Quirks in Lemmings levels

[Clam]

This is the thread for things in the original levels of the Lemmings games that are unusual and unexpected - "quirks", if you will. To start with, here are some from Lemmings, Oh No and Holiday Lemmings:


Fun 21 / Mayhem 26 - Steel objects below the bridge and exit. These don't match up with any steel terrain, and much of their area of effect is cancelled by the water trigger areas.
                            - Water object placed slightly off the left side of the level that shows in Lemmix but not DOS.

Mayhem 1 - Much of the steel platform beneath the exit has no steel objects over it and so can be dug through - and thanks to steel glitches, it is certainly possible to get in there.

Crazy 15 - Second trapdoor hidden behind the first one.

Crazy 18, Crazy 19, Wild 18 - Gap between the water and the bottom of the screen. It's only one pixel, so it's not that easy to see, but if you look closely you'll notice that the terrain extends down slightly further than the water. On Wild 18, there is another water object placed slightly lower, right next to one of these slightly-too-high ones.

Hail 7 - There are no steel objects. Technically this doesn't matter since the only skills available are builders and a climber, but with an 80-lemming nuke you can tear through this quite easily.

Hail 12 - Steel object towards the right of the maze area which serves no purpose at all, since there is no steel terrain and no skills available other than builders.

[Dullstar]

Pea Soup - Trigger areas!

[ccexplore]

Surprised you (ClamSpammer) haven't mentioned Mayhem 12, where the exit top causes an unusually large amount of steel canceling, which together with other glitches allow one to go through the steel wall directly from starting area to the exit.

Also, in a good number of levels with one-way walls, the trigger area doesn't line up vertically with the actual visual span of the object, making it possible to bash through the bottom of the wall the wrong way if you can get yourself a few pixels lower.

[ccexplore]

Tricky 8/Taxing 23:  the rocks at the bottom left and right are steel!  On a level with no bombers no less (yes, I'm aware you can nuke, but still...)

Tricky 20:  the column with the fire shooter bottom left of the entrance area, it does not extend all the way down to the bottom boundary of the level area.  (And note that there is no lava even in the Amiga version, so it's not just a case of "the lava would've covered it up".)

[Clam]

Fun 28 / Mayhem 5 - If you carefully take away all the eraser pieces and rough terrain from the middle of the level, you'll end up with a barrier made of steel terrain - presumably used early on in the level's design when they were testing it. There are other instances of terrain being erased rather than deleted - Fun 9 / Tricky 26 is another (the extra terrain from the Amiga version is hidden in there).

[Clam]

From the review thread:

The two different maps for "We all fall down" (Fun 13/Tricky 2 and Taxing 30/Mayhem 11) are slightly different. The Fun/Tricky version has a few extra terrain pieces on the right.


And (unrelated), on Taxing 13 there is a gap in the one-way wall on the right.

[Dullstar]

Never noticed.  Could you post a side-by-side comparison? (We all fall down)

[Proxima]

Not quite the same sort of thing -- this one is immediately obvious but may be unknown to many of you as it only affects certain versions.

On at least the Mac B&W version, the "peas" on Mayhem 14, Pea Soup, are completely invisible! Needless to say I was unable to get past this level until I upgraded to the colour version.

[Pooty]

Never noticed.  Could you post a side-by-side comparison? (We all fall down)

The top picture is Fun/Tricky, the bottom one is Taxing/Mayhem.

[Proxima]

It's like one of those "spot the difference" pictures! I did eventually manage to find it though.

[Clam]

The top picture is Fun/Tricky, the bottom one is Taxing/Mayhem.

It might be easier to tell them apart if you post the two pictures as separate attachments. That way we can switch from one tab (or window) to the other and see the extra terrain pieces appear or disappear while the rest stays the same.

[chaos_defrost]

I just noticed all the ending Blizzard levels in Xmas 93 lemmings are the names of (or permutations of) Star Trek episodes.

Interesting.

[Minim]

Never noticed.  Could you post a side-by-side comparison? (We all fall down)

The top picture is Fun/Tricky, the bottom one is Taxing/Mayhem.

I was mentioning something like that on the Level review Topic when I reviewed the Taxing version.

[Clam]

I was mentioning something like that on the Level review Topic when I reviewed the Taxing version.

