The wording is largely irrelevant. Where is it printed? It's not on the preview anymore, good riddance. It appears in the options and the editor at best.
Then it's still about the unit itself.
I disagree and claim that the units are relevant:
- The unit should be linear in the first place, or inverted-linear with a pole at 0.
- You have a small counterexample with the precise diggers.
- In Wafflem stream, I suggested to double the time between two spawns in Fill the Floor, and he was unable to solve this very simple task because the RR obscures what happens.
- These kind of threads generate wonderful popcorn (probably the 4th thread provoked by the units), that would be abstruse if it weren't important.
- And even if the unit were irrelevant, then NL should still change; it should then implement only one unit instead of the option; programs should not have irrelevant options.
I get that many prefer higher number to mean faster spawns. You can write the spawn interval as a frequency, 1/SI. This would be a rate for once in the physical sense: Double the rate from 1/8 spawns/frames to 1/4 spawns/frames, and the lems spawn indeed twice as quickly. I even suggested this 2 years ago; it got rejected out of fear that people would be confused.
Yes, the timer argument holds; that's the reason why I discourage long time limits in Lemmings. But still the timer measures linearly, I assume you value that? L1 RR or NL RR is not even linear. They have a weird pole at 103 or 107.
Anyway, I still claim that the SI UI is too similar to the RR UI and risks confusion because of familiarity with L1 RR. This UI problem seems far more important today than choice of default. I offer to paint new icons for SI. How does one change button icons in NL?
-- Simon