Factorio Forums

Placed cars and tanks should be rotated to 90 degree angles with 'r'

What ?

Pressing 'r' should rotate already placed cars and tanks to 90 degree angles

Why ?

When placing long belts, walls or power poles I often do it from inside a car which is really fast.
However the car needs to be aligned reasonable 90 degrees or the belts will have holes and the walls will not longer be straight.

Being able to rotate the car to a 90 degree angle like all other placed entities would make this really easy.

I like this idea. However, you could also just deconstruct the car, then place it down again and use the "r" key to perfectly rotate it 90 degress in any direction from a straight start. This would work for placing down belts as well.

Not if the car is already loaded up somewhat.
Then it might be next to impossible without placing a lot of chests.

I was going to post the exact same suggestion, no wonder someone else already brought it up.

Rotating vehicles to perfect 90° angles (North/East/South/West) with 'r' seems absolutely essential to me and I wonder why it hasn't already been implemented.
There are so many times I would need to go perfectly straight but always end up wrecking my base because finding the right angle is near to impossible:

• Quickly moving along my main bus

• Driving down my outer defensive "ring", which of course in fact is a rectangle with endless straight lines

• Driving parallelly to train tracks... And not feel like playing russian roulette

• Placing power lines or pipelines over larger distances quickly

Etc.

Of course there's always the option to deconstruct the car and replace it, but there's a fair bit of reasons why that's impractical:

• You would need to empty the trunk first, which can in most cases hold more items than the player. Not even taking in consideration all the sorting that would need to be done after.

• Already loaded but not fully consumed Fuel will be lost. Not really important with solid fuel, but quite a blow with nuclear fuel, for instance.

• it's so time consuming, game-flow breaking and even less immersive, at least for me.

So yeah, this simple fix would make life in the factory a lot easier for me! (and possible many others?)

Also, I just understood how to use the list format option, so here's another one:

• A bullet point

• Another bullet point

• An actual third bullet point

Honestly, it does seem a bit silly that you can't, when I believe you can do it on almost any other entity.

bobingabout wrote: Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:29 am Honestly, it does seem a bit silly that you can't, when I believe you can do it on almost any other entity.

I think you can only (mostly ?) rotate asymetrical entities. (asymetrical non graphically, but functionally)

Koub wrote: Fri Feb 22, 2019 2:26 pm

bobingabout wrote: Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:29 am Honestly, it does seem a bit silly that you can't, when I believe you can do it on almost any other entity.

I think you can only (mostly ?) rotate asymetrical entities. (asymetrical non graphically, but functionally)

Asymmetrically functionally, like going in an entirely different direction?

Jap2.0 wrote: Sat Feb 23, 2019 12:30 am

Koub wrote: Fri Feb 22, 2019 2:26 pm

bobingabout wrote: Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:29 am Honestly, it does seem a bit silly that you can't, when I believe you can do it on almost any other entity.

I think you can only (mostly ?) rotate asymetrical entities. (asymetrical non graphically, but functionally)

Asymmetrically functionally, like going in an entirely different direction?

You can rotate assembling machines with pipe input on one side, but not assembling machines that have no pipe inpyt.
You can't rorate furnaces, they are identical, feature wise, whichever side you interact with them.
steam engines, boilers, refineries, ... are rotatable, because it makes a difference to rotate them.

I would prefer 45 degrees steps.

Sad_Brother wrote: Sat Feb 23, 2019 12:30 pm I would prefer 45 degrees steps.

Might make sense in some cases, although I'd say I wouldn't need that personally

CJ5Boss wrote: Sun Jan 06, 2019 2:14 pm I like this idea. However, you could also just deconstruct the car, then place it down again and use the "r" key to perfectly rotate it 90 degress in any direction from a straight start. This would work for placing down belts as well.

Brilliant, now what do I do with all the stuff it had in it's inventory?

bobingabout wrote: Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:29 am Honestly, it does seem a bit silly that you can't, when I believe you can do it on almost any other entity.

In real world logic you are right, but this game isn't. The car is not an object with traditional physics laws applied. Unless there is a way to change the vector data and update the object (taking guesses here) I don't see this happening. Somebody should create an object that allows walking over it and edit that object properties, such as belts, and instead of modifying the coordenates it should modify the vector's values so it results in a rotation of the object avobe. May be it's possible.

It would be neat to have a roating platform that would rotate the vehicles as the tank rotates if you simply pless A or D while driving it. Connected to a circuit you could make it turn as many degrees as desired when the conditions meet.

It's rectangle, not the square. But you can always rotate it to 180 degrees, without any problem.

darkfrei wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2020 7:51 pm It's rectangle, not the square. But you can always rotate it to 180 degrees, without any problem.

I agree with that, you should only be able to rotate a placed car by 180 degrees (like boilers). Otherwise you will get problems with the rectangular hitbox.
Another limitation should be that no player should be allowed to be in the car when rotating it.

ickputzdirwech wrote: Thu May 21, 2020 12:34 pm Another limitation should be that no player should be allowed to be in the car when rotating it.

Let's make that "no character"! Some mods (AAI Programmable Vehicles and Autodrive are the ones I know of, there may be others) do their magic by inserting character entities into cars. You can't place a player inside a car, just a character entity associated with a player. But character entities can exist independently (one player could be associated with one or several characters, or with no character at all, e.g. in god mode; there can also be character entities that are nor not associated with a player).

Pi-C wrote: Fri May 22, 2020 9:45 am Let's make that "no character"!

+1 Sorry for my inaccuracy