I'm modifying Lemmini - any suggestions?

[Crane]

It's about striking a balance.  Personally I prefer the 'modern' steel behaviour where nothing within the steel zones can be cleared - it makes for more consistent and reliable gameplay - while I prefer the old behaviour of miners and bashers always completing a full stroke and reversing direction if they hit something they cannot penetrate.

I'm all for fixing glitches and obvious exploits (e.g. walking along the top of the level, or blockers negating one-way arrows and steel zones etc) but if Lemmini does something in a particular way that isn't broken per se, then it might not be worth fixing.  There's no fixed formula to it though - what some people like others won't.

[mobius]

Also; great idea to make it compatible with other sound formats.
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Pieuw says the game sometimes gives you only 9 letters for the code, in other words it’s incomplete. And when entering this code, put an underscore at the end, that works. No idea why this happens.
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here is screenshot of that present level. Looks good to me 

It is an issue with the mechanics though; for example in the level I made "the Italian Job" and Crane's level Oil Rig; bashers can't bash across a relatively low piece of terrain of which they can in Lemmix.
-One wooden horizontal bar from the pillar set can be bashed through, if the lemming stands on one pixel of terrain (of the the wood). In other words from the top of the wood he can dig down until 1 pixel left then bash through the rest of the wood successfully. in Lemmix. This is not possible in Lemmini, he'll take 1 swing then walk on. I don't remember what happens exactly I'd have to check it out.

[ccexplore]

then what does this mean?

I decided to reverse my decision on the steel behavior: The "fixed" steel will now be the default, and a new toggle (I'm thinking of "classicSteel") will use the old behavior. The included levels will use the latter.

That only affects the steel behavior specifically and not every current Lemmini behaviors.  I couldn't tell from your post's wording that you were referring specifically to the steel toggle.

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I think from the perspective of most custom level designers, the "old" steel behavior tends to be much more of a bane, as it tends to provide too many ways for the player to take advantage and bypass the steel areas that were placed specifically to prevent certain backroutes.  So I see enabling the old steel behavior mainly accomplishes two things:

- enable in Lemmini solutions to the original games' levels that rely on the behavior.  We already know that none of those levels require the behavior to solve, so this affects more the "challenge" type solutions that needed the behavior to achieve the challenge's goals.

- enable in Lemmini solutions to CustLemm levels that actually require the behavior.  I don't think too many such levels require the behavior either, but I'm sure there are a few that do, so there's a small gain in this if the old behavior is supported.

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[completely different point below, but don't want to double-post]

Any chance that Lemmini can support creating a video recording out of an action replay?  As in a Youtube-uploadable video without requiring separate video recording and editing software?

[ccexplore]

here is screenshot of that present level.

Thanks.  Any chance you can get a screenshot of Genesis Tricky 10 (it's different from the normal DOS one) in Lemmini?  I want to see what the "curved pillars" normally look like without the "carvings" done on Present 14.  From your screenshot, it kinda looks like they didn't actually update all the terrain graphics for hi-res, in which case my concern about seeing low-res artifacts might well be moot.

[mobius]

I first played the Genesis levels on Lemmini, that's how I knew. In this level they are just more pillars, (erased). In that Present level it's a bunch of grey circles.

Btw, you probably know but playing mechanics work differently if your playing a lvl file verses an ini one in Lemmini. They look identical however. I don't know all of the differences except the lazy climber glitch only happens with ini. Well the ini's are the higher res graphics I guess; I don't know how that works.

I started using tricks like these too, after seeing the Genesis levels.

[Tsyu]

This is good. However, it's also true that the object triggers in regards to the exits are vastly improved in Lemmini since they are larger and make it easier to place in the level (you don't have to align it the grid or put a stupid piece of terrain there to make it work. So I'd say fix the traps but keep the exits the same.

I'm making all of the trigger areas the same as they were in the original game. However, if you want to use larger or smaller trigger areas for your levels, you'll be able to do that if your levels are distributed as packs. Rest assured, though, that trigger areas won't be locked to a 4x4 or 8x8 grid.

