The nuke is the "abandon level" button in all of the official Lemmings games. The level ends when all lemmings die, and nuke kills them all. Seems very clear to me that nuke should kill all neutrals too.
#2 is weirder than #3, and #3 is also plausible. Kieran didn't mention the difference, unsure if he would prefer #2 or #3.In this case, #3 or even #4 would be preferable to me than #2.
2. The nuke affects neutral lemmings, but neutral lemmings do no damage when exploding. However, this still allows for very subtle ways of manipulating the neutral lemmings via this. The simplest setup would be to have a locked exit, which the neutral lemming will usually go past by the time it opens; however, them ohno'ing holds them in place until it opens, thus allowing them to exit through it. More complex setups could include avoiding a floater or updraft fall slowing via an ohnoer, or using the same kind of delay trick to drop a neutral lemming into a trap and thus allow a non-neutral (or just a different neutral) to pass. Giving neutrals immunity to objects after the nuke is activated - or perhaps, once they begin ohno'ing - avoids this, but then gives rise to the opposite issue - what if there's just a traditional "group up and nuke 'em" level but includes some neutrals, should they not be able to exit along with the regular lemmings that would do so here?
featuring exactly one level that requires nuke to solve (though arguably a bit of a joke level) in Xmas Lemmings 94.
"A Trap Is A Trap". While there are non-nuke solutions (that, on real hardware, would've needed some very precise bomber timing)
Having nuke potentially abruptly end the level when only neutrals are left, might be okay if you educate users to expect that beforehand. For example, maybe whenever the game detects only neutrals are left (for any reasons), it could pop up or display some message notifying the player to that fact, and explain that they need to either ESC to quit the level directly, or they can try nuking and we will basically also treat it like an ESC.
Sure, you can exploit the corner case of the nuke being the only way to make a neutral explode, but the player will have many chances to observe that this happens, so it's not unfair in the same way as levels exploiting glitches (back in the bad old days).
#5 (make nuke eye candy) is merely an elegant, striking alternative to everything else. It belongs in the discussion even though I feel that it will be dismissed. If we actively dismiss #5 with a reason, we can happily pick something else without regret of overlooking the simplemost design.
(ie. there probably already exists a few custom levels featuring nuke solutions), at the same time the number of such levels had been low and tended to grow only slowly over time.
So in conclusion, make the nuke affect everything, keep the nuke solutions, and also keep the countdown counter on nuking, because it makes levels as the ones I mention playable, and also it adds a sense of tension before the nuking.
My instinctive reaction to this was "removing the countdown wouldn't actually break anything, as long as they still OhNo first; it may break replays but those could be patched automatically just by delaying the nuke 5 seconds". I then realised I'm wrong (and I'm explaining this because I suspect others might have the same reaction): This change would remove the feature "stop lemmings spawning, and 5 seconds later any existing lemmings start exploding", and add the feature "stop lemmings spawning, and lemmings start exploding immediately" - so this could have an effect on levels that require nuking before all lemmings have spawned. (Indeed, I can think of one level that might break due to this - albeit only a talisman solution, not the regular one.)
The 5 second delay for the first lemmings to explode is significant (also lemmings can still reach the exit) and between the first and the last lemming there is quite the delay where later spawned lemmings can still act while the first already explode.
"nuke affects everyone, aside from that it remains as-is" as the solution here.
"nuke affects everyone, aside from that it remains as-is" as the solution here.
We should define the order of nuking then, assuming you still want one exploder assignment per physics update. For maximum replay backwards compat, let's explode player lemmings first, only then neutrals, then zombies.
-- Simon