Rant.
When your lemmings die, play exits to postview, and you can't rewind. Many people have reported this bug, and it's still open 3.5 years after.
2020: WillLem, Simon, Proxima, Dullstar, mobius2023: Crane, Simon, WillLem, Proxima, DullstarThis is particularly nasty because you don't see it coming. Oh, split-second too late releasing the finger off timeskip? Tough luck, plow through the menu, start play from the beginning and fast-forward to where you want to go. Oh, you want to go to almost the end? Better take extra care to not run into the bug a second time!
Solution is to stay in play, but prevent further physics advances. It's only okay to exit here if I've already won, or if I've nuked.
I'll paypal 200 Euros to
whoever fixes this (
Edit 2024-05-15: WillLem got it and donated a share to namida), releases code and binaries, and prods namida to include it upstream (whether successfully or not). Never exit an unsolved unnuked level until I exit manually. Caveat: If namida gets the 200 Euros, 100 of them must go to LF hosting.
Every time:
- You promise people to play their levels.
- You finally find an hour of free time, and load the level in NL.
- You play for 3 minutes.
- You run into such a UI problem and resign.
It's beyond me how anybody can play under this bug without tearing all hair out. And this sounds familiar: I feel the same about the
unfixed zoom bug. The workaround to the zoom bug is to never zoom, and instead play fullscreen on the biggest monitor you can buy. Yes, play fullscreen ... until you run into the exit-on-losing-lemmings bug.
There is also the slippery right-click scrolling, but that is hard to debug (happens under Windows or only under Linux) and hard to fix (freeze the OS cursor?). Again mitigated by big monitor. Not that big of a deal as the other two bugs (exit on losing all lemmings, and the zoom bug), but it aggravates the zoom bug because the zoom bug breaks the alternative scrolling via zoom-out-zoom-in.
Not sure what is 4th-most agonizing bug.
I've told Flopsy in IRC: NL has improved a lot since 2014. Yes, it has. It merely still has a few bugs that lead to dents in office furniture.
I understand that it's hard to make software bearable. I should write about and debug the laggy mouse cursor in Lix. Even the Allegro 5 example for endless mouse movement has that bug. Looks like it's worse on Linux than on Windows. I'm surprised nobody has ranted about that in Lix.
-- Simon