-When creating a game pack, somehow be able to see the codes to all your levels. Currently there is no way to “skip” a level in a game pack other than leaving the “game” and loading the level individually which is generally a pain since usually the levels aren’t titled but only have a number.

Or I could add an "allLevelsUnlocked" parameter to levelpack.ini to have all levels unlocked from the start. (And you can always enter "0xdeadbeef" as a code...)

-Pieuw just alerted me to a possible strange glitch in Lemmini; the level codes not working as they should.  I suspect not much investigation has ever been done in this area (since not many people even use the codes anymore?). But I don’t know the details yet.

Pieuw says the game sometimes gives you only 9 letters for the code, in other words it’s incomplete. And when entering this code, put an underscore at the end, that works. No idea why this happens.

I did make make some changes to the level-code system to make it more accurate to the original game; that may or may not have fixed this problem. Do you or Pieuw have an example of a level that ever does this?

-blockers turn around ALL lemmings; that includes lemmings falling, climbing, building bashing, mining, digging, floating etc…

-when a digger is on nothing but air, he can still be assigned tasks like builder, this makes it easy to have a lemming move horizontally across the level by digging and building.

Both of these have been fixed.

Any chance that Lemmini can support creating a video recording out of an action replay?  As in a Youtube-uploadable video without requiring separate video recording and editing software?

I agree that this is a good feature to have, but it will probably take some time to implement and will most likely not be in the initial release.

[mobius]

Pieuw says the game sometimes gives you only 9 letters for the code, in other words it’s incomplete. And when entering this code, put an underscore at the end, that works. No idea why this happens.

I did make make some changes to the level-code system to make it more accurate to the original game; that may or may not have fixed this problem. Do you or Pieuw have an example of a level that ever does this?

he just encountered it recently playing his own level pack (which isn’t released yet) I have never encountered this problem at all, sorry. He said it happened quite a bit but this was the first time apparently.

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here are a few more items that are not real important but would be a nice touch imo:

-be able to assign blockers climber/floater (while blocking)

-Lemmings that are selected under the cursor turn a different color. This makes it very easy to tell exactly which lemming is being selected in a crowd.

-I prefer the FF button to be a hold-down instead of toggle. The reason is I often use FF for short periods of time and it's easier to use this way and harder to make a mistake by accidentally leaving it on. To compensate for this add a button that does 10 time skip like in Lemmix.

-to select walkers over worker; instead of pressing up arrow key or some other key, use right mouse click. Right clicking both scrolls and selects walker in Lix and works pretty nicely. But I can see someone not liking it. Something else I just thought of to take care of this:
Require a key to be held down when using right mouse button to scroll. Or not have to click at all; when a key is held down, it locks the cursor in place and moving the mouse then scrolls without any other clicks. I’d like to try this out.

[Tsyu]

he just encountered it recently playing his own level pack (which isn’t released yet) I have never encountered this problem at all, sorry. He said it happened quite a bit but this was the first time apparently.

It sounds like the tenth letter of the level pack's code seed is too close to Z. Setting it to K or an earlier letter should do the trick.

-be able to assign blockers climber/floater (while blocking)

While this is easy to implement (and the original Lemmini allows this), it isn't possible in the original game, so I don't think I'll enable it unless more people request it (and even then, it won't be allowed in the original levels).

-Lemmings that are selected under the cursor turn a different color. This makes it very easy to tell exactly which lemming is being selected in a crowd.

To be honest, I don't like this idea. After all, the game does tell you what kind of lemming is highlighted. You can also use the walker-only and left/right selection filters (which my version of Lemmini will let you use together). I also greatly improved the selection priority system, so walkers never have priority over workers unless no worker under the cursor can take the selected skill.

