Here's a little "Bumper for the Jumper"
. Since Nepster never chimed in on these thoughts, I just wanted to ask how things are going on the Jumper front? namida has done a lot of work on both Lemmings 3D and NeoLemmix recently, adding in a bunch of new features. The Jumper, however, if I understood correctly, is still Nepster's domain, I guess?
I think I remember from the discussions during the transition to New Formats that Shimmier and Jumper were planned to be introduced about one year apart. The Shimmier is now making its way into official NeoLemmix, however, of course it was available for preliminary testing as early as the end of last year.
It might be too early for Christmas wishes, but does it seem like a reasonable prospect to get a somewhat functional version of the Jumper running until then?
To my layman understanding, the main issue with the Jumper are not the graphics / sprites, which can be taken from Lemmings 2, but all the questions surrounding tumbler physics.
But I guess it's intended for tumbler physics to only affect the Jumper exclusively? i.e., introducing the Jumper does not necessarily require introducing tumbler physics into NeoLemmix for all skills in general?
I'm asking because Lemmings 2 of course has general tumbler physics, i.e. even skills that we're used to behaving differently in Lemmings 1, like the Bomber, result in Lemmings being tossed around. I don't think anyone wants that kind of "chaos" in NeoLemmix.
In Lix, in contrast, it seems to me that only certain skills use tumbler physics, namely the Knockback Bomber (=the equivalent of the L2 Bomber in contrast to the L2 / NeoLemmix Exploder), the Baseball Bat, and of course the Jumper (the Runner maybe by extension when it interacts with the Jumper).
Consequently, I wouldn't expect skills like e.g. the Glider to be affected by tumbler physics and bounce off of walls in a different way than they do now.
I'm not trying to create a hurry for anyone here, I'm just curious. In fact, in the meantime, the introduction of
the increased 10-skill-types-limit per level gave me a way to simulate Jumper usage in a similar way like I used to simulate Shimmiers before they were introduced (see my level "Coming Soon: Shimmiers" from Lemmicks, where Gliders hover along an updraft below a Platformer's bridge as if they we're shimmying on it):
Now that we have Shimmiers at our disposal, a Glider which is assigned a Shimmier skill can make upward together with tiny little forward jumps - it's enough to get on a Stacker's stack if the Lemming is standing right in front of it, for example. Likewise, a little gap that's supposed to be crossed by using a Jumper eventually can be temporarily crossed by placing an updraft across it, then assigning a Shimmier to give a Glider sufficient height to float across the gap on the updraft.
The crucial point is that this requires two skills to simulate one, which of course reduces the number of other available skill types in a given level. But with the maximum skill-type limit increased to 10, I could have a level featuring "normal" different 8 skills plus a "simulated Jumper" by adding in Shimmier + Glider as skills 9 and 10. Of course, the main danger is that those two skills shouldn't unexpectedly break the level elsewhere, but this can be accomplished by providing the Shimmier and Glider as pickup skills only shortly before they're supposed to be used. That still leaves the issue that the updraft spoils where the Jumper is supposed to go eventually, obviously - but hey, we're only talking about interim solutions here anyway.
At least that's what I like to do when I have a level idea already that involves an upcoming skill, and want to create the terrain it advance.
For the Shimmier, I can confidently say that this reportedly went down very well: Most of the levels I had created prior to the introduction of the Shimmier worked exactly the way I had intended them to when it finally arrived. Some merely required a couple of pixels in height adjustment so that the Shimmier could reach or not reach a certain ceiling, but everything else about the skill behaved exactly as I had hoped for.
And since we probably all have a rough estimate of how far the Jumper should be able to leap - mainly from playing Lemmings 2 - I think it might be possible to create Jumper-friendly terrain as early as now, at least for anyone who is coming up with ideas?This seems to be especially true when it comes to Lemmings 2- and other block-heavy graphic sets. Jumpers typically make it across one of those square L2 blocks, either in height or in width, meaning they can jump on top of such a block, or over a gap of that width, but not
over such a block in one jump.