Got to put my vote in for the side-view glasses; they look great! 

Quote from: Airwave on February 27, 2026, 11:07:07 PMHowever, I then checked YouTube and discovered there's a solution with 17 saved using a very odd glitch I've never seen before (if you turn a miner into a bomber and time it so that they would explode just before breaking through the last row of pixels, they die but there isn't an explosion and no hole is created).

That's not quite what happens. When the miner-bomber oh-nos, because of a positioning glitch (during part of the miner's animation, his position is below where it should be) he notices that there is no ground under him and falls. On this specific level, he falls out of the level before he can explode; if that didn't happen, he would explode like any other faller-bomber.

The same glitch can be used with a blocker instead (not on this level, of course) -- a miner can become a blocker on air and instantly transition to a faller. This was used in the first 100% solution to Wicked 6, although I think it has been achieved glitchless since then.

That's awesome! Good luck with that

I'm aware that I didn't really answer your original question, so I'll give it my best shot. Assigning a level to a difficulty rank is some combination of a few different factors:

* How open-ended is it? If there are lots of different ways to solve a level, it's much easier for the player to find at least one.

* How long and complicated is the solution? For example, Fun levels and the first half of Tricky are both full of 20-of-everything levels, but the Tricky ones tend to be longer or give the player more that they have to do (e.g. two trapdoors).

* How close are the player's first impressions to the actual solution? For example, forging the path with a single lemming while the crowd are trapped is something the player learns early on, and is likely to be the first thing they try. Following a straight line to the exit, building over any gaps and bashing through any walls in the way, is easy to see; having to go around what looks like the main path is trickier.

* Does the level require any knowledge of game mechanics that goes beyond the basics of what the skills do? For example, traps killing only one lemming at a time; blockers turning lemmings performing a skill; interrupting a basher to make a little step -- all of these make levels harder for players who haven't seen the tricks before, but even for players who have seen them, as your repertoire of tricks expands, the process of analysing a level to see what tricks are needed gets more and more complicated.

There are a couple of axioms I follow:

* The designer is the worst at assigning difficulty to their own levels, because you cannot have the experience of solving it from a fresh start. This doesn't mean you should treat testers' words as gospel (especially as they can and will disagree with each other), but it does mean that testers' opinions should carry more weight than yours.

* Almost all usermade content is harder than the original games, and a different kind of difficulty. This is partly because NeoLemmix and Lix remove most of the execution difficulty, and have quality of life tools that allow designers to realise more complex puzzle ideas than were possible previously; it's also because when we played Lemmings for the first time, we were still learning what the skills do and how they interact, whereas almost all usermade content is aimed at players who are already familiar with the game.

* Different people will find different things difficult, and that is especially true in a puzzle game, where so much depends on how quickly you happen to hit the correct insight or get onto a good way of thinking about a level.

* It doesn't matter very much whether there is a strict difficulty curve. (For one thing, there is no reason why a pack has to have difficulty ranks at all; a pack that is all easy, or all medium, or all hard will be enjoyed by players at that level. But since it sounds like you want to make a pack with progression, I'll focus on that.) As far as possible, you want to avoid howlers like the original game putting the easy "Highland Fling" in the last rank, or (worse) a very hard level sticking out in the easy rank. But no-one will mind very much if, say, Tricky 14 of your pack is a little easier than Tricky 13. Occasional breather levels can be good to encourage the player to keep going.

Quote from: JawaJuice on February 27, 2026, 02:59:28 PMYeah, that's true. Unlike the basher, it's not visually obvious that the digger has changed directions, but you're right, he has. I suppose it does make sense then! It's odd then that no-one has an issue with the digger-blocker trick, but everyone dislikes basher-blocker.

For starters, it's simply not true that no-one has an issue with digger-blocker turnaround; this mechanic has provoked discussion before, and some have felt it to be unfair.

But more importantly (in my view), there is a huge difference between the two mechanics. If a digger and a blocker overlap, there's no reason why the digger would not be able to remove the terrain under the blocker, freeing him. That part isn't in question; what is in question is whether the digger should turn -- and that he should turn is implied as a special case of "blockers can turn any lemming". With the basher-blocker trick, it's obvious that the basher should turn, and that isn't in question; what is in question is whether the basher should also be able to free the blocker at the same time. And that is not easily answerable as a special case of any general mechanic.

One reason why many of us (including me) dislike the mechanic and consider it more of a bug is that it is very precise, and that makes it hard for new players to discover, which means any level relying on it is potentially unfair.

In addition, this is a mechanic that was never in the original games, whereas digger-blocker turnaround is in most (maybe all?) versions of original Lemmings. It was never necessary for solving the original levels, but it was always possible, and was discovered during challenges (in particular, the first solution to maximum saved on Wild 15).

