Simon has vented his rage on the NeoLemmix player, so I may have my own little rant about the NeoLemmix editor
.
1) Missing documentation
There is no readme file coming with the editor, explaining all the buttons, menus, ... (and I don't know whether one actually exists). Some examples, what should be explained even for people that know the original Lemmix:
- All options in File-Settings
- There is a unlabeled box under "Index" in the Inspector menu.
- What are "S Val" and "L Val"? What "Reset ID"?
- There is a drop-down menu at the bottom right of the Inspector menu. What does it do?
- System.Dat Editor? Huge pile of options and only some are self-explanatory. For a new user, it is not even clear what this whole editor can be used for! And isn't there a barely visible textbox at the very bottom?
- "Help" does not help, but gives the credits. Perhaps give some in-editor help/explanations here?
- What does "Validate Level" do exactly? How does it fix which issue?
- There are some grey boxes in the lower half of the editor. What are they there for?
- ...
(many of them are rhetorical questions for me, because of dedicated experimentation - so no need to answer them here)
2) Remove "Selection" from the top bar and replace it by "Windows" (or something similar)
I rarely need the "align" function, but frequently want to open the skill window, inspector window, ... So I would prefer moving the "align" functions to the bottom of "Edit" and move all the windows to a separate drop-down menu. Then the "View" menu would be much smaller.
On a related note:
- Why is "Dos Levelpack Editor" under "View" and not under "Tools"?
- Is "Align to grid used by Dos" really needed anymore? You cannot save levels in the old Lemmix format anymore, can you?
- Minor point: The order of the window options and view options does not coincide with the order of the FX-keys. Perhaps they can be ordered within the drop-down menu to reflect the order of the FX-keys (though the pairing between options and FX-keys should be kept).
3) Revamp Skillset window
- Currently some of the less used skills are quite at the top of the window (like disarmer, swimmer and stoner), white important ones are at the bottom. The ordering possibly reflects the ordering in the skill panel later on, but here it is more important to find much-used skills easily.
- The miner is far away from basher/digger and floater/glider could be next to each other as well. You probably intended this window to be read horizontally, but with the clear separation into two colums, I always read it vertically.
- Minor issue: Could you fix the internal order of the boxes. Hitting tab gives a random walk around this window
. At least all the boxes with the number of skills should be consecutive when hitting tab.
4) Revamp Gimmick window
- About half of the space is taken up by two gimmicks that are rarely used (and that I did not even know about before seeing them here). This space could be used much better by displaying a short description of the current gimmick. If one selects the clock gimmick or bait-and-switch then it may still display the additional options, but otherwise it is simply uninteresting.
- The drop-down menu to select the gimmick shown only 8 out of 44(?) gimmicks in total. It would be better to show a larger number of gimmicks at once.