So, I had a further thought: Going for a server in Europe would no doubt mean needing to ensure full compliance with many of Europe's well-intentioned but overly-pedantic internet laws, which is not really ideal for a small site where my involvement these days is mostly "keep it online and updated". It's not ideal if the site ends up suspended because I wasn't quick enough to fix the exact wording of some disclaimer or whatever.

With that in mind, I've been giving more thought to providers based in NZ, Australia and Canada. At this point the hosts I'm primarily considering are LunaNode (Canada), easyVPS (Canada), Xenyth (Canada), Voyager (NZ) and Binary Lane (Australia). I do need to look into them a bit more before I make any final choice, but based on location, very quick preliminary research, and pricing, that's my initial shortlist.

Quote from: bezzie616 on October 13, 2025, 08:48:50 PMHow do you make music work with this? Or has it not being implemented (yet)? I ripped the red book audio of the original 3D PC release but no matter where I place the folder, (or any other rip of Lemmings music. It won't play music.

Did you use one of the releases in this topic? If so - they were older versions while Loap was in development.

Download V1.0.0.0 from the release topic (from the first post; it's been updated every time there's a new release): https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=5907.0

Older releases had the music as a seperate download so that they didn't have to be redownloaded with every update (as they were the majority of the file size), but because further updates are unlikely at this point, I decided it was simpler to put everything in one download.

Hi all,

I have decided to look into a new host for Lemmings Forums (and related sites) for a couple of reasons.

The first one is that I have noticed that several other comparable hosting providers (reputable ones, not dodgy no-names) provide comparable service at around half the price. While they lack some of the advanced features of DigitalOcean, these advanced features are ones that I don't actually use (some of them I don't even know what they're used for beyond vague concepts) and the sites will be fine without. Thus, by switching, I can either cut the costs, or alternatively, get a much more powerful server for the same cost.

The second is that, while I realise it's impossible to 100% avoid, especially while remaining practical, I wish to minimize any spending that funds the US (which in practice means don't buy services from US companies, as they pay tax to the US government). Moving away from a US-based host is a step towards this goal. The reasons for this are outside the scope of subjects we would usually discuss on this site, but I'm also sure you all can guess exactly what they are. It's most likely I'll go with a Europe-based option instead (partly due to most of the site's userbase being in Europe or the UK, so it makes sense to have the server located there too), but there's also one NZ-based option I've been looking at too, and I'm also open to Australian options if any good ones come up.

To avoid doubt: This does NOT mean US-based users are no longer welcome here. American people are not the problem, and are not in any way a "target" of this action. If you are welcome here today, you are still welcome here after the move (assuming you don't suddenly start spamming the forum between now and then or anything like that, of course). Nor will anyone be banned for not following the same course of action themself - this is what I am choosing to do, and I am sharing it in order to explain how it will affect the site; that's all.

No final decisions on who the new host will be or when we'll move have been made at this stage, but I tend to move pretty fast once I've decided on something, so don't be surprised if it happens within the week.

In terms of impact on site use: You can expect a small amount of downtime, but that's it. As this will be a 100% planned move, unlike the last one that occurred due to problems with the server, it should go a lot more smoothly than the last one. This also means that for a significant portion of the move, instead of the site being completely down, it should be able to remain online in "read-only" mode.

There is an SMF addon for this, but I'm not sure if it's up to date - it only lists itself as compatible with 2.1RC, not the newer stable versions of the 2.1 line. This may or may not become a problem - several of our existing addons were like this, or even officially only compatible with 2.0, and only two of them caused problems when upgrading to 2.1 - the PM attachments, and the replacing "Recent posts" with "Recently updated topics" (ie: so the same topic doesn't show up in the list several times if there's multiple replies).

I have moved this topic to General Discussion, as it was completely off topic for the Other Projects board. I have also removed a comment which served no purpose other than to insult another forum member (even if one who can be frustrating at times). We'll leave it at that for now, I think we both know very well what happens if that kind of conduct continues though.

While CleanTalk is definitely helping, it's not perfect, and a few have slipped through. To help combat this, I've reintroduced the security question on registrations in addition to CleanTalk's checks. It should only have to be answered when registering; not when posting or sending PMs, even for new users.

It's not a "secret password" question, just general Lemmings trivia. I also added a few questions; SMF will randomly pick one to ask.

They are - but they can also make the intended solution easier to spot. Likewise for pickup skills, and even to some extent one way arrows.

I didn't play through it, but looking at the description and screenshots: I'd actually say "every level revolves around a locked exit" is the more "gimmicky" thing here than the one lemming. However, I'll also stress that in this case, I don't mean "gimmicky" in a bad way - it's a perfectly valid, fair and (in and of itself) non-frustrating style of level design, the only thing "unusual" is it showing up in every level of the pack.

Or rather, has been since May, but I only just found out about it.

I don't personally have it - a trustworthy member of the community managed to secure it. Since they haven't spoken about it, and I only found out when I reached out to "the owner" earlier since I noticed it was no longer being used even to serve ads (literally no DNS entries), I can assume they don't want it widely known that they have it; so I won't say who it is. (I initially made this topic for the staff board before realising there was no reason to confine it to there; and even then, I kept the person anonymous.) They can reveal it themselves if they wish to.

I've coordinated with them to set up a redirect to a dedicated topic explaining why .com links no longer work; I've closed that topic since it's intended to serve solely as a post we can redirect such links to, and started this one because I'm sure the community will want to discuss this. There hasn't been any discussion about transferring ownership or anything like that, basically just them confirming they have it and coordinating to set up the redirect.

