Lemmings Forums

BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/namida42/neolemmixplayer/issues/8/trapdoors-need-clear-indication-of-spawn

This was also discussed in this topic (http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2219.0).

In some recent levels like "Action-Packed Lemmings" in DynaLems, MobiLems II Cake 15 "The Rineman Exchange" and Holiday GigaLems Very Merry 6 "Polars Apart", they use pickup skills as a way to mark trapdoors that have pre-assigned permanent skills.

However, if a level with such markers also have pickup skills, they can potentially cause confusion. Another issue with that is that there is no way that one can mark a trapdoor as having a zombie/ghost. Well, they can with maybe a pre-placed zombie/ghost blocker, but it may be inconvenient.

Perhaps "arrow" markers can also be used to determine if the lemmings are facing right or left when coming out of the trapdoor.

This is definitely a worthwhile idea, but I would like to hear more thoughts on how it should be done.

This matter was (slightly) touched on in another topic recently. I'd still like more input on what the best way would be to handle this.

From the other topic, möbius's suggestion:

QuoteI thought I posted already but anyway: I'm in favor.

I really like the mouse over option, pretty much exactly as you said. You could have the same icons as for the pick up skills appear above the entrance when moused over, multiple appearing if the lemmings are preset to have multiple skills.

I'm not too sure about the mouse-over, though. Also, you could indeed use the same icons for the pick-up skills. However, to potentially avoid further confusion, you can make the icons shaped as squares.

This seems to be a very difficult problem with no obvious good solutions. So I throw out some ideas - some might be useful and some might be idiotic:
1) Swap green and blue color for lemmings with permanent skills
This was used in L2: Whenever a lemming had a permanent skill, his hair was blue and the clothes green. When lemmings spawn out of a hatch, the player would immediately see, that there are permanent skills.
However the player will not know, which skills the lemmings have. Moreover there is no way to see this at the very beginning when the hatches are still closed.

2) Put small icons (and perhaps a directional arrow) on the hatch, until it opens
The idea is to display this info only at the very beginning, when the player has no other way to know about preplaced skills. Closed hatches have a static image, so it should not be too difficult to come up with a placement for these icons, that doesn't look too ugly. These icons would vanish once the hatch opens and the lemmings start to appear, for three reasons: Open hatches usually have less unused space that can be filled with icons, the player should not mistake these icons for pick-up skills and the player now has other options to get the info.

The mouse hover option has a few problems in my opinion:
- Whether a hatch has preplaced skills at all is not clear, until hovering over the hatch. So the first action of the player would always be to move to all the hatches and check them. This is no simpler than waiting for the first lemming and checking them. So the mouse hover option is only good to get more detailed info, but one still needs visual clues that hatches have preassigned skills at all.
- When there are lemmings behind the hatch and I want to assign skills to them, this mouse hover option might be very confusing, depending on the precise implementation.

Quote from: Nepster on March 16, 2016, 04:49:10 PM
1) Swap green and blue color for lemmings with permanent skills
This was used in L2: Whenever a lemming had a permanent skill, his hair was blue and the clothes green. When lemmings spawn out of a hatch, the player would immediately see, that there are permanent skills.
However the player will not know, which skills the lemmings have. Moreover there is no way to see this at the very beginning when the hatches are still closed.

This one's an interesting idea. It does make it far easier to distinguish which lemmings have permanent skills and which ones don't, especially if lemmings with permanent skills may get mixed up among regular lemmings.. This idea will also be very useful for levels that simply only have pre-placed lemmings with pre-assigned skills (like Mental 16 "Skill Factory"). Perhaps this one should be implemented, but as a configuration option, since not everyone may be accustomed to the blue-haired green-clothed lemmings.

Quote from: Nepster on March 16, 2016, 04:49:10 PM
2) Put small icons (and perhaps a directional arrow) on the hatch, until it opens
The idea is to display this info only at the very beginning, when the player has no other way to know about preplaced skills. Closed hatches have a static image, so it should not be too difficult to come up with a placement for these icons, that doesn't look too ugly. These icons would vanish once the hatch opens and the lemmings start to appear, for three reasons: Open hatches usually have less unused space that can be filled with icons, the player should not mistake these icons for pick-up skills and the player now has other options to get the info.

