Lix "korean washing machine" effect of overloading the UI with tons of buttons.
Lix skillbar, where all skills are visible all the time, including those you don't have any of in a given level, I find to be quite "cluttered" - too many buttons you don't need that can easily distract from the intended solution. I get why the Lix developers chose to have it this way, and I don't want to throw shade on them
The "scroll left" / "scroll right" idea seems more future-oriented to me
When the number of skill types exceeds 8, the section of the bar dedicated to skills (rather than the Minimap, Replay/Rewind buttons etc.) remains the same size, but the cells for the individual skills get smaller. In this case, one would have to put this to a litmus test to see how small the individual skill button can actually get when you throw in all skill types which are currently available.As we currently store everything in pixelated sprites, I fear that they will look horrible when shrinking the cells.
The skill bar expands - most likely to the right - when additional skills are added, at the cost of shrinking the other components. Most likely, this would mean making the Minimap less wide, since buttons like Pause/Nuke/Rewind/Clear Physics should remain the same size as the skill buttons. This would not require the buttons to be redrawn, but the Minimap would have to be able to adapt in size - not gradually, fortunately, but at least step-wise, becoming one step smaller for each increase of the skill bar beyond 8.As mentioned above, I like a solution similar to this, but remember some previous discussions that this would only work for at most 10 skills in total. Note that even now NeoLemmix supports some different minimap sizes (IIRC depending on window size and zoom factor), so this should not be too much work regarding the minimap.
Scrolling through a skill bar which is only partly visible - totally had not thought of that. That somehwat violates the "immediacy" philosophy though, which has already lead to changes that follow principles such as "one should never have to use clear physics", the level itself should show you everything you need to know right from the start.As Simon already mentioned, the skills are so vital to the game, that they should always be displayed.
Note that even now NeoLemmix supports some different minimap sizes (IIRC depending on window size and zoom factor), so this should not be too much work regarding the minimap.
on button arrangement:
1) how about moving or getting rid of the nuke? I never liked it next to pause anyway; chance of accidentally clicking that instead of pause (even though it must be double-pressed) and we have F12.
2) how about merging the two release rate buttons into one. left click could go down and right click could go up or visa versa.
-the pause is another option to remove/letting players know about a hotkey. Many games I've seen in the past (including Lemmings revolution) have no button but a hotkey for pause. Many steam games these days have escape as a default pause button.
on the minimap: now that we have the zoom feature I stopped using the mini map a lot less. Although the zoom feature apparently can't go all the way out (I learned this just last weekend), it would be really nice if it could. Also the minimap now not showing the entire screen lessened it's useful for me as well. The whole point I liked about the original L1 minimap was it let you see lemmings everywhere and let you quickly get to anywhere in the level. That use is almost totally negated these days by these factors.
A corrupted or just poorly-set-up hotkey configuration, combined with removing the nuke, could leave a player with no way to terminate gameplay.-- a simple answer would be to make Escape a non-remappable "exit" key. There might be a problem for new players if we remove the nuke -- they might solve a level but have remaining blockers, and not realise that exiting via Escape will count as solving the level as opposed to aborting it. Still, if we make a new intro pack at some point, it could showcase this exact scenario to teach the use of Escape.
I don't like the suggestion to make the minimap variable-sized. It's true that it doesn't cope well with large levels, but there's no reason to think size of level is negatively correlated with number of skill types (if anything, you'd expect to see positive correlation).If you select the "Compact Skill Panel" (which is the old-style one) in "Options -> Interface", you don't get the "Korean washing machine" button like directional select, you just have nuke, pause and fast forward.
Instead, we could get rid of some of the "Korean washing machine" buttons. Directional select can go; it's much more convenient to use a hotkey.
Hard-binding Esc is conceivable, I have no opinion on this.
Removing dir select buttons: Careful. What you remove from the UI, the new player will not try. People will not read manuals. Level designers get crazy about making their own skill tutorials (unnecessary, skills are in the panel, tutorial pack exist for skill subtleties that level designers can miss anyway) but haven't/won't make directional select tutorials (with good reason, it's the job of the engine to explain it). Also people won't play tutorials; people play packs, and not every pack has that; if every pack had that, people would skip it. Lix has tooltips for dir select whenever two opposing lixes are under the cursor, but I haven't user-tested those tooltips.
Splat ruler should get a button?
Again I point out that many games nowadays features so-called hotkeys and no buttons. Pressing keys without any kind of visual button the screen is very common.
another idea on 'removing' a button is to place the release rate change function up to overtop of entrances (this is how Revolution worked--you left or right clicked the entrances and the number appeared temporarily above it). That would free up one more space.
- Vertically stacking some of the existing buttons (Directional select would be the first target)
Directional select is already vertically stacked.
what about vertically stacking the RR buttons as well?
At this point, I feel very strongly against the following:
[...]
- Vertical-stacking the release rate button (the only logical way to do this, that still displays all information currently displayed, gives an ~8x7 pixels pre-zoom area each for - and +)
I would prefer the bottom one as it still has all the functionality and I think this is still ok in terms of too many buttons.
Now I just hope enough people who voted for Neutral Lemmings to be introduced first change their vote to expand the skillset, because while I do admit that Neutral Lemmings provide more potential than I thought at first, simply having more degrees of freedom with regard to skill combinations is obviously going to blow the doors open much wider on new level-design possibilities... ;)