Your showcase animations are always excellent. Thanks for taking the time to make them!

-- Simon

In Future of NeoLemmix development, Crane wrote:

One thing I would like to do one day is get NeoLemmix working on the Raspberry Pi.

It is a bit of an undertaking though because besides porting the source code over to the Free Pascal Compiler, [...]

That's interesting -- I've always thought that NL builds (1) only on Windows, (2) only for Windows, and (3) only with certain compilers/IDEs. You sound like none of these 3 restrictions need be set in stone, and removing the 3 restrictions is a medium-scope project for an experienced Pascal/Delphi developer.

Background: I spent one night on installing a Delphi toolchain in Wine on Linux and failed because the graphical IDE wouldn't run. I wouldn't mind trying again, and trying it with different versions of the Microsoft toolkits that the IDE needed.

But even better would be to build NL on Linux from the command line without installing any fat IDEs.

It's okay if it generates Windows binaries (i.e., we crossbuild from Linux to Windows) because the Windows binaries run well in Wine. Linux binaires would of course be nice, but they aren't essential yet. It's also okay if I can't change the GUI dialogs without installing an IDE or a graphical GUI editor.

-- Simon

Hi,

geoo will pay me a short visit next week. He'll arrive on Thursday, May 23, and leave on Saturday, May 25. With only two days, there isn't much time, but I'm looking forward to:

• Discussing Lix development. What is important? Which bugs are most nagging?
  
• Discussing Lix physics. We have some long-open small physics oddities. Let's fix at least some for 0.12, whenever that will release.
  
• Testing a top-secret work-in-progress feature. Well, it's only semi-secret because I'll give you a hint:
  

To get into the mood, here's our topic from the February 2023 visit.

-- Simon

FF buttons be hold-down instead of toggle, how I thought they always should've worked

Interesting observation. In Lix, I hold the 10-second framestepping, too, and it becomes fast-forward for me. Hard to say if it's worthwhile to turn toggle-on fast-forward into hold-to-fast-forward. I imagine that toggle-on is better for recording solution videos, but that's niche. Even in livestreaming, I prefer hold-to-framestep instead of the toggled fast-forward.

I haven't played Golems enough yet to decide if I want a super-fast hold-to-fast-forward in Golems.

snapshot basically only needs to store the accumulated changes to the terrain and effect maps along with the (uncompressed) creature states, gadget states, and various other small bits of game state.

There is wisdom here: Separation of all level state into an immutable and a mutable section. It's enough to store the immutable section once, at the beginning. We store the mutable section in regular intervals, possibly compressed.

We can push this further in all of our engines.

E.g, hatches and water don't need to be part of the mutable state at all. Their animation is only dependent on the number of physics updates since the beginning. We can keep them in the immutable section, and only prepare them just-in-time during the drawing step. It's common to have 10 to 50 water tiles in a level; Lix can omit many allocating deep copies here.

Traps must remain in the mutable section because they eat lemmings at unpredictable times, and both physics and graphics depend on such recent eating. Theoretically, traps can split into an immutable location and the mutable number of the physics update of recent eating, at cost of even more complication.

Thanks!

-- Simon

We refactored the three bools into one enum.

I tested the Exp 8 (from WillLem's previous post) and it all looks good. The default behavior is to exit if save requirement met. Options load and save correctly, and behave accordingly during play. Icho's Lemmings United mass-tests identically in this Exp 8 as it did in the Exp 6, i.e., everything looks good here, too.

Pull request is up for namida to review. WillLem and I are both happy to give high-level overviews of the source changes; namida: Ask here or in IRC or anywhere. The diff is moderately large: 9 files changed (7 source files and 2 new images), 211 insertions, 61 deletions, but overall it stayed surprisingly manageable.

Thanks, WillLem, for your patience and for ironing it all out!

-- Simon

what an enum is

Like a Boolean, but with 3 values instead of 2 (true, false), and you get to name the 3 values yourself.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Pascal_Programming/Enumerations#Declaration

-- Simon

I'm sitting in Mumble. Join anytime.

BRB in 20 minutes (17:30 UTC). Back.

-- Simon