I really like this idea. But I would rather the icons and directional arrow stay throughout the whole time one is playing the level. Perhaps if they don't want it to be displayed throughout, they can simply press a hotkey to enable/disable the display of such icons.

As I said, the icons can be square-shaped, as pickup skills are always circle-shaped. The shape of the icons can be a helping factor in knowing the difference between a marker and a pickup skill. It is possible that people can make square-shaped pick-up skills though, but I have yet to see a graphic set that does this; all of them I've seen so far are circle-shaped.

Quote from: DynaLem on March 16, 2016, 06:14:05 PMI really like this idea. But I would rather the icons and directional arrow stay throughout the whole time one is playing the level. Perhaps if they don't want it to be displayed throughout, they can simply press a hotkey to enable/disable the display of such icons.

Yes, that's sound -- remember the discussion about the save requirement, which is only a single number for each level. Which trapdoors have which permanent skills (and facing direction) can be a lot of information. It's much better to have the information available at all times than to force the player to remember it. However, to avoid the ugly screen clutter, there can be a key to toggle whether it is currently shown. There could also be a setting for whether it starts shown or not, with an option to automatically hide when hatches open, if enough people want that.

I'm working on this now (at last!).

Any input on how this should work? Currently, I'm considering offering the following two options (user-setting):

1. Icons always displayed
2. Icons display only before first lemming spawns or while window is moused over

In terms of graphic, I'm going to simply display a left or right arrow. For preassigned skills, currently, I'm coding it to only have a single mark, which is either present (if the entrance has any preassigned skills) or absent (if it doesn't). This can be expanded later if need be; I'll probably release it for a trial run before deciding.


Currently, I have the icons displaying accurately, but no options relating to turning them on/off have been implemented; they're simply always visible.

I think having icons always displayed is the better option. It is always good to have the information on what comes out of a trapdoor displayed at all times.

The issue with that however is that it can block some terrain above the trapdoor that may need to be used as part of the solution. As Proxima said, one can press a hotkey to have the icons disappear and reappear during gameplay.

Every hatch has a direction. It's okay to hide the direction after the first spawn. No strong opinion about this.

But hatches that assign permanent skills on lemming spawn -- these hatches are exceptional, a glaring deviation from the expected behavior. These hatches occur rarely enough so that I would mark them all the time. When the hatch assigns multiple permanents, show multiple icons.

This matches Neolemmix's design principle: You can to solve the level in your head, without experiments.

-- Simon

I personally feel that it's acceptable if the player knows there's a deviation and does not have to try too hard to find out. In this case, the mark tells them "this hatch has preassigned skills", so they let it spawn a lemming and see what it spawns. At any rate, the way the code is written, it will be easy enough to add more precise marking if people feel it nessecary.

Since there doesn't appear to be a dedicated topic for it, and it's closely related: How should we do this for teleporters?
My initial idea was to draw an up arrow on the teleporter and a down arrow on the corresponding receiver. In theory this seemed fine; when I tried it in practice I noticed a fault that should've been obvious: It doesn't help if the teleporter and corresponding receiver are not both on-screen.

So, I'm thinking perhaps, when mouseovered (or at all times, depending on user setting / further discussion), display a number or letter above them, with matching number/letter indicating matching teleporters. Additionally, when mouseovering one, display the icon on the matching ones too; this will help if they are both on-screen.

How's this? They display (for all connected teleporters/receivers) when any one in the set is moused-over; yes, they work fine with all cases where multiple teleporters link to the same receiver.

(Level shown is "Adventure Time!!!", Mental 21 of Lemmings Plus Omega.)

