Quote from: Simon on August 16, 2026, 04:58:00 PMIdea: Over each lemming who will receive a replay assignment in the next 5 seconds, we paint a large arrow with the skill on it and a countdown. You can click an

• on that arrow to cut the lemming's future.

Bonus: This might feel "good enough" that the periodic demands for reintroducing timed bombers finally die out for once and for all.

I'm quite a fan of it, but I can definitely admit it has some weaknesses.

The camera controls are the obvious one. They're not really much better on PC. The keyboard-based controls are an improvement over the mouse-based ones, but still not ideal. Lack of ability to tilt up/down is also frustrating.

The other one is that honestly, I don't feel the level design was the greatest, and especially, it rarely made full use of 3D. There are a few absolutely excellent levels in there that couldn't work in 2D (eg. Critical Path), but also so many that aren't all that interesting and/or the 3D aspect of them is limited to "assign a couple of turners" and/or "the path has turns in it, but there's no puzzle-related reason it couldn't be a straight 2D line". Think of levels like "This Is The Army" or "The Five Arches" here.

It was definitely very fun to make an original level pack for!

https://demozoo.org/productions/224224/

This seems to be what it's a reference to.

And in finding this and sharing it here, I've probably instantly moved it one or two tiers up the iceberg.

Quote from: WillLem on August 08, 2026, 06:32:40 PMI can't think of a sensible way to deal with this engine-side tbh. CE could perhaps see if the target .png is the same width as the one it expects, and - if it isn't - load the default instead. There might be a better way.

Keep new (non-12.14) characters in a seperate file - or at least, strictly at the end of the file. Apply the fallback-to-default seperately for the original and new characters (if using "at the end": compare number of characters, load missing ones from default file).

Yeah, it looks right. And the format I remember is ".lev", not ".dat", so yeah - I'm probably thinking of the wrong engine here.

That being said - if WinLems offers any way to convert to the standard DOS format, you could go WinLems -> DOS -> NeoLemmix.

Quote from: Vexar on August 05, 2026, 03:19:13 PMThanks a lot! I started rebuilding some in NeoLemmix but is taking a lot of time, and I'd love to convert the rest to save time, is there a thread where I can download the old versions you're referring to?? It would help a lot

12.9.X release topic: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4872.0

To convert:
1. Create a subfolder of "levels" (call it whatever you like)
2. Put your levels in this folder
3. Create a "levels.nxmi" file in this folder. Look at an existing pack (it will have levels.nxmi inside each rank's folder) to see how to structure this file. Make an entry in it for each level you want to convert. (Note: When converting LVL files from DOS / etc, or older-version NeoLemmix level files, you do not need to create a levels.nxmi file as NeoLemmix will autodetect them. It won't automatically pick up other engines.)
4. Run the cleanse levels feature on it. (Open the level select, select your pack (not a level within it, the pack itself), hit Ok. It'll take you back to the title screen. Now press the F8 key.)
5. NL will create converted copies of your levels in a new folder, which IIRC will be called "cleanse".

Now - one thing I'm gonna have to correct myself on, I think I'm confusing WinLemm (unless you mean Windows 95 Lemmings, in which case that's the same format as DOS Lemmings and is fully supported for this process) with Lemmins, another clone. So I could be wrong about it being supported.

For reference - levels from both Win95 Lemmings and Warren Gaylen's WinLems can be converted to NeoLemmix (and from there to many of the other modern engines, if you prefer another one - though NeoLemmix is generally the "gold standard"), but you'll need to use a slightly older version of NL (12.9 or earlier) to do so.

Quote from: Lana T. on April 26, 2026, 02:21:01 PMHow many people are using the forum nowadays? It seems less active than before my break. Silken told me that almost everyone is on Discord now, but is everything taking place there? If there's anything I can do to support the forum, please let me know, I don't want it to be replaced...

I see the two as complementary, not as one replacing the other.

Discord is much better suited to quick chats, collab projects / challenges, etc. Whereas the forum is much better suited to larger info-dumps, sharing content, etc. Both are an important part of the community, and I don't see either one going anywhere any time soon.

Quote from: Dullstar on March 06, 2026, 07:37:04 AMOf course, I'm sure these are intended to be guidelines and not hard rules, but I think this one has an interesting caveat: providing more skills than absolutely required will often allow more possible solutions (which makes the level easier), but if the excess skills don't actually open any new solutions, then it could potentially make things harder by obscuring which skills you're actually supposed to use.

Yes - and doing this can also contribute to the overall difficulty of later levels too, if the player has adjusted to "this pack makes use of decoy skills".

Lemmings Plus III intentionally does this with...

Reveals a key part of the solution for an early-Fierce level

...surplus bombers. It's very frequent for levels, including 100%-required levels, to give more bombers than are useful and/or the save requirement allows for. So when the player reaches Fierce 1, a 100%-required level that includes a bomber in the skillset, it's just doing this again, right? Wrong. The bomber is used in that level's solution to cancel a digger; the bombed lemming falls into an exit before he can explode, making 100% still possible.

It's a more well-known trick now, but only one other level had done something like this at the time, and that level didn't have the bomber exit, it just had the bomber fall some distance after digger-cancelling to explode elsewhere.

I had a quick play with it. Honestly - I have to say the gameplay feels more comparable to the SMS version than the NES version (that's not a bad thing; the SMS version is one of the best ports IMO).

Quote from: WillLem on July 22, 2026, 10:11:17 PMThere may be a better way, though. My goal would be to not litter the directory with temporary replays, ideally.

Maybe a dedicated folder (or subfolder of the replay dir) for these ones, and one file per level (perhaps tracked by level ID)?

Welcome! Commander Keen was also a classic for sure!

The issue with letting the game handle it is that the editor would still need to set a fallback for 12.14 compatibility. If the editor can determine a fallback, it may as well just handle the entire auto-selection logic.

My thought - the main use case for this would be "user does not need to manually select it, they just start placing pieces in their preferred style and the theme is assigned automatically". As such - I would say, invoke the automatic decision when a level:
- does not have a manually assigned theme (when loading a level, it could in practice just be assumed the theme was manually assigned)
- and does not currently contain any pieces from a style with an associated theme
- and the user places a piece in it that comes from a style that does have an associated theme

In the event of a copy-paste causing pieces from multiple eligible styles to be pasted at once, I would say determine it by whichever such style has the highest number of non eraser pieces, and break any ties with an arbitrary factor such as alphabetical order or which one has the first (relevant) piece in the raw data. Keep in mind that this is a convenience feature, not a critical one.

Alternatively, it could be invoked when first saving the level if it doesn't yet have a theme assigned. In this case, determine it based on which style has the highest proportion of non-erase pieces.

Actually, this does sound familiar now - I remember wanting something closer to the DOS versions of the tunes, so likely used them for that reason.

I'm fairly sure the tracks I used for LPII were just taken from Lemmix's source code. I definitely recall using DragonsLovers' tracks in other past projects though, so perhaps this was a mixup with one of those cases? I don't think DragonsLover was active anymore when I made LPII.