The problem has nothing to do with replay tweaking or framestepping. The problem arises even if the engine supports only (restart with replay) and (interrupt replay to take over).
I have read your explanation/examples and I still don't see what the problem is. If the player clicks to end the replay
before it enters the Oh-no state, then the Bomber skill is cancelled, in both instances (since the assignment is recorded at the point of Oh-no). I would imagine that, in the case of Timed, the countdown timer would simply stop (and disappear) mid-way through if it had already started at that point.
Anyway, the more I think about it, the more I'd prefer to aim for a solution which doesn't even
need to account for different replays. Option 3, with no player-side option for "always untimed", is looking to be the most attractive at the moment, both in terms of simplicity and elegance.
it means restricting the assignment of Untimed Bombers in the first 5 seconds of every level
Why, though?
Because otherwise, any level
requiring an Untimed Bomber in the first 5 seconds becomed impossible if the player had Timed Bombers enabled. Sure, this isn't a problem for the original games, but it could affect custom content.
And of course, SL isn't quite as custom-content-driven as NL by any means, but there is a platform/market there for it, and I feel that placing avoidable restrictions on it isn't helping its cause.
That's why I've come to the conclusion that allowing the designer to decide which type of Bomber they use in their levels is the best way to go with it, since then custom content is being played to author specifications, and the original games can of course go back to having Timed Bombers.
Again, if I was the one implementing this feature (and it looks like Tsyu is back on board with SL now so it still very much remains to be seen if I end up doing anything with it at all), I would probably do so via a "
timedBombers=true/false" line in the level.ini file. So, if players
really wanted to always have Untimed (or even Timed) Bombers, they technically would be able to do so. However, it would mean that their replays would no longer be cross-compatible with other players. To be honest, I can't really see that being a massive problem for SuperLemmini anyway, since replay sharing is quite rare amongst its userbase. So, it's really more about whether the engine itself will support a player-side option or not, as opposed to whether it's
possible to tailor your own experience of the game, should you wish to.
So custom levels don't really need to be considered here.
I disagree with this entirely. Those of us who
do make content for SuperLemmini care just as much about it as our NeoLemmix content. Besides, if the options for creating custom content for SL improve, then more people probably
will get into it. And even if they don't - a program should be as good as it can be anyway. Option (2) presents far too many fiddly problems which run the risk of ruining the smooth, free-flowing experience of playing SuperLemmini.