Here another completely different argument: We already had in vanilla Lemmix the possibility to hide steel (by placing steel areas over usual terrain). Sometimes this was horribly abused: Try to guess where the steel areas are in levels 1, 4, 5 and 9 of
CHRISFN15.dat (Yes, they all have steel!).
While I have faith in all forum regulars to use the ability to cover steel with decoration properly, I wonder whether new Lix users will feel the same? The Lemmix history suggests something different: If some option can be abused, than someone
will abuse it.
<geoo> Proposition for the steel issue: a class of decoration (ideally with alpha) that does not affect what's underneath, and if placed on air will just be erased. I cannot be used for any other purpose (e.g. terrain), thus it's only in the tileset designers hand to provide visually distinctive decoration
[...]
<geoo> and it can also be applied to normal terrain, but not to air
<SimonNa> we still introduce an extra type of tile. I'm not 100 % convinced that bombing holes into steel is such a problem
[...]
<SimonNa> deco is gadget that is never checked for interaction
<SimonNa> leftover from "let's make lots of crap like trampolines"
If you go with this, I would suggest implementing the current deco objects similarly to what NeoLemmix calls "objects with Only-On-Terrain setting": This is a class of objects that does nothing except recoloring already existing solid terrain pieces.
Advantages:
- Removes unintuitive deco pieces that look solid, but are not.
- Allows steel decoration pieces as this new object type.