I know. Hence:

From the review thread:

The two different maps for "We all fall down" (Fun 13/Tricky 2 and Taxing 30/Mayhem 11) are slightly different.

Don't worry, I'm not trying to claim credit for your discovery.

[Dullstar]

That IS an amazing discovery.  I would have never noticed.

[Clam]

Here's another one that I forgot about earlier:

Flurry 6 - there are no steel objects. And unlike Hail 7, it really makes a difference in this case.

And I just noticed that the steel terrain doesn't go all the way to the bottom of the screen either, but the surrounding terrain does.

[namida]

That's the key to beating it in the single-skill-type challenge using bashers.

[Clam]

And the 2-skills solution.
And one of each. 

[Simon]

There are some levels with terrain outside the level boundaries.

The following black stripes are actually thumbnails and link to the full picture. I used an image hoster, you have to click "continue" after following the link. <_<; Scroll all the way to the right.

X marks the spot:
No Problem:
On the antarctic cost: Has this as well, but I didn't make a picture.

I made the terrain visible in those pictures, but the pieces probably have the draw-subtractive (dark) bit set for them. If I exclude dark pieces from determining the level's true level horizontal span, the level area ends correctly to the right of the last terrain piece of the mainland.

Edit: I suspect that the terrain at the very right actually belongs to the left border, and the place where you can see it right now is where the integer value for x-pos wraps around. The terrain would make sense if you placed it at the left. However, not even the original games interpret this terrain as being on the left side.

-- Simon

[geoo]

Cool. If you find any more of this sort of thing, be sure to post it in this thread over here. I found some similarly useless stuff in the original Lemmings levels while playing around in Lemmix.

On ClamSpammer's note in the Lemmings 2 thread, even though I know this was not aimed at me; but I guess I might re-post my Lemmings 2 findings as they are easily overlooked considering the place they were originally posted (an unrelated thread in the Help section), so it might still be new to some.

(@GuyPerfect: contains spoilers, as I think you want to work out everything independently, though I guess soon your discoveries will surpass my old progress anyway. In particular I'd be interested in the L2OB definition format, which I only partly worked out. It seems like it could be possible to define ones own objects, or at least reactivate the unused ones.)

This is the original thread: http://henriwatson.com/lemmings/index.php?topic=196.15

Images of the 16x8 pieces: http://207.58.177.175/~geoo89/lemmings/l2gfx.zip
Images of the tiles: http://207.58.177.175/~geoo89/lemmings/l2tiles.zip
Interestingly enough, there's some unused stuff in the classic tribe, for one some larger blocks/planks derived from the Lemmings 1 Classic style, but also a re-color of a piece from the pink set.
The Sports set has a bowling ball, and I think the unicycle in the Circus set is also unused.

Images of the objects: http://207.58.177.175/~geoo89/lemmings/l2obj.zip
Again, it seems that it was initially intended to include more stuff from other styles (not just the fireblowers), as there's also the rock trap and the 10 ton trap included in the object animations.
The highland set seems to contain a fake exit, a telephone booth which gets surrounded by electricity and then appears into the ground.
I don't remember seeing that lemming eating flower in the Outdoor tribe anywhere either.

Images of the special objects: http://207.58.177.175/~geoo89/lemmings/l2ss.zip
The only notable thing there is this:

Also, it seems pretty common to have unused tiles beyond the boundaries and hidden by objects in the levels.

[Clam]

Found a piece of water off the screen on Fun 26 / Mayhem 13. Pic attached.

Plus something I noticed some time ago but never mentioned: Fun 3 has a bunch of spare terrain pieces to the left of the main area.

[Minim]

I also found a few years ago that in Fun 29/Mayhem 9 that there are many black pieces floating in the air over the entrance. Good job that doesn't affect the solution in any way.

[Clam]

It looks like they put a couple of terrain pieces out there so they could copy and paste them into the level. Why they covered them with eraser blocks afterward instead of just deleting them, I don't know - maybe just in case they wanted to change things at the last moment? Seems to be a common theme though.

[Clam]

Found this while making the reverse Holiday levels: Frost 7 and 14 (the two 'Happy New Year!' levels) have objects that aren't placed at multiples of 8. It seems the developers finally realised that you don't have to line everything up with the grid