-I prefer the FF button to be a hold-down instead of toggle. The reason is I often use FF for short periods of time and it's easier to use this way and harder to make a mistake by accidentally leaving it on. To compensate for this add a button that does 10 time skip like in Lemmix.

I'll try making this an option. However, I don't think the 10-second skip is a good idea for a number of reasons.

-to select walkers over worker; instead of pressing up arrow key or some other key, use right mouse click. Right clicking both scrolls and selects walker in Lix and works pretty nicely. But I can see someone not liking it. Something else I just thought of to take care of this:
Require a key to be held down when using right mouse button to scroll. Or not have to click at all; when a key is held down, it locks the cursor in place and moving the mouse then scrolls without any other clicks. I’d like to try this out.

I currently have the right mouse button do what it did in the original game: select only walkers, and increase the scrolling speed when the cursor is moved to the edge of the window. The middle button is currently assigned to scrolling. I think I can add an option to swap the behavior of these buttons. However, I don't think it's possible to lock the cursor in Java, at least not without using a software-drawn cursor.

[mobius]

ooh, I forgot something I’d really like:
[again, I apologize for making these all in separate posts but there are so many things I can’t think of them all at once]
-on the menu screen, besides the percentage save requirement have the exact number of lemmings required displayed also.

(these I'm not real excited about but they are handy feature I think)
-slow motion
-zoom

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In Dodochocalo's first version of Dovelems there are underscores and other odd symbols in his codes. Idk how he got those. I still didn't even try any of this out. But I will be once I start doing this for the community pack.

[mobius]

here are a few interesting things I remembered while playing recently:

-sometimes (often actually) the game lags by “pausing” then it speeds up as if to catch up.

-[in Lemmini] if a bomber is standing on a thin piece of steel, so that it’s bombing mask extends below the steel and there is terrain below that steel, the corresponding terrain (not the steel) will get erased. It’s weird because the steel is intact. Personally, Idk if I like this or not, or if it seems like a good mechanic or bad. I don’t really care either way right now. I have only encountered (to notice it) it in one level so far. In all the Lemmini levels I played and I have not seen it utilized at all for any purpose. Maybe others don’t find this weird at all.

-some of the terrain [most notably] the rocks in marble set have such a dark shading that it’s difficult to tell where the terrain is. That is; it’s black like the black parts in the crystal set. It’s not like this in DOS. Also the "mountain" like piece from marble [in Lemmini only] has what appears like a small "hole" on the left side, so that things behind it show through. It looks odd.

[Tsyu]

-on the menu screen, besides the percentage save requirement have the exact number of lemmings required displayed also.

Like this?

87% (70) to be saved

I personally don't like the way it looks. I think it would be better to have an option to toggle between percentage and number.

I did make a change so that the percentage is not used if there are more than 100 lemmings; a percentage would not be precise enough in that case.

(these I'm not real excited about but they are handy feature I think)
-slow motion
-zoom

If I do implement slow motion, I'll most likely make it a cheat, considering that it would make some levels easier than they're meant to be. I'll admit, though, that it would be a great developer tool, especially if it's adjustable. As for zoom, that looks much harder to implement, so it's probably not coming anytime soon.

-sometimes (often actually) the game lags by “pausing” then it speeds up as if to catch up.

The pausing sometimes happens when the open() method of a sound clip is called. I really don't know how to fix this. I did, however, fix the fast-forwarding that happens afterward. (And yes, it is supposed to be catching up; the developer was apparently intent on making the game clock match real time, no matter what happens.)

-[in Lemmini] if a bomber is standing on a thin piece of steel, so that it’s bombing mask extends below the steel and there is terrain below that steel, the corresponding terrain (not the steel) will get erased. It’s weird because the steel is intact. Personally, Idk if I like this or not, or if it seems like a good mechanic or bad. I don’t really care either way right now. I have only encountered (to notice it) it in one level so far. In all the Lemmini levels I played and I have not seen it utilized at all for any purpose. Maybe others don’t find this weird at all.

