[boskid][2.0.25] Pasting settings from ghost entity fails after revive

[eugenekay]

I found some Unexpected behavior while laying-down a line of Inserters / using Copy-Paste. I think that ths is because the "Ghost entity" which is being Copied is "Removed" or "Replaced" when the actual Entity is placed by Bots.... Which makes sense, as you couldn't want to continue to "Copy" a Ghost which was Cancelled.

What did you do?
- Laid down a set of Inserter Ghosts
- Made a Settings change (example: "Use Filters") (0m7s in Demo video)
- Shift-Right-Click to Copy (0m9s)
- Shift-Left-Click to Paste to another Inserter (0m11s)
- Wait for first Inserter to be placed by Bots (0m19s)

What happened?
- Paste stops working once Inserter has been Placed (0m21s) / green "Highlight" disappears from source inserter
- Source Inserter must be re-Copied to continue (0m 27s)

What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!
- "Copy" should remember the settings from a Source Entity, even if it was originally a Ghost

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
- Any time a "Ghost Entity" is Copy-ed, and then later Placed. If the Ghost is never placed (due to lack of items) then it continues to work.


My workaround is to use Ctrl-C to "copy" the whole inserter as a temporary Blueprint, not just the Settings (Shift-Right-Click).

[robot256]

This is almost certainly a consequence of the fact that the "copy settings" command does not actually "copy" any settings. It only selects the source entity which future paste settings operations will read from. If that entity is destroyed (or revived, apparently), it can no longer be used as a source to read settings from.

Reviving is special, though, so the devs will have to decide whether the settings source should transfer from the ghost to the revived entity.

[eugenekay]

Yes, I suspect as well that it is because the "Ghost" is disappearing / being replaced with a brand-new Entity (at the same X/Y coordinates).

This is a "Place from Ghost"; there are no Destroyed entities involved in this Bug Report. Internally, I recognize that this may count as a "revive", but that is a new term to me.

[robot256]

Internally, ghosts are entities too. The game has to delete the ghost entity to create the real entity in its place. "revive" is the game action that copies all the settings from the ghost onto the real entity that replaced it. So it's just a matter of should copy-source reference be included in that process.

[boskid]

To be more precise, ghost is a shapeless entity that holds another entity inside and delegates drawing and most of the interactions to it. Reviving does not involve copying settings, it is just taking out the inner entity and placing it back on surface (ref 124122).

This should be pretty simple to fix, just make the copy source information preserve on entity transformations (dying, reviving)

[eugenekay]

I have experimented and confirmed that this is also true of other Copy-Paste-able entities, including Train Stops, Assembling Machines, Combinators..... hopefully the Fix will be generic enought to account for everything.

[boskid]

This missing feature report is now implemented for 2.0.29.