I saw a few times in your videos you commented wondering whether lose-1 etc solutions were possible. Just so you know, there's a list of records (mostly my own, but some come from Pooty or Nessy) in the LP3D topic, so I won't comment on those - see the list if you're interested.
Fun 02 - Security Walls
In the original Lemmings 3D I seem to remember a level that was a maze but you had to shortcut it by bashing through a wall. This feels like the simplest, most obvious implementation of that concept. I feel like there is the possibility that this level is trying to put me in the right mindset for a trickier revisiting of this, but I might be wrong.
Nope, no repeats here (except for a single Part 1 / Part 2 pair, but even that isn't an exact repeat, more just "has common elements").
Fun 05 - The Grand Gallery
The tight space in this level is really bad for the camera. The level is very straightforward, but I spent the entire time fighting the camera. The ceiling needs to be higher up so there is more room for the camera to move. It took me a long time to understand what the (admittedly simple) layout of the level even was. And the position of camera 2 is completely incomprehensible when you first switch to it, you don't even understand what you are looking at.
There's a technical issue which often necessitates the camera movement space being quite restricted in indoor levels - if a level has too many visible block faces, the game starts to not render all of them, and can also have glitches with destructive skills. So please keep in mind that sometimes it's just not possible to expand the space for camera movement, even when it would be convenient. With that being said - this level
can handle some extra, and I was able to safely increase the ceiling height in the recent update to the pack.
Fun 06 - Indoor Maze
By comparison this level has a really high ceiling and as such there are no camera issues. It's a perfectly fine level, although it didn't really need to be indoors at all and this would have made the camera even better. I'm glad the walls are only as high as they need to be and no more, so clicking on the lemmings isn't made harder. The level itself is OK. Feels slightly like filler, the maze isn't big or complicated enough to make much of a puzzle out of not using too many turners. Is that the splitter texture used for the exit?
The (intended to be) most obvious path does actually use too many turners - but I think that by virtue of luck with where the camera angles ended up, you never spotted this path. I mostly made this level indoors because I wanted to produce a specific effect, that may not have worked reliably (or triggered the bug mentioned under the previous level) on a level much larger than this - specifically, that whole "you're indoors, but you can look out the windows" effect. Another oddity that's there because of this intention - the level actually uses a
castle texture set, despite the Maze wallpaper and music. And yes, there's a splitter-like graphic over the exit to provide the "arch" - using the actual exit texture would've given away what was going on with the textureset, so I used the entrance bottom texture with this wall graphic over it instead.
Fun 08 - Where Shall They Rest?
Unfortunately I'm sorry to say that this level is terrible. While hidden exit puzzles were an acquired taste, they are even worse and so much more tedious in 3D. Not even any graphical hints as to where they might be or anything. No, nothing, just pure trial and error strip-mining of the level until you find the one block that can't be destroyed somewhere in the middle of a solid mass, and there are multiple solid masses. Come on namida, you can do better than this. This felt like a troll level.
The way I envisioned this one being approached is by gathering lemmings on a pyramid, then nuking them, to quickly look through the entire thing. Nonetheless, yeah, it's still annoying even with such a strategy. I can assure you there's no other "find the exit hidden in one of many potential spots buried in terrain" levels here; I just felt I had to do this
once because there are people who enjoy such levels, even if they're a minority. The same logic is behind a couple of other levels that I suspect the majority of players won't like later in the pack - though I assure you, such levels are very infrequent, and none are as annoying as this one.
Fun 11 - Device Upgrade
I'm not sure if this level is named because the computer monitor has changed to a flatscreen one instead of the old bulky monitor in the original level this is clearly inspired by, but if so then that's a nice touch. Obviously the main gimmick here is the hilarious joke that made me laugh. A worthy inclusion but the level itself is nothing special, although it's a good introduction to some of the peculiarities of blockers on builders in this game, that can cause some unexpected issues the first time around.