A more radical proposal - should we have some kind of icon for all types of objects, so if one is unsure what an object is, one can simply mouse-over it to find out? Or perhaps this info is better displayed in a similar way to how lemming actions are displayed?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/exhwhwdbzr94s29/NeoLemmix_VExNf145n_Experimental.zip?dl=0

This version has the helpers available (note: in this copy, they're always-on. Code does exist for showing them on mouse-over, but no code exists for eg. the show for first few frames on entrances; so I just disabled the mouse check and made them always show). Try it out and let me know how you feel about them.

Please be aware that due to the semi-implementation of new formats, existing graphic set files will NOT work with this copy, not even in NXPs. I have included copies of the Orig, Ohno, Xmas, LPII and LPIII graphic sets, so that should be plenty to test. You can use NXPs with it, as long as they only use those graphic sets.

Also be aware, there are minor glitches in other parts (in particular, the lemming animations, as I'm currently working on those). Don't worry about these for now. Also, be aware that performance will be quite slow on slower PCs, especially on large levels. If your PC isn't too great, try using small levels to test.

(Also note - the exit and exit top are merged in the Dirt set. Try a level that has one without the other and see what happens!)

I am tending to a hotkey to switch the displaying of the markers on/off, with on as the standard when starting a level.

It is very important to mark things as pre-assigned hatches/teleporters....., but having these markers always on can be a bit annoying from time to time.

I put a poll up to see what kind of indicator people would most likely want to use.

I really like the idea of a mouseover indicator to show what an object is, but it might be best if the indicator is text-based (although making it editable by .nxp's might not be a terrible idea).  This would have the added advantage of creating less clutter.

A hotkey would work as well (actually, to be honest, I don't see why the two options would be mutually exclusive). I think this was mentioned already, but the mouseover could also be used alongside the hotkey to give more information (e.g. display a marker for a hatch with pre-assigned skills, then on mouseover, show which skills are pre-assigned). The only option I DON'T like is "always on."

A few remarks after playing around a bit with the new markers:

1) Lower placement of the directional arrow
Currently one cannot see the arrow if the hatch is at the top border. So I would lower the arrow by about 8 pixels.

2) Use a light gray for teleporter markers
A light gray is better readable and causes less eye strain than pure white on dark backgrounds. (http://uxmovement.com/content/when-to-use-white-text-on-a-dark-background/) I wouldn't use such a dark gray as in the link though.

3) A red "!" is the wrong icon and not terribly helpful
A red "!" is a danger sign (see the L2 shadow trap), which is not appropriate for hatches with preassigned skills. Secondly, it helps only a little bit: The player gets warned about preassigned skills a bit before seeing the first lemming (now that they have a different color scheme). But they cannot find out which skills these are until the first lemming appears, thus an important info is still hidden.
Not sure how to improve this though...

#1 - Yes, I noticed this too (albeit more with teleporters than with entrances). The reason I elected to place it above the window is that there's less chance of interfering with important graphics (including the window itself). But I could try placing it below.

#2 - Do other people agree with this? It will be an easy enough change to make if it's desired.

#3 - It's not impossible to add icons that specifically display the skills. Just a bit more work, especially in the "making icons" department. Simon had a hunch before this version's release that people would want the full info up-front. Your thoughts here confirm that.

#2, teleporter markers: Mark pairs with colorful shapes, or with letters. If UI professionals believe light-grey on black is easier than white on black, then use light-grey on black. What happens when the level's bg is not black? Is the bg still dark?

#3, hatch shows all permanents: I feel it's good design to display all permanents. Main reasoning: When you need the info 100 % of the time, then don't show that there is info available; instead, give the info up-front. Remove indirection.

Most hatches assign nothing. Among the permanent-assigning hatches, most assign only 1 or 2 permanents. Make these hatches look good. I hope that nobody wants to disable these 1 or 2 markings.

The rules allow 5 different permanents on a hatch, zombie is a permanent. That's an arcane corner case. It's okay if a hatch with 5 permanents looks mediocre.

-- Simon

In regards to teleporter markers, it would be nice to have default ones that could be overwritten by the tileset if a custom appearance is desired.