[2.0.15] Inconsistent character's reach range when flying in mech armor

[Pat86]

What did you do?
Noticed gaps when landfilling a lake by hand.

What happened?
When placing tiles, the maximum range is anchored to the character's sprite, not its actual (?) top-down position. As such, it keeps bobbing up and down. It also moves ~1 tile up when entering flight mode.

What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!
I expected all building actions to behave the same, regardless of whether I'm flying or not. This could cause inconsistent tile placement when I'm for example paving ground and have to fly over obstacles, e.g. rocks, trees.

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
Happens consistently, easy to replicate. Might need to tap W/S a couple of times to get into the sweet spot range on the Y axis.

In addition to tile placement, it seems like other actions are also affected, such as deconstruction, entity access and attacks.
I believe that character's range should be decoupled from its sprite/flying state and stay the same when flying or walking.

[Pat86]

Can confirm that the personal roboport's construction range is also attached to the sprite, visually and functionally

[LCStark]

[2.0.19] There's also a small issue with the minimap, where if you're at just the right Y position while flying in the mech suit, the minimap will bob up and down as well.

[Rseding91]

Thanks for the report. These things are known behavior with flying and so far have been deemed acceptable.

[Hares]

Thanks for the report. These things are known behavior with flying and so far have been deemed acceptable.

This closes GUI for entities if you are flying on their reach's end.
It took me a minute to figure out why this keeps happening.

Click to expand the video

Note that I didn't press E to close GUI of that chest!

[IsaacOscar]

Yup, I just had this exact same problem when opening a chest, it was really annoying and took me a bit to work out what was going on.

I wouldn't expect this to be too hard to fix (e.g. by keeping track of how far in the air you are hovering, and subtract this from the players y position when computing the players reach and minimap display).

[FasterJump]

When running and flying, the character pickup reach changes. I found it slightly annoying (probably in my top 5 annoying things in Factorio).

I understand that it's acceptable so far, but I hope for a fix in Space age 1.1. What would be the technical limitations to this? Maybe the personal lasers and incoming projectiles needs to aim for the character sprite for consistency, rather than the true Y location. But I know that other mechanics (for example, the center of the screen) use the true Y location*. Couldn't the map and reach range use it too?

(*I mean, when the character hovers, the screen remain centered on the true Y coordinate, so the game already use this variable)

In my playthrough, now that I have the power armor I'm always scared to press F to pickup items, because any buildings (even power poles) can cause inconsistent item pickup... and I end-up with trash that I have to manually get rid of. (although I don't need to pickup items often: because of quality, I don't often need basic materials)

So, why not use the true Y (center of screen) to determine the reach range?

In the screenshot below, I ran from left to right while picking up items.

03-13-2025, 14-01-19.png (668.07 KiB) Viewed 236 times

03-13-2025, 14-35-47.png (13.76 KiB) Viewed 221 times