What happened with aligning shelves back to back?

[Darth Gamer]

Before the update, you could align shelves back to back with no problems. Now it acts as though it is too close. What happened?

[Bjørn]

I'm not sure if this is related, but I recently started playing the game, and put shelves back to back in the beginning. However I had problems with people getting stuck in one of them (seemed random) when I did that, so I've started only placing single shelves on the floor, with walking space between all. Glasses and donut stands I put together.

Btw, with the new update / DLC, when expanding the station to max level, the 'manhole cover' (is it really called that, btw? Sounds indecent ) for the sewer is causing conflicts when placing shelves on the inner closest wall / corner of the station. You can no longer have something all the way in the corner, for example. Hopefully that'll get fixed (I'm not good at 'official' bug reporting, I'm afraid).

[Darth Gamer]

I had people getting stuck in the ice cream machines. I used to be able have an island of ice cream machines where I can put one facing left and one back to back with the other facing right. Now there is like a foot of space between them, killing precious space. The new editing system makes it to where shelves cannot touch each other when they are back to back now. I can't make nice aisleways with the little space I have. Dumb!

Oh yeah, and on the back wall, before you could put 2 small cigarette shelves side b side. Now if you hang a small one, it goes right in the middle as if it was a large shelf... I hope they fix this.

Devs, please let shelves be much much closer together back to back!

[RustyXXII]

Yep its terrible. Just another thing thats a mess in this game now.

[(N☆G) Jackal ★JJ★]

Okay so it wasn't just me.
I was wondering why I can't put things back to back anymore. :|
Hope it gets fixed.
Until then I just kinda put a big display that covers the big space at the end of the displays that are back to back.

[Borfoid]

I think the way placement inside the gas station is done now is just generally bad in every way I can think of.

Hard to place without encountering collisions, rotation seems pretty quirky and doesn't look right most of the time and bots seem to get stuck walking in to stuff if you try and do any kind of layout that's much more complex than lining the walls.

Placement of shelves/items would be infinitely better using a snap to grid system and having the rotation fixed to 90 degree increments.

You sacrifice a little bit of customisation by not being able to put stuff at any angle - but it'd be way quicker placing/moving stuff, easier to properly detect and avoid collisions, easier to align things and the pathing for the bots could just ignore any cell that was occupied by something when walking about.

I'm fairly new to the game but I found this mechanic really grating.

[mrsddixon66]

Originally posted by Nutshellfish:

I'm not sure if this is related, but I recently started playing the game, and put shelves back to back in the beginning. However I had problems with people getting stuck in one of them (seemed random) when I did that, so I've started only placing single shelves on the floor, with walking space between all. Glasses and donut stands I put together.

Btw, with the new update / DLC, when expanding the station to max level, the 'manhole cover' (is it really called that, btw? Sounds indecent :lunar2019crylaughingpig:) for the sewer is causing conflicts when placing shelves on the inner closest wall / corner of the station. You can no longer have something all the way in the corner, for example. Hopefully that'll get fixed (I'm not good at 'official' bug reporting, I'm afraid).

I never thought of the location of the manhole cover (yes it really is called that) causing issues with the placement of things in the corner. Makes perfect sense! Hope it gets fixed soon. Also, the alignment issue certainly messes with my aggravation threshold so I like the idea of the snap to grid (the grid should allow for small adjustment side to side though, not like it is with wall hangings where you put the item in the middle of the wall and when you place a shelf it puts the wall decoration partially behind the shelf because you can't put shelves where you want them) and the 90 degree rotation. I think those are excellent ideas!

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by mrsddixon66:

I never thought of the location of the manhole cover (yes it really is called that) causing issues with the placement of things in the corner. Makes perfect sense! Hope it gets fixed soon.

Thanks for clarifying Yes, if you equip the... new tool (forgot the name, where you can move trashcans and such), you'll notice the manhole cover gets a red outline in some cases where the shelves are placed on the closest wall and corner, and the cigarette stand / ice cream box combo I normally use doesn't work like other places when placed on that wall, or you have to move them more left to make it work.

Sorry that got complicated. Short: Yes, it's bugged!

[Indie]

Originally posted by Borfoid:

I think the way placement inside the gas station is done now is just generally bad in every way I can think of.

Hard to place without encountering collisions, rotation seems pretty quirky and doesn't look right most of the time and bots seem to get stuck walking in to stuff if you try and do any kind of layout that's much more complex than lining the walls.

Placement of shelves/items would be infinitely better using a snap to grid system and having the rotation fixed to 90 degree increments.

