If I can get this working, would anyone like to see this feature in SuperLemmix? Would you use it?

As a side question - should Failure/Success jingles be brought back (bear in mind that such jingles can be long music tracks, not just a few seconds) so that the music in the Postview screen can be different depending on whether or not the level is completed?

Or, should these screens remain silent?

From a conversation on Discord:

On (menu) screen, when using up and down arrows do not continue but stop at highest or lowest setting... like old neolemmix. Sometimes it's hard to know if you're on the lowest setting because of a strange name.
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Right now you tap the up arrow but when you get to the highest level it resets to the lowest.
if you press the up arrow, you scroll through tricky, taxing, mayhem... then it starts over.
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Old neo used to stop at the highest option. Some level packs are hard to tell if you're at the last option.

Now that we have a way to display singular and plural custom names, it's a better time than ever to have level info display on the Window caption (aka Title bar):



Here's an example of singular form:



And, custom lemming names (in this case, Lemminas):



In light of this change, I feel it's now no longer necessary to display the "rescued" count as a negative number in the panel. Instead, the number is displayed in red until the save requirement has been met:

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In addition to this, the caption reads "Mass Replay Check" when a MRC is being performed.

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Frenzy (the "pause doesn't work" gimmick) has been under consideration for making a comeback in SuperLemmix, but I think that a better way to implement it would be as an optional talisman. This encourages real-time play whilst not outright enforcing it.

Similarly, rather than allowing levels to toggle Classic Mode on (another idea that was previously under consideration), this also works better as a less intrusive, optional talisman.

Both have now been added to SuperLemmix! Here's how they work:

The talismans check for whether a Replay has been loaded and fail if that's the case (Mass Replay Check also fails these talismans).

Individually, "Play in Classic Mode" checks whether the mode has been activated; since it isn't possible to activate or deactivate it in-game, this must be done via the Config menu prior to playing the level. For that reason, it's more of a "re-play value" talisman for those who prefer not to use Classic Mode as part of their normal play. If the level is completed with Classic Mode active, the talisman is passed.

"Play Without Pressing Pause" checks for both the pause button and hotkey being pressed. If neither are pressed and the level is completed, the talisman is passed.

Both have been implemented in Commits f7d13258d (Player) and ee48fb5 (Editor), and will be ready for release in the next Player update (2.2) and Editor update (2.3).

This topic is not necessarily related to the current discussion about whether Jumpers & Shimmiers should turn when encountering level sides, and instead is more a product of it.

Do we want this, specifically for when these skills encounter a wall (or any vertical terrain)?:

Note that the skill shadow shows the movement of the lemming - for Shimmiers, they turn and continue to the end of the pips - for Jumpers, they turn and continue the jump trajectory

From discussion in this topic:

Could you ... Make the selecting tone (or a fail tone) ...?

a fail sound would be ideal for any and all disallowed assignments

You could use the same (assign) tone but pitch it down to sound negative.

I'm attempting to implement a hotkey which sets the skill count of the current level to infinite-of-each (types remain the same).

It's easy enough to make the count change happen (barring a few wierd bugs when backskipping). The real problem I'm having is that it isn't as simple as just "set the skills to infinite, and then change them back later if you want" because if the level provides 5 of something, you set it to infinite and then use 6, what should happen when you press the hotkey again?

I can think of 5 possibilities:

1) Once applied, the skill count stays infinite until the level is restarted. Pressing the hotkey again doesn't change the count again at all. This is easiest to achieve and probably makes the most sense.

2) The count resets to the originally available count. This might seem to make sense, but if a player is already halfway through the level having used an infinite count to get there, then the original count becomes fairly meaningless. They might as well just continue with the infinite count.

3) The count resets to the originally available count, and restarts the level. Better, but might seem a bit jarring.

4) The count resets to the originally available count, minus the skills used, and any minus counts just show as zero. This option is slightly better than the second option, but would be the most difficult to manage code-wise and is fairly pointless seeing as we have a "used skills count" which would be far more useful in this scenario.

