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SuperLemmix Bugs & Suggestions / Re: [SUG] New Lemming type - Rivals!
« on: May 01, 2024, 11:01:32 AM »If tribe alignment is a property of the exit: The exit is now responsible for showing tribe alignment, all by itself.
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It's possible to solve this by introducing extra tiles conditionally when the game constructs the level from a level file. But this feels unnatural. If you solve it with extra tiles, don't allow another way of adding these tiles; the only way must then be by setting exits' tribe alignment.
This is kind of what I'm aiming for. The Editor auto-draws the tiles when the property is set. It also re-draws them if the property is changed at any time (I still need to make it so that all markers are auto-removed if no Exits are marked as Rival).
Assuming you make tribe alignment a property of the exit (and not a result of overlaying two tiles): Avoid reliance on human-placable marker tiles in the editor. The editor should render the exit as it will appear during play, or show other equivalent information on the exit.
*Ideally, the markers should remain in place, anchored to the Exit, and be non-editable. That way, they appear exactly as they will appear in the Player. This is on the to-do list.
For now, they can be edited and moved around. A band aid would be to simply call the marker-adding method upon saving the level (the method first removes all existing markers), but this obviously isn't ideal.
EDIT: Another possible method would be to add the helper graphics to the Editor and draw these wherever they are relevant, in the same way that placeholders are used for pickup skills in the Editor. This should probably happen anyway, since the Editor currently has no way to visually represent pre-assigned hatches, lemmings, etc. I did take a quick look at this yesterday and found that it would take some doing, but it might ultimately be worth it for more than just the Rivals feature.
Downside of introducing extra tiles conditionally when you render the map: The editor can't naturally show these tiles and not put them into the level.
If I can achieve the above^*, then re-introducing the tiles at map rendering will make them appear exactly as they appear in the Editor: from a user point of view, nothing has changed. We still need to do it simply because the level file can be edited in Notepad; the only way around this would be to somehow bake the animations together in the Editor, which I'm not sure is even possible (and certainly wouldn't be worth the time and effort it would take when we can simply re-draw the markers in the Player, achieving the same result - this is how Secondary Animations are handled).
Do you have deneutralizers? What happens when you neutralize a rival, then deneutralize him: Will he be regular lemming or rival?
This is a good question with no easy answer.
Instinct: they should keep the Rival tag.
Then, I remember that I don't want to have to recolour Rival-Neutrals a different colour to regular Neutrals, so these lemmings become only a source of confusion.
So, I then think that Rivals should simply ignore Neutralizers. This would at least be consistent with code-base behaviour (since Rivals cannot also be Neutral at any other time), but could seem odd to players.
So, I then think that SLX shouldn't feature both Rival lemmings and Neutralizers. The latter is essentially just another trap to be avoided anyway, which makes them mostly uninteresting. De-neutralizers have much more gameplay and puzzle potential, and can play nice with Rival lemmings.