Lemmings Forums
NeoLemmix => Bugs & Suggestions => Editor Bugs / Suggestions => Topic started by: Dullstar on August 18, 2019, 07:35:49 PM
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Currently, the editor allows you to create a level with 11+ skills despite the 10 skill limit. It will warn about it when validating the level, but it still lets you save it with the excess skills assigned.
The player handles this gracefully by truncating the excess skills. But this creates a potential problem: In addition to resulting in some strange behavior when trying to modify skill allocations without exercising caution to ensure you don't exceed the limit (why is this skill I'm trying to add not showing?), if an eleventh skill is accidentally left in during development and hidden by the truncation behavior, these hidden skills could reappear if the limit is ever changed again.
I'd suggest graying out the fields for unused skills when the maximum number of skills have already been selected (by graying out only unused skills, this should prevent levels which have been manually edited to contain more than the maximum allowed number of skills from causing strange behaviors when loaded in the editor). To show that the editor does in fact save all the skills, rather than deleting the excess, a demonstration 1-of-everything level is attached.
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It's known that the editor does this - for the same reason you can create a 10-skills level using an older editor from before this feature was implemented. Not sure how feasible it is to check - keep in mind that the editor would have to also check every pickup skill to make sure of how many are being used, which would have to be checked every time a skill count is changed (or at least, every time it's changed between a zero and nonzero value). It might be simpler to just give a warning when saving.
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It might be simpler to just give a warning when saving.
...or make it part of the checks taking place when you select "validate level", perhaps? ;)
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The Validate Level function exists, but it's pretty out of the way. It's only useful for creators who really care to make sure they haven't left any non-obvious mistakes behind. As long as the obvious fixes are made (e.g. problems like a level that has no entrance hatches and no preplaced lemmings), there's nothing stopping someone from saving and releasing a level which fails the Validate Level checks. Perhaps a simple solution would be to automatically run Validate Level when the user tries to save a level (though it's probably still a good idea for the warning to contain an option to save anyway).