Welcome Valentin,

German here as well, born in 1979. Thanks for joining this forum. Have fun!

Welcome, VorticonCmdr!

Welcome Valentin, glad to have you on the Forums!

Welcome to the Lemmings forum! It's always nice to see new people joining.
Yeah, this is one of the friendliest and most welcoming communities I've ever been part of!

Welcome aboard VorticonCmdr.

We'll be glad to discuss any lemmings stuffs with you, be welcome to share your experience with the games.

... Valentin and I wanted to introduce myself. I was visiting the forum the last few days a lot and found a lot of interesting information and interesting threads.

About myself: I am from Munich, Germany and born in 1978 and the first time I played (DOS) Lemmings was at a friends place but I don't remember when.

My impression is that this is a great community so I wanted to say Hi!

I can defo make the Leeds one if it doesnt go on too late (I live in Oxford), I think Liverpool might be a bit far however.

Really looking forward to it

One crossroads in the design is: Should cutting the global future be undoable?

You can decide against this for code complexity. Or for difficulty of making understandable UI for it. Or you can allow it, but undo has only depth 1, i.e., you have the most recent previous replay in memory for restoration. Or you can make a full undo-redo stack, either by storing full replays, or by storing the modifications.

Reason behind undo: Powerful actions with powerful undo is nicer than making it hard to reach the sharp knifes that you need all the time. But it remains hard to say how commonly the knife is needed.

UI concern: Undo is one extra button, and it's fundamentally different from rewind. Undo/redo would even be two extra buttons. Rewind is travelling along the 3rd dimension, replay editing is working in the 4th, and an undo stack will be the 5th. It feels only one level below the strength of git rebase.

* * *

If cutting the global future won't be undoable, then I sympathesize with your preference to guard against misclicking air.

I don't think moving the airclick to RMB is good. Reasons as yesterday: RMB airclick clashes with priority invert (where a lone RMB click/hold affects lemming filtering only), it clashes with scrolling (where a lone RMB click/hold does nothing), it's undiscoverable, and it's unconventional (in Lemmings; many other games have RMB canceling).

One idea is to still have two modes, switchable during play:

• Clicking a lemming first cuts the future of that lemming, then, if no clash with different lemming, inserts the assignment. Airclicks cut the global future. This is can be the default mode.
• No cutting whatsoever. Clicking a lemming never cuts, and it inserts an assignment only if it doesn't clash with any lemming, same or different. Air clicks do nothing.

UI concern: Modes are hard to discover. Modes annoy the user when he doesn't understand them completely. Hard to make icons for these modes. I feel like colored Rs won't cut it; the symbol for no-cut mode would rather be struckthrough scissors.

Require something really explicit to cut the global future? Comes at cost of breaking consistency with many Lemmings games, with Lix, but the idea isn't entirely off the table. Hard to sell this to users who rarely insert, but who rewind often and already know not to LMB. The ice is thin.

* * *

Abstract background reading:
Preventing User Errors: Avoiding Unconscious Slips, 2015
Preventing User Errors: Avoiding Conscious Mistakes, 2015
Undo vs. Confirm, when to use what, 2025
Forgiveness Principle: Designing Undo, Confirmation, Error Recovery, 2026

-- Simon

I like the examples from reply #13 more than the examples from reply #12.

I think the author line should be dark blue like the pack and position, to not stand out as much. It's as relevant as the pack and position.

Pack name is nice for livestreaming. People will see excerpts without stream metadata (stream title). Good to orient viewers.

Re long pack names: When you have to trim long pack and position because of long directory names, cut from the left. Or cut from the center. Don't cut from the right. People tend to be happy with the position.

Spacing is a concern for later. Now, if author is missing, there is gap. I don't mind the gap much.

-- Simon

Little time, the hunches are:

The shift in design will be away from {different modes for different tasks} toward error prevention/recovery. E.g., you value how blue R cannot accidentally cut global future. Error prevention may be via modes again, or via undo, or via something.

{LMB into air to cut global future} is accident-prone and obscure. But RMB fixes neither of these problems, and it clashes with many RMB habits where click is no-op: priority invert, scrolling, ...

More when I have time.

-- Simon