Build: 1.8.4 Mode: creative blueprints Reproducibility: easy Severity: highly annoying Type: Blueprint Signal Names Summary: If you create a signal name using a circuit such as "Landing Gear" and then delete the circuit. The blueprint will continue to view "Landing Gear" as a defined name and not allow you to recreate it. Description: This only happens if you delete the circuit and "Landing Gear" is assigned as an on/off for a device. When you delete the circuit, the device will show "Landing Gear" in red. When you remove the "Landing Gear" reference from the device, the game won't allow you to reassign "Landing Gear" to a new signal. Instead it throws the error: "signal name already in use" (but nothing is using it, and the original circuit that defined it was deleted) Steps to Reproduce: 1) Create a circuit and give it a result name like "test" 2) Assign "test" to the on/off condition of any device 3) Delete the circuit with "test" 4) The device that references "test" will now show the name in red 5) Reassign the device so it no longer references "test" 6) Try to create a new circuit with the result name "test" and it will refuse to take the name If you open the .epb file with a text editor you can literally see the name "test" embedded in the blueprint file with no way to clean it out of there. I was hoping there might be a console command or something that could scrub the bad/deleted name references from the blueprint file. ...or give me some way to review the blueprint saved names and delete them.
Update: I was able to fix the blueprint problem by spawning the craft in a new Freedom mode game. Not sure if Freedom mode is relevant or if any new game instance would work. When spawned in the new game, the circuit allowed me to use the name "Landing Gear" name without throwing the "signal name already in use" error. I saved the blueprint in Freedom, took it back to my creative game, spawned it next to my old craft and the new craft worked fine. Might even work if I just closed and restarted the same creative instance? ...will check that next time. Oddly, during this process I seem to have acquired 3 new signal names, each beginning with an asterisk: *RadarDisk *ExplodeRadar *BlastBase I have no idea where these came from?
I know the problem well because I work a lot with circuits. ^^ Exiting the game into the main menu and then restarting the game fixes the problem. You can also avoid the problem from the start: before deleting the circuit, you have to click in the input field for the name and empty the field completely. If any other action is then performed, such as left-clicking outside the field or pressing Enter, then the name is deleted internally and is immediately available again for a new circuit. Simply emptying the input field and then directly deleting the circuit as the next step also works.
Another workaround: * If you save the BP and respawn that, the "used but deleted" signal names are freed again.
Defects like this make a lot of people give up on creating circuits because it is too easy to encounter this problem when you start out. For me this defect sites in the OOB class of issues (Out Of Box) , meaning users will discover and be really disappointed a lot in the first hour or less of usage. Thinking carefully about signal names so that you never make mistakes is the solution, but it's just not obvious when you start out, would be great to fix this somehow by attempting to dispose of all references after any signal name or selection edit events.
This problem really should be fixed because it's also a reason I avoid making too many signals myself.
