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.

So far, I haven't received any reports of registrations / posts being outright blocked when they shouldn't be. If anyone does encounter this, please let me know. I'm also reviewing the logs periodically to look for anything that was filtered but shouldn't have been, and haven't seen any.

We did have one case where a legitimate post got flagged for moderator review. This post was definitely not spam, and came from a long-time member of the forum. Nonetheless, I can see why an overly-cautious filter may have flagged this post. There's only been a handful of posts since the filter was installed, so it's hard to get a general idea of the trend of how often it will flag things - if it's frequently flagging legitimate posts I might need to rethink things (though perhaps the first thing to try here is seeing whether I can modify the plugin so that it only flags posts from newer users), if this seems to be a one-off or at least an uncommon occurance then I don't think it's a huge problem if a moderator has to approve a post every once in a while.

I actually think this would be very useful to have. It doesn't necesserially have to be official - while it might be a bit different in purpose from other styles out there, it's still a useful tool for building levels and thus I'd see it as absolutely valid to submit as a style, so if WillLem doesn't want to take this on as an official supported thing, you'd be more than welcome to just make it as "gigalem_erasers". (Personally, if I were still developing NL, I'd simply accept it as just "erasers" if you wanted, but that's WillLem's / the community's decision at this point.)

Do be mindful of that NL is not going to force people to use it as erasers, and thus - while it might be weird - people would be allowed to actually use them as non-eraser pieces to make levels. I'm not saying you would, but just in case, do be mindful that no one is going to force people to ONLY use the pieces as erasers - advise maybe, force no.

Quote from: GigaLem on August 13, 2025, 10:45:46 AMThat would explain my sudden log out then.

That one would've been due to a slight screw-up while installing it. If anyone saw the "site is down to upgrade to 2.1.6" message during it, this was also the result of the aforementioned screwup.

As reCaptcha and security questions are no longer effective, and a secret password is frustrating for new users, I've now added CleanTalk anti-spam to the forums. We'll see how well this works, but it should be completely unobtrusive.

If any legitimate would-be users are having trouble registering (or posting), please reach out on the Lemmings Forums Discord or the #lix IRC channel on QuakeNet.

The issue recently with forum emails being delayed by a couple of hours was the fault of SMF 2.1.6. I've now applied a patch which should fix this issue.

Different ports have different behaviors. Most ports do have a fixed track for each level, but this isn't always the same between ports. DOS and Win95 (among several others) just play the first track on the first level you play, then the next track for every subsequent level (with special cases for the special graphics levels).

I Am AT solely appears in the Genesis version if I'm not mistaken, which does have fixed tracks for each level. Lemmings Ark appears in both Genesis and SNES; both use fixed tracks but I'm not sure if it has the same track on both. Dolly Dimple exists on both DOS (which doesn't have fixed tracks) and Amiga (which does). I couldn't tell you off hand which tracks they have, but an emulator (or YouTube) can probably clear that up.

I'm not sure how necessary this is for grouped pieces, I feel like it's easy enough to identify those in any case where it'd matter (but at the same time, this would still at worst fall under "unnecessary but doesn't hurt to have it").

On the other hand, having this option for erasers seems like it could be a really useful idea in the right circumstances. One option could be to simply have erasers, instead of erasing, have them draw a solid color that contrasts with the background. (You could go a step further and do an outline or similar - be aware this may not always be obvious for smaller pieces, depending on the piece's design and how thick the outline is - but even just "solid contrasting color" will achieve the goal here I'm pretty sure.)

Quote from: GigaLem on August 02, 2025, 12:29:17 AMLook at a screenshot of Windows 95 lemmings and compare it to Mac Lemmings, the graphics are very different, recognizable but one is more "hi def" than the other.

The resolution is the same, and on a technical level, I get the feeling the capabilities are the same (or at least close) - but it does feel like the Mac version had less effort put into it. The Win95 one looks like an actual effort to remake the graphics in higher resolution and color depth, whereas the Mac one just looks like a fairly decent upscaling (aside from the skill panel, which is actually quite nice, especially compared to the Win95 one).

Not sure how likely it is for an in-game option to be added, but the sprites are just PNG files, nothing at all is stopping you (or anyone else who wants to do so) from modifying them to have the look you want. NL is very moddable like that. You could even likely use a direct rip from the Mac version for the sprites that exist there, though you'd need to make custom ones for the new skills.

I remember making a (non-trivial) one-second level as a proof of concept once. It's probably still floating around in the older posts somewhere.

The minimum setting should either be one or zero (in the latter case, with zero being interpreted as "no time limit"). This is not a situation where you have to choose some arbitrary limit (unlike, say, maximum level size where there isn't - within reason - any specific exact cutoff point where it won't work beyond), there is a clear logical line here - we can't meaningfully have negatives, and we can't have literal zero (but can have infinite, and could treat zero as a shorthand for that). Thus, minimum of either 0 or 1. Whereas for upper limit, there's the consideration of "what actually fits on the in-game display" as a good reason for 99:59 being the maximum finite value.