Yep, spot on with your theory about the title. In addition to that, the floppy drive has been removed from the PC, and the keyboard and mouse are slimmer too. And yeah, that particular "gimmick" was the entire reason I decided to reuse this level. (L3DEdit is perfectly capable of activating the Fun 8 effect on any given level, so there would be no obstacle to using it again here, but I only made this level
because I had the idea to put that on the screen instead.)
Fun 12 - The Armageddon Machine
A top tier level. While this might not be anything special if it were a standard lemmings game this level asks you to do some interesting digging which is something the official 3D levels didn't really do much of. The exit being on such a thin platform really challenges you to understand what you're doing to get down there, while not actually being very challenging in the grand scheme of things. I guess this level does highlight at this stage how digging in the middle of big solid obstacles can be a challenge solely for camera reasons and a part of the challenge of the level is dealing with that restriction, but it does so in an environment that's both fairly simple and also has enough interesting wrinkles like not having crowds of lemmings go the wrong side of the exit that it makes you think.
As a side note, the level's layout inspiration is the world map of Commander Keen 5. Obviously, it's a bit simplified from the Keen 5 design, but the basic shape should be recognizable (I hope).
Fun 17 - Quadcore
4 connected islands each with their own trapdoor and a bunch of different stuff happening on each island ... this level was actually pretty complicated, but mainly because there's just a lot going on. There's also splitters, which complicate the possible pathing more. But ultimately this level is flexible, there are probably a whole ton of possible solutions, so the complexity is not so bad in practice. I found a solution that seemed to ignore most of it. Lemmings 3D's ability to make levels that loop adds a very cool unique flavour to things.
There are a LOT of different ways to complete this one, even compared to other Fun levels. There's actually two more exits you didn't notice in your videos - they're both immediately either side of the one you used, but facing the opposite direction. This makes even more potential solutions.
On a side note, what you observed regarding the bridges being invisible from their reverse side was the result of an incorrectly-set flag; I corrected this in the V1.01 update.
Fun 18 - Just Let It Bee
I love these levels made out of blocks designed to look like something. I think this level succeeded in making it an enjoyable level too. A lot like the train level from earlier in the rank. However, I don't know if it's possible in L3D to have the trapdoors not release lemmings at exactly the same time? It would be useful in these cases to prevent the pausing and going back and forth to assign things to two groups at the same time.
Nope, multiple trapdoors in L3D always release simultaneously. It's also limited to four on a level, with any additional ones refusing to work (you can see this on Tricky 48 "Rescue Team" in the official levels - it contains 5 entrances, and nothing to suggest that one of them is
intentionally non-functional, but only four actually work due to this limit).
Fun 19 - The Side Act
An excellent level, and one where the bug of not being able to turn on builder bridges is actually to its benefit. Not going to post anything about the solution, but this was a real stumper while at the same time making me feel like a huge idiot when I figured out the easy solution. Very well done on this level. However I'm feeling a little worried about devious levels will get in the future...
Yeah, basically, there's plenty of "you need to think in 3D, but it's obvious that you need to do that, and where you need to do it" so far; this level's point is "this looks like it's more or less 2D, you need to think about how to use the 3D aspect even where it's
not so obvious".
Fun 20 - Arctic Mission
A really cool concept, but let down slightly by the textures making it really not obvious what the layout of the terrain is like. The ice walls look identical from every angle, so it's really hard to tell which ones are deflector blocks and which aren't, which left me stuck on this level for far longer than I should have. Given the camera restrictions, this sort of level would ideally make important terrain layout as clear as possible.
It's hard to spot those deflectors regardless of texture, simply due to viewing angle and their position. But I've made some tweaks to this level in V1.01 of the pack that should help a little bit, at least.
Looking forward to seeing you take on Tricky now. As you've probably guessed, you won't be getting 5 of everything all the time anymore; though the first few levels are still relatively easy despite that. Don't worry; they get harder soon enough.