Preventing this would require additional checks to determine whether there is any steel between the middle of a lemming and a given pixel. While it is probably doable, I think it's a bit too much trouble to implement.

-some of the terrain [most notably] the rocks in marble set have such a dark shading that it’s difficult to tell where the terrain is. That is; it’s black like the black parts in the crystal set. It’s not like this in DOS.

Yeah, that's how the Windows high-resolution graphics are. I'm unaware of any levels where this is really a problem, though. If more people are annoyed by this, I can probably lighten those pieces.

Also the "mountain" like piece from marble [in Lemmini only] has what appears like a small "hole" on the left side, so that things behind it show through. It looks odd.

There are a few other pieces in that set that are like that. Those holes were almost certainly added by the Lemmini developer since they don't exist in the Windows graphics. They have been fixed.

[ccexplore]

-[in Lemmini] if a bomber is standing on a thin piece of steel, so that it’s bombing mask extends below the steel and there is terrain below that steel, the corresponding terrain (not the steel) will get erased. It’s weird because the steel is intact. Personally, Idk if I like this or not, or if it seems like a good mechanic or bad. I don’t really care either way right now. I have only encountered (to notice it) it in one level so far. In all the Lemmini levels I played and I have not seen it utilized at all for any purpose. Maybe others don’t find this weird at all.

I don't pretend to know all the intricacies of the physics of explosions, but it is worth pointing out that the primary power of an explosion comes from its shockwave rather than the actual fireball of superheated air, and it is possible for waves to traverse through solid matter (though they can also get partly reflected and attenuated, amongst various possible interactions with the medium).  So while I'm not sure there exists real-world materials that can faithfully replicate the results you describe, it at least seems theoretically possible to me I think, for an explosion to leave the thin steel intact but have the shockwave traverse past the thin steel and affect the terrain material beyond.

In any case, it is basically how terrain removal works against steel in games like Lemmings 2.  I even created a custom level for DOS Lemmings 2 where at one point, your explosion must take out terrain on both sides of a 8-pixel-thick piece of steel.

[Proxima]

That's also how it works in Lix, though it's hard to notice as the explosion mask will only just go through the thinnest steel piece currently available. It's a natural consequence of the rule that terrain removal is dependent solely on whether terrain is steel or not (and not whether the lemming is standing on steel as in original Lemmings). And it's desirable because of its simplicity. If steel were to block an explosion, what would happen when two thin pieces of steel cut into an explosion mask at different heights, and some regular terrain can be "seen" diagonally through the gap? Best not to open that whole can of worms.

As for slow motion, it comes in very useful in Lix, but it does change the nature of the game -- as was Simon's intention.

[Simon]

The game should offer any tools it can for singleplayer. You rarely need slow-motion, but in the few cases it's useful, it shouldn't be a cheat. Pixel precision usually makes a level bad. Most level authors leave in pixel precision only when there was absolutely no design alternative, and subsequently encourage the use of slow-motion for that level.

If it weren't such a complex-to-make and rarely-needed feature, Lix would even allow inserting/moving skills at precise time intervals. Right now, humans can edit the replay text file, but nobody has done that yet. :-)

-- Simon

[Proxima]

I can't entirely agree. Back when I first played Lemmings, the absence of fine-control features was an essential part of the difficulty and fun of the game. Adding them, as I said, changes the game -- into one that I like now, but don't think I'd have liked nearly as much back then. It's good to have those features in Lix, partly because the community are making much harder levels, partly because I don't have nearly so much time for playing as I used to -- and finally, because I've changed from a casual player to a challenge player, and trying to squeeze the last drop out of many levels would just be too frustrating without control aids.

I've used editing the replay text file twice, as it happens -- to save the maximum possible on Clam's "Mental Block" and Rubix's "Scaling the heights". The former requires assigning many pixel-precise blockers, which would be really tedious by any other method. The latter requires assigning 95 climbers faster than is physically possible in the game, so text-editing is the only way the maximum can be achieved.