[NeoLemmix 1.43] Lemmicks - Lemmings with gimmicks! ANOTHER UPDATE

[Strato Incendus]

I didn't try the new rar folders, but I think this is fine, since zip is more commonly used anyway, as far as I know.

I appreciate your continued interest in my other packs! Pit Lems and Paralems are older than Lemmicks, though, so the levels are of much lower quality.

Especially Paralems is really more of a collection of stupid references that aren't really challenging at all, and has a good deal of somewhat trolly levels.

Pit Lems was indeed designed to be more puzzle-focused and strictly fair. The levels don't have an overarching theme, though. The first version had quite a lot of backroutes (see nin10doadict's Let's Play), and some of the open-ended levels (X-of-everything ones) have so many degrees of freedom that they're quite easy.

I still consider the puzzles in Pit Lems good enough to be worthy of conversion to New Formats eventually, and I'll add some select levels from Paralems that I consider worthwhile to it as well, creating something I'm going to call Pit Lems Remastered in the process.

Pit Lems does have a lot of Radiation and Slowfreeze levels, though, including some that were nominated for Level of the Year, so it's definitely still worth giving a shot in Old Formats as well.

Paralems is really just more of a thing if you're interested in it for historic reasons. Since you said you already played GigaLems, which does contain some Troll elements as well, and you weren't as bothered by execution difficulty in Lemmicks as other players might have been, maybe you'll enjoy Paralems after all. But it would certainly be the last one of my packs I recommend to anyone - because it was the very first one I ever made.

Lemmings World Tour is my flagship pack, and most likely will remain that way even once I release Lemmings Open Air, Hall of Fame, and Drugs and Rock 'n Roll. Because those latter packs are going to be more difficult by nature.

Lemmings World Tour is, as far as I can tell, slightly easier than Lemmicks on average, while still having an overarching theme, fair puzzly-levels (unless they contain an octopus ), and offers lots of pretty landscape levels and custom self-recorded music to boot (you've already heard some of the tracks on the last levels of each rank while playing Lemmicks ).

[kaywhyn]

Ah, ok. Would had been nice to confirm if the new rar attachment worked, but it's fine, since the zip ones work for you. They both contained the same files anyway, so you got to take your pick. It was a quick, free easy conversion from rar to zip with a site I found online, so it's all good. That is very interesting indeed. I've checked other level pack topics and didn't realize that the replays that were sent were all zip files. Icho didn't report any problems with the rar replay files I sent to him for his Lemmings United pack, so it's probably the software you're using to extract them, since the rar replay files work fine on my end. I use Winrar, which does both zip and rar files. I guess I'm used to rar since I've been using it for at least 15 years or so without any problems whatsoever.

Thanks for the background on your smaller packs. I'll definitely give them a go regardless of the generally hated elements reported by the other forum members. Regarding Lemmicks, I unfortunately didn't hear any LWT tracks on the final levels of the ranks, as the only music that played were the Amiga tracks. The only time I did hear custom music was in the Nostalgic rank, but there was only 1 or 2 levels that did that IIRC. I think I tried putting the tracks in the music folder but it didn't work for me. Perhaps you can tell me how to get it to work.

[Strato Incendus]

I take it that you did in fact download the music for Lemmicks, so: Did you check the music folder again if there's another folder inside it? Sometimes this happens when you extract from a zip or rar file, it creates another sub-folder in "music", rather than just placing all the tracks in there loosely. And then NeoLemmix 1.43 won't be able to find them, as far as I know.

The intended music for Lemmicks are basically all Lemmings 3D tracks, plus one of my Lemmings World Tour tracks on each of the final levels. Occasionally, there might be an original Lemmings track in there on some of the levels, like Pachelbel's canon, but those are rare.

Speaking of it, I actually do use win-rar for both rars and zips... it's just that with these specific files, rar for some reason complained they were damaged, whereas zip didn't. Don't know why.

