[2.0.23] Cannot rotate rail to all directions

[sben]

Not sure if this bug or more a feature request...

When rotating a rail hold in hand, there are 8 orientations in that the rail can be rotated using [R].
But there are 16 orientations a rail can lie on the ground - 8 of them cannot be selected for placing directly.

This is not the case for the rail and rail chain signal, which can be rotated to all 16 orientations before beeing placed.

What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!

To be able to rotate to and place rails in all 16 orientations directly.

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?

Always

[boskid]

That is a consequence of one of tradeoffs i had to do when doing new rail shapes: half diagonal rails have different cost to build a single piece and as such it had to be a separate entity type to make it possible to give a different cost to built (also there is some history involved into process of how new rails were implemented and when half-diagonal rails were added, ability to specify 16 directions was not yet there so i had to extract this new directions into a separate entity type anyway; this part of history can be observed by seeing one of directions of half diagonal rail reports as being "north" when in reality it is noth-north-west). I do not want to merge those 2 pieces into 1 entity type now as it would require quite annoying migration, and i also do not want to have those rails to have the same cost to build of 1 rail as horizontal/vertical/diagonal straights. Only solution for this would be to tinker with manual builder so when rotating it would seamlessly switch between those 2 entity types but that is annoying on the prototypes side since the rail item itself can only report as directly allowing to build only one entity type (there are no precedents about having one item that switches between multiple entities when rotating).

I am going to consider this to be the same type of limitation as not being able to build curved rails when holding a rail item: you can build curved rails using rail planner and then using blueprints in which case i am going to call this a Not a bug.