You sacrifice a little bit of customisation by not being able to put stuff at any angle - but it'd be way quicker placing/moving stuff, easier to properly detect and avoid collisions, easier to align things and the pathing for the bots could just ignore any cell that was occupied by something when walking about.

I'm fairly new to the game but I found this mechanic really grating.

Definitely the rotation of items is super frustrating. I want to place shelves against the walls but there's no rotation step that aligns them perfectly, it's always angled slightly with one side closer to the wall than the other. Nothing wrong with having the full degree of rotation steps as we have now, I just have no idea why the game wouldn't align those so that they include 0, 90, 180 etc. Or maybe they do and the gas station itself isn't properly aligned to the grid 🤷‍♀️

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by Indie:

Definitely the rotation of items is super frustrating. I want to place shelves against the walls but there's no rotation step that aligns them perfectly, it's always angled slightly with one side closer to the wall than the other.

Using a tiled floor with 'lines' makes it easier. The shelves are aligned to your 'body' when you pick them up or equip them, so if you're facing the wall directly it will be aligned when you pick it up, and put it down again.

But as mentioned, this is much easier to see by using the 'lines' on the tiled floor as reference.

(Edit: I've started a new game that still has the old floor, and it struck me that those 'tiles' I mentioned are actually in the game when placing things from the start. My bad. The gridwork is good to use for reference when picking up shelves, which is probably their intented use, come to think of it, or one of them.

Would be nice with perfect 90 degree angles that automatically fit the walls, ofc. I'm using a curved monitor that I've had for over a year, but I'm still getting used to actually finding the center of the screen using that. Not sure I'll go for a curved monitor next time...

[Borfoid]

Happy people think it's a good idea.

Every item has 4 points, two left, two right.

Those form an outer edge rectangle.

Scale all the floor assets so they are smaller than the 4 points you're using to dictate the boundary rectangle they sit in.

Align those points to the grid you can - literally already - see on the floor when you're moving movables around.

Break the whole station, at max upgrade size, down in to grid squares as per existing grid, because it looks about right as is.

Flag any square which collides with the outer walls or other item, or outside the enclosed area, at any upgrade size as invalid placement.

Snap to grid, fix 90 degree rotation.

Bots route in, to the shelves, to the counter and out again avoiding any grid square already occupied.

Done.

Just seems like common sense to me to do it that way... Having me be able to move something freehand while also providing me with a visual grid doesn't make sense to me - at all - if the visual grid doesn't really have any consistency between items.

Seems like this is a fixall solution that, yes, would take a little time to implement but it would fix pretty much all the issues with placement and bot pathing inside the building.

[Lord Admiral Revol]

Originally posted by Borfoid:

Happy people think it's a good idea.

Every item has 4 points, two left, two right.

Those form an outer edge rectangle.

Scale all the floor assets so they are smaller than the 4 points you're using to dictate the boundary rectangle they sit in.

Align those points to the grid you can - literally already - see on the floor when you're moving movables around.

Break the whole station, at max upgrade size, down in to grid squares as per existing grid, because it looks about right as is.

Flag any square which collides with the outer walls or other item, or outside the enclosed area, at any upgrade size as invalid placement.

Snap to grid, fix 90 degree rotation.

Bots route in, to the shelves, to the counter and out again avoiding any grid square already occupied.

Done.

Just seems like common sense to me to do it that way... Having me be able to move something freehand while also providing me with a visual grid doesn't make sense to me - at all - if the visual grid doesn't really have any consistency between items.

Seems like this is a fixall solution that, yes, would take a little time to implement but it would fix pretty much all the issues with placement and bot pathing inside the building.

As it is demonstrated by the devs, this is waaaay to logical. You gotta include at least some bafflingly stupid decision into it to at least be considered.

[Borfoid]

Originally posted by Lord Admiral Revol:

As it is demonstrated by the devs, this is waaaay to logical. You gotta include at least some bafflingly stupid decision into it to at least be considered.

Yeah, it's weird, right ?

You can quite literally see how you can make the game way better because it's all right there when you play it. It's just not done correctly.

Honestly - if you gave me access to the source for the game and gave me a few weeks I could create an update that'd fix the whole damn game.

And I would do it for free just because it's annoying me.

[Bjørn]

Originally posted by Borfoid:

Honestly - if you gave me access to the source for the game and gave me a few weeks I could create an update that'd fix the whole damn game.

And I would do it for free just because it's annoying me.

Give that man a cigar! ...and access to the source... And maybe something else than a cigar if they don't smoke.

Having used AutoCAD a lot in my 'professional life', I see a lot of missed opportunities when it comes to snapping.