Hi,

You've probably ended up here because you followed a link that points to a topic or attachment on LemmingsForums.com.

Although we have recently been able to secure the LemmingsForums.com domain name again, we are not able to correctly match old-site links to current-site topics via any automated algorithm, and there are far too many posts to even consider doing it manually. This is due to the way posts were migrated - we were not able to access an up-to-date database backup (only an older one), and therefore, had to resort to scraping every topic via a web crawler instead. Therefore, we have elected to have any attempts to access LemmingsForums.com result in redirection to this topic.

If you were just trying to get to Lemmings Forums in general - congratulations, you're here! You can click the logo in the top-left corner of this page, to go to the front page of the site. If you were a member of Lemmings Forums during the LemmingsForums.com era, your old account might still exist here - doesn't hurt to try (please note that your PMs will not have been preserved). Although posts from even-older iterations of the forums have been preserved on the current site, accounts from older iterations have not.

If you have a general idea of what the topic/post you were looking for is, you may be able to find it by using the Search bar at the top of the page.

Quote from: WillLem on July 08, 2025, 02:38:13 AMOutline wouldn't be the best idea for water and/or OWWs because in both cases the trigger area affects whatever it overlaps, including any added terrain:

This is true for almost all trigger areas - and ironically, at least on the player side of things, OWWs are actually one of the few exceptions. In DOS/Lemmix it's indeed the case that they affect anything they overlap, but in NL (and presumably SLX by extension), when the physics map is generated at the start of gameplay, OWW data is baked into it at that point. If a pixel is erased (by an eraser piece, or during gameplay, by a destructive skill), the OWW flag is erased with it; if a new solid pixel is later placed in that same location, it's just a normal pixel with no OWW flag. If the pixel wasn't solid at the time of generating the physics map, it didn't get the OWW flag in the first place.

(And by extension, yes, this does mean that SLX could theoretically add a constructive skill that creates one-way walls, with no changes to any wider object / terrain physics. Whether it's a good idea is a very different question, but it's very possible on a technical level.)

Quote from: WillLem on August 01, 2025, 12:05:16 AM@namida - Is there a reason why the trigger areas are all that very specific shade of pink (#F000F0)? I've noticed that Lemmini uses a very similar shade (#FF00FF), and that DOS variants of Amiga colours follow the pattern indicated by these colours (so, for instance, #4422FF in Amiga would become #4020F0 in DOS, and vice versa). I wonder, then, if the choice of shade for trigger areas is simply what was used in the base game that each clone was based on (so, #F000F0 for Lemmix's DOS base and #FF00FF for Lemmini's WinLemm/Amiga base).

It's very likely I chose to intentionally go with a color that's within DOS's color depth, hence #F000F0 instead of #FF00FF. The choice of using "death magenta" in the first place is simply because it tends to contrast well with a lot of other colors, and in particular, it itself tends to be a less-frequently-used color in actual graphics (as opposed to UI). It's a pretty common choice in general for this sort of purpose, not just Lemmings-specific.

Despite asking several times, no one has had anything to say about the new setup (outside of the one-off aforementioned case with the post being flagged for mod review). I'm going to go with the "no news is good news" assumption here, but if this is wrong - please actually reach out to me if it's causing problems. Don't assume that someone else will be having the same issue and report it for you - this community is far too small for that assumption to be reliable. And just in case anyone got the wrong idea, we are definitely not going to warn you or ban you or tell you off for reporting a technical issue. If for any reason you don't feel comfortable discussing it with me, you're welcome to raise it with a different staff member instead and they can pass it on (anonymously if you wish, although anonymity may limit how easily I can investigate).

I can also say that:
- Either no spambots have slipped through, or mods have been very quick at cleaning them up. (I also assume that if such had happened, it would've gotten back to me.)
- Aside from the one case mentioned above, no genuine posts have been incorrectly flagged for review or outright blocked.
- I have noticed a sharp decline in the number of guests viewing the site since setting up CleanTalk. This is expected - where it suspects a particularly high risk of spam, it blocks the site altogether rather than just preventing posting / registering. (This should also help with the database crash issue - I still haven't figured out exactly what leads to it and we're still relying on the "temporary" fix of having a background script that checks and restarts it periodically if needed, but it appears to be the database getting "overloaded", which is far less likely if we're not getting slammed with page loads from spambots.)

Quote from: WillLem on August 21, 2025, 11:39:00 PMThanks GigaLem. I'm afk at the moment (on mobile) but I'll take a look at these at some point for sure.

Namida, what did you mean about generating these images automatically? Would this be instead of creating the style, or as a way of quickly adding new pieces to it? Or as something in the Editor that can create them on-the-fly?

I was simply thinking of it as a way to generate the images.

A built-in feature in the editor sounds useful on the surface, but I'm actually a bit hesitant to recommend it. It would really need to be supported in the player as well as an actual feature rather than just a piece-creation tool in the editor (otherwise, you're going to end up with a bunch of user-generated erasers that not everyone is guaranteed to have, and a huge mess trying to keep them in the styles collection up-to-date), but then that would break 12.14 compatibility. It could be a useful idea for SLX.

Granted. The long-lost younger brother who just moved in is far worse.

I wish spambots were only able to spam their creators.

It might be worth looking into whether there's some fairly easy route to create them as SVG (or another vector or code-based format) while still retaining the desired crisp pixel edges. That way, if you later decide that eg a 128x128, or perhaps 24x24, etc, is desirable, it's very quick to create one, just change some parameters and run the generator again. I've found this approach to be extremely productive for functional 3D models, I'd think some parallel exists for 2D.