Locking parts currently serves as a way to prevent unintentional modifications to parts while working on unrelated things (among other use cases), but it is currently too hard to select a locked part if I really need to select it anyway.
It is very difficult to copy and paste, or get to the properties of a part that has been locked, especially if it is very deeply nested away in the explorer hierarchy. If I need to get e.g. the color of a nearby part, copy a meshpart so I can reuse it and save on memory in my game, or I need to reference something else about it, I must do the following:
- Select the lock tool
- Unlock the part
- If the part is in a folder or a nested folder, this involves unlocking every other part in the entire folder tree as well - if there are a mixture of locked and unlocked parts in the folder, I lose that information, either everything is locked or everything is unlocked.
- Deselect the lock tool
- Select the part
And if I want to prevent myself from accidentally editing things again, or selecting the wrong things while working I must do this process again to lock everything, until I need to sample another meshpart or property.
This is awful and makes re-using meshparts and keeping colors consistent unnecessarily tedious and difficult.
When I hold down alt to drill into a model to select individual parts, I should be able to also do this for locked parts. For example, maybe I could hold down alt+ctrl to activate the alt-click select behavior, but also have it ignore if a part is locked and select it anyway.
For example, right now I’m making props and I wanted to reuse this spiked meshpart in my map:
I cannot copy this meshpart to use in my props because it is locked, and to unlock it I have to go through a tedious ritual that I must repeat every time I want to sample a meshpart, and I risk ripping the ground up by accident if I don’t re-lock everything since all of the parts in my map are in a nested folder hierarchy.