And one more note on one of the levels from the Nostalgic rank, one which you rightfully criticised - I had intended to respond to that, and then somehow forgot...

Regarding "Stop steeling my features"...

This is yet another reason, aside from fake objects and hidden hatches/exits, as they appear on "Irreversible", why NeoLemmix 1.43 had so much trolling potential: Manual steel + no true physics mode. As you will recall, this level flips the player a double bird, and pretty much the only parts of the level you can't remove with destructive skills are the two middle fingers.

I included a level on manual steel in the Nostalgic rank because I do have a personal Nostalgic attachment to it:

The very first levels I ever made were made on a Lemmings clone my brother introduced me to, WinLemms, which featured all the music as MIDI tracks... and also had manual steel. I made this level called "Hallowed Ground" back in the day, thinking this was a great in-game justification why random regular terrain could not be removed... it was a Dirt level, and thus also contained that retractable boulder trap that kind of counts as a hidden trap... in the beginning, every level designer believes these things are soooo funny... until they find out the joke has been done to death by literally everyone else already.

Some of these WinLemm levels I actually re-built by hand in NeoLemmix, though (since there was no option of converting them to NeoLemmix at that time, though I think namida created such an option at some point in the meantime - might no longer exist, though). One of them is "Journey to Emeria" from Paralems. That one is a strictly fair level, yet my brother struggled quite a bit with it in WinLemms... but WinLemms didn't have any of the NeoLemmix conveniences, such as skill shadows, rewinding, and frame stepping.

[kaywhyn]

Yup, no other folder inside the music folder. However, I solved it. I had to simply rename your Lemmicks music folder that I downloaded a few months ago to just "music." Whoever knew it was that simple? I think the strange thing was that I did that the last time but it didn't work for some reason. Or maybe the problem was for some packs for v10.13. Well, problem solved lol.

Hope you're enjoying the replays I sent you.

[Strato Incendus]

Ah, maybe your NeoLemmix 1.43 folder didn't have a music folder to begin with yet? If it only had the standard orig and ohno tracks, then those probably came as part of the game, so there was no dedicated folder called "music" yet.

[kaywhyn]

You are correct there. I just tested this by downloading another copy of v1.43 and when you exit after loading any pack compatible with this version, all there exists are Neolemmix.exe (the file you download from the Neolemmix website), along with a settings.ini and hotkey.ini files. Hence, it is necessary to create a music folder. I think in some packs the custom music worked fine, as the only way to play the packs on this version, as well as v10.13, is to load the .nxp file. The custom music should work automatically, but not always. The Gigalem packs come to mind here, where the custom music worked automatically. For packs that include custom music as a download, such as your pack Lemmicks, then as mentioned before it is necessary to create a music folder since there is none. Once I renamed your Lemmicks music folder to just "music," then it worked. Thanks for the help!

[jkapp76]

I'd love to see some edition of this in the new format.

[Proxima]

That is impossible, because this pack was designed to showcase the "gimmicks" that existed in older versions of NeoLemmix. They have not been supported for some years now.

[WillLem]

I'd love to see some edition of this in the new format.

That is impossible, because this pack was designed to showcase the "gimmicks" that existed in older versions of NeoLemmix. They have not been supported for some years now.

If Strato is happy with the idea, it might be interesting to see how the maps play out with new skills and no gimmicks.

[jkapp76]

Something like that is exactly what I had in mind. 

[Strato Incendus]

Yeah... that's not going to happen.

A lot of the landscapes in these levels don't even work without the gimmicks. For example, all the No-Gravity levels from the Cosmic rank normally have the lemmings walk in the air because they can't ever fall down. If you turn such a level into a normal level, you often don't even have enough terrain to make it through the level, unless you turn the thing into a massive Builder fest (potentiall requiring a Stoner at the start to even have some terrain to land on).

