I'm a bit reluctant to have the trash verb available on creative items because of the amount of effort which go into them. I think there should need to be effort and action to destroy those rather than heat of the moment actions which cannot be stopped/try to stop during conflict. Trashed clothing items for example go into the @review-cloth queue so it doesn't get permanently deleted unless the community decides.
Maybe an option if you're the original author to trash it?
I don't really feel the old justification that artwork is special applies anymore, personally. First because things made from digital canvasses are not necessarily art to begin with, are not necessarily things that should be indestructible, and there's already many items added since then that have similar "importance" that are now destructible.
When almost nothing in the game was destructible and there were very few art items it was more reasonable, but there's at least hundreds of these things and many of them are junk, have errors, accessibility warnings, or were just not meant to be permanent.
I've come across at least a dozen items that are duplicates because the original had errors and there was no way to destroy the draft. The creators may be dead a decade. Likewise these ASCII warnings only show up once an item is finished, so an accessible version creates a duplicate and now there's two items in the database.
I honestly dislike things living forever in this game. Especially things that decay or would get stolen. I'd rather make it easier to get rid of things but I understand some players want to preserve things.
The distinction then seems arbitrary to me, why would one creative item be indestructible and not another? I know this problem actively discourages me from making any more of these things because I've got a bunch already with random ASCII warnings or other errors and I don't want to warehouse dupes in-memory for eternity.
I'm pretty sure destroyed artwork already goes in the same temp storage that trashed clothing does, there is just no review process that faces the players.
The distinction then seems arbitrary to me, why would one creative item be indestructible and not another? I know this problem actively discourages me from making any more of these things because I've got a bunch already with random ASCII warnings or other errors and I don't want to warehouse dupes in-memory for eternity.
Agreed... seems sentimental in an out of place way. Just have a queue like the clothing one.
That could be cool but it might be unnecessary if the goal is to simply to make art easy to destroy, bypassing any kind of review-art (player facing or otherwise), should there be mistakes while protecting art that passes the artists muster.
With that in mind, maybe call it 'protect' instead of 'finalize' Or something similar.
This could also make it so an artist can decide that what they made just isn't important enough for it to be protected while someone who gets hold of it later can flag it as protected if desired or trash it without worry.
Sorry about the double post. Just realized my first post might be misunderstood.
I don't put much value on preservation because if, for example, I wanted to effectively delete someone's artwork from the game out of spite or something, I could just drop it into the ocean, or a volcano, or outer space. The difference is that it's still loaded into memory and creating replacements of it continues to fill the moo with objects.
The main use cases I personally have for trashing art are: I want to be able to trash artwork objects that get tagged with an ASCII warning, because this only happens when it's already indestructible, or there are otherwise mistakes or revisions needed.
There are already methods to destroy or otherwise obscure artwork for eternity. I don't feel a need to have a considerably more easy method to destroy them to offer covinence where it isn't needed.
Props can be made form unfinilazied materials or materials that can be repurposed.
Artwork has a great review system built in that allows you to review things before finalizing, and until it is finalized it can be entirely re written.
Even finalized clothing can be rewritten and changed (within reason as per rules)
Given art work cannot be copied or even close to replicated a destroyed art piece is gone forever, unlike any other creative item in the game.
So please, I emplore you not to consider a one word command capable of just ending creative works that can take tens of hours to create.
I would have taken no ASCII warnings getting baked in but they're still there just hidden on display pieces, which didn't cover all my use cases.
Everything else a player creates can be destroyed, including themselves. There's clothing with greater creative work than artworks, likewise photographs for sentimental value, likewise animals, NPCs, locations, all of which have some erasure options.
I think it's being overly and unnecessarily covetous where the game is otherwise utterly unsentimental. If you don't want an artwork destroyed, it can be installed and protected like any valuable object in game, but I feel like just assuming everything any player ever created is too precious to ever remove is both wrong and inconsistent.
A quick check of my draft file shoes I have 1.1 million characters of object descriptions written, I'm not being callous about creatives. I'd just like to not be churning out dupes.
Would having unflagged art be trashable solve my use cases above? Yes.
Woke: make all art trashable just like any other item
Bespoke: make all art trashable but add a @review-art queue for finalized art (and maybe add an ASCII art warning before finalization)
