The main concern is that a moving focus stands to be irritating.

What are the use cases? Manually anchor camera in advance to the lemming that will receive the next 5 assignments? You need to know in advance what's going to happen. Yes, if you know that in advance, then you can use this to avoid manual scrolling and zooming. And zooming into the lemming (instead of into the cursor) is good then (it's the only way).

But why would such an interactive feature (manual anchoring to lemming) useful in televsion mode (that I never use)? It should be noninteractive, right? Or do you think darkshoxx would use it for the showcase? You may want a big fat arrow over the anchor, for the audience.

Ways to soothen the worry of the moving focus: Camera could jump according to some hysteresis, e.g., when anchor closer to camera's edge than 20 % of screen length, camera will jump into that direction by 50 % of screen length, putting the lemming back near the middle with view ahead. Unsure if the concentrated nastiness of huge jumps is any better than the smeared-out nastiness of a permanently moving screen. You can smoothen jumps by making the camera focus chase the anchor, not jump to the anchor, but still. And zooming into the lemming would be bad then, and we should continue to zoom into the cursor.

Ways to anticipate which lemming is important. Then you don't have to anchor manually. This ties into that other thread (I'll edit this) where I mull about painting markers over lemmings that are going to receive skills soon. Or anchor could switch to lemming that is going to receive the next skill half-time between any two assignments.

-- Simon

This idea is courtesy of Armani, who has implemented it his custom NeoLemmix build.

In Clear Physics Mode, we should show a fall distance ruler beneath each entrance hatch. The ruler can always the exact fall distance (63px) just in case terrain needs to be removed from beneath the hatch when lemmings are still spawning.

This idea is courtesy of Armani, who has solved this issue in his custom NeoLemmix build.

We need some way of being able to view the talisman requirements during gameplay. If a talisman has many requirements, it can be difficult to remember them all and this can inhibit a player's attempt at the talisman, or worse - put them off attempting it altogether.

Armani solves this by displaying a clickable talisman button which opens a panel showing the requirments. The panel is updated live, so a player can also track their progress on the talisman in real-time.

This may be a good enough solution as it is, but I thought it best to open this up to discussion in case anyone has any other suggestions.

One possibility I can think of is that clicking the talisman button could adjust the skillset, save requirement and time limit shown in the panel itself. We can use different-colored digits (possibly) to show that it's a talisman requirement rather than the normal requirement, and the player can toggle between the normal/talisman values by clicking the button again. Progress feedback will be inherent; the display can revert to normal once any of the requirements have been failed.

The only downside to this idea is that a level can have multiple talismans, so we'd need multiple buttons.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

The Hold-to-assign hotkey is something I've implemented in RetroLemmini which can be very useful for levels which require repeat assignments of the same skill.

Essentially, whilst the hotkey is held, any lemming under the cursor will be assigned the currently-selected skill (i.e. if they can be assigned to, and if the skill is available).

Armani has implemented something very similar in his custom NeoLemmix build, which has prompted me to post this topic. I'll look at adding the hotkey to CE soon.

This idea is courtesy of Armani, who has implemented it his custom NeoLemmix build.

The Level Select menu currently has a search bar, which allows the user to search the levels by title. The results are displayed and can be clicked to load the relevant level.

Armani's version also allows searching by Title and Style. This could be expanded even further to allow searching by Skills, Talismans and other level properties.

Now that the Search feature is fast and stable, expanding it seems like the obvious next move.

Also, @Armani - I'd be very interested to see how your Search feature works, and if you may have been able to optimise it in a different or better way than I have.

This idea is courtesy of Armani, who has implemented it his custom NeoLemmix build.

Basically, right-clicking a lemming twice locks the camera to that lemming. The view then follows them until another is highlighted, or empty space is clicked. This is potentially super useful for watching replays back in Playback Mode.

Armani takes this a step further by also anchoring the Zoom function to the same lemming.

I'd like to add this to CE, but make it a hotkey (similar to the existing 'Highlight Lemming' hotkey) which toggles the anchor on and off, rather than 2 right-clicks.

We can decide later if clicking air should cancel the anchor. Air-clicks also cancel the replay and perform forwards frame steps; we probably shouldn't make it also do this third thing.

Ah OK... so, the option is remembered between Editor sessions (and is set via the Auto Screen Start checkbox itself), but reverts to being unchecked if a new level is created in the same session, regardless of option.

The setting must necessarily be separate from the level property, then (which is initialized to false every time a new level is created). An oversight from my early days with the Editor before I knew better! It has at last been added to the Settings menu.

Fixed in NLEditor commit 8ecd3c6.

Turns out this is a game bug (rather than an Editor bug) so I've moved the topic.

The fix is to wrap the LoadReplay function and pass it a bool when loading replays via Playtest. This restores all other replay-loading controls.

Fixed in NLCEPlayer commit ff7dd7f.

This could be a handy feature, makes NL level testing somewhat easier

Yeah this is likely due to the new Autosave feature, I'll take a look at it later.