[Bug] Invisible Entity blocking placement

[rezecib]

TL;DR: SeasonManager:DoMediumLightning()'s SoundEmitter entities and sunkenprefabs need to be tagged as "FX" so they don't block placement.

 

During hurricane season, while it was raining and hailing, I found a clear open space where nothing could be placed. I used this command to find out what entity it might be:

FindEntity(GetPlayer(), 4, function(v) if v:HasTag("FX") then else print(v) end end)

It turned out the closest thing was some type of "blank" entity, with no prefab name and no components, and set to not persist. I'm not sure how such entities might occur but perhaps that will be helpful to you?

 

I confirmed that it's what was blocking placement by removing it (it printed out its GUID, so I called that from the Ents table and called :Remove()). Unfortunately I couldn't find anything else that might indicate what the entity actually was.

 

Edit: You can find more such entities all over the place, at least during hurricane season. If you use the mod Geometric Placement you can find them more easily, because the build grid it displays will show the invalid placement regions without having to sweep your placer around as much.

 

Maybe these are left by lightning strikes? In SeasonManager:DoMediumLightning(), it looks like it creates a non-persisting generic entity with a SoundEmitter (which it turns out these blocking entities do have), but doesn't schedule removal of it. I'll try editing the code to also add the tag "FX" to these medium lightning sound entities.

 

While investigating this, I also noticed that sunkenprefab isn't tagged as "FX", but probably should be-- it can block placement near shores where you'd otherwise be able to place things.

[Bael]

I was thinking that the invisible entities were caused by plants/trees that were previously there, but are no longer. I tend to have this problem where there were things earlier, but I dug them up or chopped them down.