Unfortunately, (anti)splat pads do
not work like one-way arrows.
One-way arrows
expect the region they cover might have terrain added or modified, and have code to make sure constructive skill terrain is not affected. Splatpads do not. Which means that, in those above examples, if a lemming were to build inside the area that's covered - even where the field is invisible due to no overlapping
part-of-the-level terrain - that area would also gain splat and antisplat properties.
This means that designers must
very actively work to avoid anything misleading with these objects - this might even come down to "they cannot be used fairly on levels which include constructive skills", although I'm sure there are ways especially when the Builder isn't involved at all - which to me makes it very questionable if they should be accepted into NL's downloads
at all. Them becoming part of the default style is
100% out of the question.
Adding code to
make splatpads / antisplat pads have OWW-like behaviour could break existing levels, and I will not be considering making it dependent on the "only on terrain" - in fact, if anything, "only on terrain" is meant to be purely for decorative purposes and it's questionable if objects with the property should still function
in any case, but that's another subject. However, this blatantly falls outside the intended usage of that feature, and will not be
actively supported in any way.
I think a general piece of advice you need to keep in mind:
If you need to resort to tricky workarounds like this to achieve something, you probably shouldn't be trying to achieve that "something", except as a "this is technically possible" demonstration that never gets used in standard levels.However, there are a couple of points here that I do think are very worthwhile to draw attention to:
I would even vote for these to become part of the default style and not just be hidden in a style on the huge list!
I do agree here that
some kind of splat and antisplat pads - perhaps the ones from namida_wasteland as they're the most well known example - should be put into the default style. Thanks to the alias system, this can be done fairly easily now.
simply resize them to the terrain piece using the vertical and horizontal resize
The aforementioned (anti)splat pads in namida_wasteland support horizontal (but not vertical) resizing these days.