[2.0.23] Non-ghost rail planner not snapping to ghost rail support

[IsaacOscar]

My appoligies if I'm annoying everyone with these minor issues, but this one did annoy me.
Consider the following:

Screenshot 2024-12-12 204600.png (3.03 MiB) Viewed 442 times

The ghost was built using the rail planner.
Unfortunately, using the non-ghost rail planner, I am unable to build it:

Screenshot 2024-12-12 204608.png (2.62 MiB) Viewed 442 times

I first have to manually place the rail support:

Screenshot 2024-12-12 204910.png (3.08 MiB) Viewed 442 times

Then I can build the rails:

Screenshot 2024-12-12 204920.png (3.02 MiB) Viewed 442 times

[boskid]

Well, this is not a bug for couple of reasons:
- In general the decision was that ghosts are supposed to be built by construction robots so when building non ghost rails, the rail planner completly ignores ghosts whatever they are including a colliding ghosts when building on ground.
- Those specific rails are on the "minor diagonal" for which a rail planner was specifically made to try to avoid as it was creating a lot of annoying "last rail piece turns" when building long straights.
- If rail planner in manual mode would be required to snap to ghosts then it is not a fully manual mode, it would be "guided manual construction character bot" mode.

I am not considering this to be a bug.

[IsaacOscar]

Well, this is not a bug for couple of reasons:
- In general the decision was that ghosts are supposed to be built by construction robots so when building non ghost rails, the rail planner completly ignores ghosts whatever they are including a colliding ghosts when building on ground.
- Those specific rails are on the "minor diagonal" for which a rail planner was specifically made to try to avoid as it was creating a lot of annoying "last rail piece turns" when building long straights.
- If rail planner in manual mode would be required to snap to ghosts then it is not a fully manual mode, it would be "guided manual construction character bot" mode.

I am not considering this to be a bug.

Thanks for checking!
So in other words, the ghost-rail planner is intentionally meant to be more powerful than the non-ghost one?
And I'm playing the game wrong by using ghosts to help me plan manual building.

[boskid]

Ghosts are primarily for construction robots to be built, you can also use them for planning but there are no plans for making manual building to be affected by presence of ghosts (of course there are some exceptions like electric poles drag over ghosts, but they were made because of wires limits). Any time there were proposals to make manual building easier without construction bots there is always an argument raised that "it would nerf construction robots by making them less needed" and as such we try to avoid convenience features for manual building if they can be achieved more easily by using construction bots. Having buildings be built by robots is in the spirit of automating, while manual building (and hand crafting) are not and are usually discouraged by various means.

For similar reasons all ideas of pipette-spraying-made-easier were rejected as they would make manual building without construction bots easier and we do not want to shrink the gap between "having construction bots" and "not having them".

[boskid]

So in other words, the ghost-rail planner is intentionally meant to be more powerful than the non-ghost one?

This misses quite a lot on the constraints of manual building compared to ghost building.

Manual building is usually character reach limited so there is no reason for having cross continental rails built in manual mode as practically never you would be able to be in the character reach of the entire rail. Ghost building is not restricted by character reach so it is allowed to build on any distance. Also there is a difference that real entities collide with for example trees so you need to first remove the trees to be able to place real rails and rail supports there. Ghost mode is able to build ghosts without mining trees and rocks because it can mark them to be deconstructed which is a reversible action.