Factorio Forums

What did you do?
I was checking transport lines gaps on my timed onshore steel module. I'm in editor mode.

What happened?
A minor visual issue in case the debug visual show-transport-line-gap is tuned on: At one place the white gap is flickering - disappearing then re-appearing. No effect on any gameplay. See the gif attached. The inserter is inactive when the thing happens. Issue is coming back consistently in each cycle (864), for all three gaps before the inserter activates.

What did you expect to happen instead?
Should be no flickering. The white gap should be travelling as at the other places. No idea what is special about that inserter, especially that the mirrored part of the module (below it) does not have the issue. Also the fact that the gap is coming back shows that it is not some slipping on the transport belt.

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
The savegame is always producing this, PFA.

Thanks for the report, however things in debug settings are primarily for our internal usage and they may be sometimes not accurate for simplification.

This observed behavior is caused by show-transport-line-gaps logic being heavily simplified: when there are 2 transport lines connected, a gap line is rendered between last item of downstream line and first item of the upstream line. In your specific case, there exists a transport belt in front of an inserter than in the past was connected to a wire so it has control behavior attached to it. Presence of this control behavior causes lines on this one transport belt to not be merged across front and back connection and so the gap you see now spans across 3 lines. Because 3 is greater than 2, the logic for drawing gaps sees that the upstream line is empty and so it aborts drawing the gaps. I could fix this by iterating backward until a transport line with items is found but by that time the gap is so obvious that i do not care about drawing this gap line anymore. I am considering this debug layer to be useful for observing gaps that are so small that you cannot see them (like a gap of 1/64 of items spacing). If the gap is large, you see the gap and there is no need to help seeing it.
-- edit:
This may be fixed in 1.1.102

TY so much for the answer! This feature is used mainly by the hard core optimizers and honestly impact is cosmetic. If this is fixed, we'll be happy though

Edit: and yes, it was connected to wire by mistake, which I've totally forgot

Edit2: deleting and rebuilding the transport belt segment also fixes this in this case