Drag Entities with Circuit Connections intact

[Impatient]

I would like to be able to drag entities around in my vicinity I already placed. And the moved entities should also retain their properties like: recipes, modules, circuit programming and circuit connections.

I recently worked a lot with the circuit network, build some complex circuits. And when a circuit I am working on does what it should, I am structuring and compacting it. Meaning I am moving combinators and other parts of the circuit around to arrange them logically, tidy things up and moving it closer together, than I would set them down in the developing phase. And this moving around of x combinators with their circuit programming and connections is REALLY tedious. For the programming, I make a blueprint of a combinator or a group of combinators, then I memorize or write down what circuit connections are needed to the outside. Then I remove it place it down somewhere else using the blueprint and reconnect all the circuit wires.

If I just could select an entity or a group of entities, drag it around, rotate and mirror it without it losing its properties and connections, this would be really awesome simple. Thinking more in general, this could also make factory construction much simpler.

Tanks for considering this.

[steinio]

Blueprint it?

Rotation: yes
Mirroring: only with mods

[mathe172]

This would be a really great feature. While I see that most players will probably not benefit too much from this, it would be game-changing for the design of any advanced circuit network (speaking from experience, after having spent countless painful hours trying to tidy up & compact several designs). As noted in the initial post, this is not doable with blueprints, since blueprints can only move isolated groups of combinators, not combinators connected to other things. And manually deleting & rebuilding combinators is extremely error-prone in any but the simplest cases. Especially given the new shortcuts for copy & paste in 0.17, a move feature would fit right in. Obviously, you can't move something if connections get too long, but this could easily be prevented.

A potential implementation could look like this:

1. The player selects an entity/group of entities to move
2. The entities are converted to ghosts, with connections not rendered to reduce clutter (only for the player themselves)
3. The player gets something like a blueprint put into his hand, which renders all the connections to the outside world (similar to how electric poles in blueprints behave)
4. The player can move & rotate the "blueprint" and place it when they're happy
5. Now the change is actually executed and other players see the updated position of the entities

Since the change is applied only at the end, it can be aborted at any time (by pressing Q), since nothing can be placed at the old location in the meantime. Entities being deleted/changed by others during the move aborts it.

[mrvn]

This would be a really great feature. While I see that most players will probably not benefit too much from this, it would be game-changing for the design of any advanced circuit network (speaking from experience, after having spent countless painful hours trying to tidy up & compact several designs). As noted in the initial post, this is not doable with blueprints, since blueprints can only move isolated groups of combinators, not combinators connected to other things. And manually deleting & rebuilding combinators is extremely error-prone in any but the simplest cases. Especially given the new shortcuts for copy & paste in 0.17, a move feature would fit right in. Obviously, you can't move something if connections get too long, but this could easily be prevented.

A potential implementation could look like this:

1. The player selects an entity/group of entities to move
2. The entities are converted to ghosts, with connections not rendered to reduce clutter (only for the player themselves)
3. The player gets something like a blueprint put into his hand, which renders all the connections to the outside world (similar to how electric poles in blueprints behave)
4. The player can move & rotate the "blueprint" and place it when they're happy
5. Now the change is actually executed and other players see the updated position of the entities

Since the change is applied only at the end, it can be aborted at any time (by pressing Q), since nothing can be placed at the old location in the meantime. Entities being deleted/changed by others during the move aborts it.

I think that is already pretty much implemented with cut&paste and undo. Simply press ctrl-x, select the area and place the blueprint somewhere else. If you made a mistake press ctrl-z. If you do it fast enough before any construction bots come along it will just cancel the deconstruction plan. Otherwise it rebuilds. Circuit connections are copied and restored on undo just fine.


The thing that I'm missing is to be able to move the contents of belts, furnaces, assemblers as well. If you cut&paste a running factory then you end up with thousands of items in your inventory or storage chests.

Question: Can the item proxies from modules be used to place items back on a belt?

[PhiPro]

I think that is already pretty much implemented with cut&paste and undo. Simply press ctrl-x, select the area and place the blueprint somewhere else. If you made a mistake press ctrl-z. If you do it fast enough before any construction bots come along it will just cancel the deconstruction plan. Otherwise it rebuilds. Circuit connections are copied and restored on undo just fine.

This won't work. As is the case for blueprints, this only keeps the circuit connections inside the group of combinators that is moved. But the pasted combinators won't have any of the connections to combinators outside the group that was copied.
For compactifying complex circuit designs where all combinators are intertwined with each other, we want to move individual combinators and keep the circuit connections to all others.
It's much easier to leave enough space while designing your combinator contraption. In the end, however, you usually want it to be as compact as possible. Currently, you have to copy the combinators one by one from the space inefficient design to some new compact design and place all circuit connections by hand, which is quite tedious and error prone. Furthermore, you need to know in advance where you want each combinator to sit in the final design. Experimentally moving a combinator to see where it fits best needs you to place a new combinator and manually set the wire connections each time.

[mrvn]

This won't work. As is the case for blueprints, this only keeps the circuit connections inside the group of combinators that is moved. But the pasted combinators won't have any of the connections to combinators outside the group that was copied.

Ah, then the question make much more sense. Didn't get that you need to preserve connections between dragged and not-dragged items.

I've been playing with tags for entities in blueprints and ghosts recently which I think could solve this. When the blueprint is made you add tags to each entity encoding wire connections to entities not in the blueprint. And when the ghost is placed you convert those back into wire connection provided they remain in range.

[Optera]

Dragging entities, especially combinators, around with intact wiring sounds like Picker Dollies formerly Picker Extended.

[SupplyDepoo]

I just built this behemoth and want to rearrange the power poles (ignore the substation) so that they don't occupy the middle space between cargo wagons (because it's good to have some space to move around more easily, to route the odd belt through or to leave space for other modules that might need it, especially in multiplayer where not everyone follows the same standard).

The ability to nudge entities, especially combinators and anything else that can be connected to circuit networks, would be noice!

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I'm in vanilla because I still need to get some achievements so I can't use those mods.