First test results of your
experimental NL 12.13 freeze version:
Out of habit, I placed only the executable in my existing NL dir and forgot the images (for the in-game messages during the freeze). NL works well until it finally wants to show the message. This produces many exceptions as one popup each, and the level continues to run and produce more exception popups even before I close the earlier popups. NL was hard to kill from the command line (impossible to type
xkill or
killall -s 9) because the popups stole focus (many times per second). Mouse worked, but NL has no X button to close the window. It managed to write a total of 7,000 lines into the log until I managed to close NL.
To close NL, eventually I thought of Alt+F4, and that worked. I believe that another solution would have been: Ctrl+Shift+F2 to switch to non-GUI Linux command line, kill NL from there, Ctrl+Shift+F1 to switch back to desktop.
Okay, in hindsight, the popups are practically unrelated to the freeze feature; if we want to do anything at all about this, we should first file those repeated exception popups (1 popup is enough) as a bug against the general resource loading. By the way, I'm happy that NL loads the things lazily, to start up more quickly. Nice.
I took the lo-res and the hi-res image from the zip into the NL tree, and that fixed the exceptions.
Now back to the freeze.
Yes, it prevents any physics advances consistently.
It appears impossible to bypass the freeze. I tried to fast-forward, to unpause, and to framestep forward. Nothing bypasses, nice. Not even when I rewound ~3 frames to before the freeze, then tapped or held the 10-second skip, NL would ever advance beyond the freeze.
The freeze appears to happen 1 tick too late. Example: I see the lemming in tick
n. Then it falls out of the level, dies, and is not visibile anymore in tick
n + 1. The lemming count in tick
n + 1 is red and shows 0, correct. Nonetheless, I can now still advance to tick
n + 2 before your message appears. The late freeze is mostly cosmetical, it doesn't break my play patterns. It merely makes me wonder why it overshoots.
Nuking brings an interesting design problem. The nuke generates 5-second countdowns, and you might run into the freeze (because you lost all normal lemmings and all neutrals), but there are still unnuked zombies (with countdowns from your nuke). This freezes, but it doesn't exit. Is this intended? Do I want this myself? (Haven't made up my mind w.r.t. nuke solutions.) Would others want this?
Ah, a nuked level in general freezes now (when everybody has exploded and even if no zombies exist), and doesn't exit. I believe it should exit, as it did in your pause experimental. Or do you have a new reason to freeze here?
-- Simon