For "not needing a seperate EXE for every game", would this mean, for example, all Lemmings Plus games (including Bonus Packs, HLP and LPO, except maybe LPF), all in one EXE?
Basically, my thoughts here are for the EXE and the game data to be seperate. This wouldn't be a setup along the lines of what Lix / (Super)Lemmini have of having thousands of files per pack, but it could perhaps be more compared to how Hungry Software's game Ducks works; each level pack is basically distributed as a single file which contains all the data relating to that pack. The EXE basically lets you load a file, either through a typical "Open File" dialog box or maybe a setup along the lines of what WinLemm has.
As well as files that contain entire games, it could also be possible to have files that simply contain extra musics, extra graphic sets, etc, so these too don't need to be seperately included with each game. For this, of course, I'd want it to go either way - a game data pack could contain them, or simply rely on an external one.
Most likely, I'd still embed the default files in the EXE, for simplicity's sake. An addon pack, or a custom game, could override them if need be.
As for the smaller things - music by names, seperating the things that currently re-use a single data field (eg: currently, the same data field is used for both oddtabling and bait-and-switch, meaning you can't have a bait-and-switch level that also oddtables another one; another example would be the clock gimmick not working too well together with VGASPECs). I'd also like to implement some way of checking replays are for the correct level that works with NeoCustLemmix (since for obvious reasons rank / level numbers don't work too well there), and at the same time avoid the checks failing when levels are simply reordered. I'm also very strongly considering making it simply give a warning, rather than outright refusing to load the replays, as long as the replay
is a valid replay and the only issue is that it's for (or at least appears to be for) a different level. Perhaps a few new gimmicks too, which if it's more than one would mean a need to allow for more than 32 gimmicks...
just because Lemmings Plus IV didn't use gimmicks doesn't mean there can't be some new ones for LPIV Bonus Pack, after all...In fact, a lot of this is already supported as of V1.34n-B, but it's mostly supported only to the extent of "NeoLemmix will not throw a fit when trying to load a level containing this extra info" rather than "NeoLemmix actually makes full use of this extra info". An almost-unnoticable glitch in the support for this is what caused the major oddtabling issue in V1.34n-B (I say almost unnoticable because, it wouldn't be expected to have any impact on oddtabling; the only effect it would have is unpredictable results in clock gimmick levels that have no objects and don't have this extra info, which in practice is unlikely to ever happen since a level without objects isn't exactly of much use...), as well as the far-less-major issue with the music in levels that use oddtabling in V1.34n-C.
And, of course, fixing any bugs that show up, as usual.