5) Keep the count at infinite, and toggle the used skills count on. This one also makes pretty good sense having considered the middle 3 options, but has the potential to be the most confusing.

Option 1 is my favourite. I think that if a user has chosen to switch on infinite skills, they've committed to playing the rest of the level with that option enabled, and so it should remain active until the level is either completed or restarted. The only problem with it is if the player accidentally hits the key without meaning to.

Another complication is replays: ideally, toggling infinite skills should be written into the replay so that any replays used with an infinite count on would make sense to the viewer, and wouldn't be broken by simply watching them without infinite skills.

Also, any levels played with infinite skills on shouldn't count towards level records, for obvious reasons. This would need to be managed as well. I think SLX might just be too complex an engine to deal with a feature like this.

I could do with some feedback on this. Do people think it's worth implementing the feature at all? What would you expect to happen if you pressed the hotkey again? Would you use it if it was there? I'm currently about 70:30 in favour of just chalking it up to "it's a good idea, and fun to do, but probably isn't worth the trouble."

I went down something of a rabbit hole with the end-of-play conditions yesterday. Here's what I've come up with:

Single-lemming Levels
If the initial lem count is 1, and 1 lemming dies, then the level doesn't end. This works nicely, and obviously works for levels with cloners as well (since, if the lemming is cloned once, and then 1 lemming dies, there is still another lemming in the level to keep it active. If that lemming then dies, the level should end anyway).

The only thing I'd like to add here is some sort of on-screen message such as "No lemmings remain. Rewind, Restart or Exit" to make it clear that there's a reason play is continuing with no lemmings on-screen.

If this works, the behaviour could extend to any condition where no lemmings remain (including when only zombies remain, which brings us nicely to...)

Only Zombies Remain
Ideally, now that we have a Kill All Zombies talisman, we don't want levels to end when only zombies remain. Thankfully, the talisman code includes a CheckForZombiesKilled method which can be used to prevent the level ending unless it returns true. That part ended up being easy enough (although further testing is needed to make sure that it behaves properly in all cases).

However, there is still the problem of what to do when only zombies remain and the user nukes. At the moment, the level ends instantly (only 1 frame of nuke animation is seen; the beginning of the countdown appears above one or two zombies); I've scoured the code and can't find any obvious cause for this, but ideally we want the nuke animation to play out before the level ends, otherwise it looks like an unintentional bug. It's not massively important, since it's purely aesthetic, but I do want to tidy up as many of these loose ends as possible.

Time Is Up
This has ended up being my favourite one to work on. The 'lems freezing mid-exit' behaviour is gone for now (since I always thought it looked a bit buggy), but I've left the code in comments in case we want to bring it back for any reason.

We still have our "overtime" period, where the time counter starts counting upwards in purple, and no actions taken during this period count towards the level result. But, I've made a few improvements:

Instead of freezing mid-exit, lems now fully exit and then re-spawn from the entrance hatch, creating an infinite loop which allows the player to start from the beginning of the level and work their way across again (with all previous skill usage - builder bridges, basher tunnels, etc - still present on the map). To compliment this, the skill count is set to infinite-of-each so that the player can fully experiment with the available skillset (although, at present, it isn't possible to assign skills to re-spawned lems - not sure why ).

If I can get this fully working, it seems a shame to relegate this behaviour only to levels with time limits (especially since most levels tend to get made without time limits nowadays). It might be worth creating a hotkey which allows the player to activate this mode on the fly, for example if they're stuck on a level. Doing so would obviously have to instantly fail the level (so, if the level is exited during this state, the level would count as a no-solve), whilst pressing the hotkey again could revert to the previous state (before the hotkey was first pressed), so that the level can be completed from there if the player has come up with a solution in the meantime. This is pie in the sky at the moment, but the behaviour itself works perfectly for TimeUp conditions and can therefore be tested for potential usefulness elsewhere.

Plenty to think about.