hope it's easy enough to add. Decorative items also have other use-cases for nicing-up the looks of the factory.
(Btw, performance wise i can update about 18k stacks, i.e. 180 stockpiles like the one above, per minute with an impact of 0.02ms on a 2Ghz system. I thought about using tree-variations but they only support 255 per entity, and decoratives would have to be re-spawned every time a stack changes, which i assume would be more expensive.)