On a related note, the wrap levels from the Circular rank could only be replicated by spamming teleporters (or future "portals") all over the place; the Moist levels repeatedly require the water areas as a "lift" for the crowd, i.e. would turn into Builder fests, too if you wanted to gain height using just regular skills; and the Karoshi-gimmick levels on the Suicidal rank could only be replicated by using fake objects in "interim Old Formats" (10.13), i.e. by swapping traps and exits around.

I did some of these things on select Lemmicks levels that made it into Lemmings World Tour (which was first designed for NeoLemmix 10.13), but it wouldn't work on every level, and some of these Lemmings World Tour levels already don't work the originally intended way in New Formats.

"Exploring landscapes" only works if the level was actually designed as a landscape - like in Lemmings World Tour. There the landscapes were dictated by the real world, i.e. existed first, and then I had to come up with a creative solution to get to the exit within the confines of that pre-existing landscape.

The levels in Lemmicks, in contrast, much like those in Pit Lems and Lemmings Open Air, had their terrain designed around the initial intended solution. The "maps" don't stand on their own.

I generally refer to "landscape first, solution second" as "bottom-up" level design, and to "solution first, landscape second" as "top-down" level design.

[kaywhyn]

Hi Strato,

You might already be aware of this, but I have started a level solving commentary video series on another level pack of yours, this time for Lemmicks. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbp2m4KlFpJt48ftqx0HE4TMj7UF3nAmA. Enjoy! Perhaps this will finally allow me to get comments/feedback on my solutions from well over a year ago?

Just like with Lemmings Open Air, the biggest reason for doing such a series is because I absolutely love this pack of yours and hence felt it deserve the video series treatment, but also because oral explanations will do a far better job of explaining the many gimmicks found throughout the pack instead of a silent playthrough recording. I've been revisiting old packs and uploading video solutions to them, particularly since there aren't any online to these old level packs. During the process, it made me realize how much I miss these gimmicks that aren't present in New Formats NL. I'm one of the few who didn't mind most of the gimmicks. Also, you'll be happy to hear this, but I didn't mind ghosts either! I've seen way too many excellent puzzles utilizing them, notably from Gigalem (you might had noticed the video series I did on his ghost pack), namida, and, of course, you. Honestly, I feel ghosts do deserve another chance, but if it was culled simply due to the coding complexity, then perhaps it was for the best. In any case, I'm glad that they can still be experimented on in very old versions of NL, as well as sharing levels using them in the thread you created. In my opinion, they're far less annoying than zombies, although I've seen a fair amount of great zombie puzzles too. Just personally zombies get more on my nerves than ghosts.

Along with this, I didn't mind radiation or slowfreeze either! Again, I've seen a lot of excellent puzzles utilizing them.

[Strato Incendus]

Oh, wow, what a pleasant surprise, thanks a lot, kaywhyn!

Yes, I am aware I haven't commented on your Lemmicks solutions yet. Indeed, when you did the LOA solving commentary, I found myself repeating a lot of the things I had already said about your replays during testing and writing them into YouTube comments again, too. So I guess now I will be able to do both in one.

[kaywhyn]

Well, seeing how the video series on LOA was such a huge hit with you, I know this one on Lemmicks will be as well Let's say this is also allowing your Lemmicks pack, and the many gimmicks within, more time to shine in the spotlight in video form, despite the pack being a few years old I'm very excited and looking forward to see what you think of the series I put together on another excellent pack of yours I always like it when the pack author enjoys any kind of video series I do on his or her pack, as that's pretty much the whole point. You're more than welcome to take your time on commenting on my solutions whenever you're able to get to them. No pressure at all My videos won't be going anywhere, they'll be right there on my YT channel whenever you're able to have the time to get to them to view for your entertainment.

Glad to hear you're doing well!

[Strato Incendus]

Level 08 from the Suicidal rank has finally been renamed (for the reasons explained under kaywhyn's level-solving commentary video).

Just in case anyone who downloads Lemmicks from now on is confused by that, because it still has a different title in kaywhyn's YouTube video.
Obviously, I can't change that in hindsight.