Quote from: WillLem on February 11, 2026, 09:38:27 AMWhilst it is a fantastic option, NeoLemmix doesn't actually include the original Amiga games. Lemmings Redux is a collection of the best levels from DOS Lemmings, Oh No! and other ported versions (Genesis, PSP, etc).

That's not entirely accurate. It's true that NeoLemmix is a continuation of the Lemmix engine, which started as a direct port of the DOS version. But the levels included in Redux try to be more faithful to the Amiga version: the DOS version removes water on many levels, and has lowered requirements on a few levels (notably "Come on over to my place" and "The Steel Mines of Kessel"), and instead of keeping these, we put them back to how they were on Amiga.

I've posted in the GSTQ topic, but in case anyone stumbles on this topic years later and needs reassurance that the problem was solved: the culprit is the GSTQ pack download zip, which had its NXMI files directly inside the "levels" folder instead of inside the pack's subfolder.

The download zip for this pack contains info.nxmi, levels.nxmi, music.nxmi, postview.nxmi and title.nxmi files directly inside its "levels" folder, not inside levels/God The Save Queen as they should be. (This is why Flopsy was getting GSTQ music playing on other packs recently.)

Please fix the zip.

Nice to see this getting started. I voted for:

Spoiler

Watch out, there's traps about -- a memorable level with the difficulty of getting down from the start, plus a nice showcase of the Dirt style's traps

Upsidedown World -- very memorable design, tricky solution, and an interesting challenge to save 100%

Steel Works -- extremely daunting at first, especially since it was unlocked from the beginning and gave you an early taste of how much more complicated the levels would get later

One way or another -- nice gimmick with the choice of route, either choice presenting an interesting challenge

The Far Side -- excellent concept of getting all the way around, and the tight skillset made it tricky

And then there were four -- very cool multi-tasking level where some of the groups can help each other

The Steel Mines of Kessel -- unique level where you have to be efficient to carve a route with bombers

Rendezvous at the Mountain -- visually impressive, nice concept of coming together at the very end, and how can I not love the level that helped me discover this community?

Konnichiwa Lemming-san -- a nice early taste of the kind of level Genesis Lemmings is best known for, puzzles where you have to get the most out of a small number of skills

Temporary peace -- neat misdirection level that might help new players get used to the concept of a backroute and help them start looking out for them in other levels

That can happen if different levels have the same ID. Ideally, the packs should be updated to fix this, but that's a lot of work.

Interesting topic. Are we just talking hypothetically here or do you intend to put our choices together into an actual pack? If so, there should be some kind of formalised voting structure so that it's not just weighted towards whoever decides to list more levels.

That said, I'm happy to list my picks! This is a little bit similar to picking levels for Lemmings Redux, but that was years ago, differently structured, and not grouped by tileset 

(I've grouped Snow and Christmas together because the level selection for both is not great, so this feels like a better balance. To bring the tribes back up to 10, I would honestly suggest a second Brick tribe, maybe recoloured, as there are far more great Brick levels.)

Dirt: Konnichiwa Lemming-san; Temporary peace; The Steel Mines of Kessel
Pillar: Have a nice day; The Great Lemming Caper; Fall and no life (Part Two)
Marble: Postcard from Lemmingland; Come on over to my place; It's hero time
Crystal: Electric circuit; POOR WEE CREATURES; Evacuating a coal mine
Fire: Last one out is a rotten egg; Lemming Lament; Let's get together
Brick: This Corrosion; Be more than just a number; Creature Discomforts
Rock: KEEP ON TRUCKING; ROCKY VI; ROCKY ROAD
Snow: Quest for Kieran; SNOW JOKE; Steel Block Party
Bubble: PoP YoR ToP; DON'T PANIC; Flow Control

Cheapo also had some notorious replay glitches (in particular, on multi-entrance levels, when you replayed then the next lemming would come out of the wrong entrance) but NeoLemmix doesn't have anything like that, its replays work fine.

My thoughts:

Strongly prefer the original bubble zapper; the rotating blades look cool, and unnecessary flashing is annoying.

New chameleon is good.

New weed is marginally better but neither is good. I'll have a go at making an alternative.

Same with the crystal trap, I think we can do better.

Agreed with Icho about the rock trap; I played through a level and the drip rate is not fast enough to be annoying, so no change was needed.

Quote from: WillLem on December 28, 2025, 04:10:01 AMDo we have an existing way to convert this [Cheapo] content to .nxlv (or .lvl or .ini)?

Not automatically! The problem is that Cheapo levels are saved as bitmaps, so it's hard to convert that back into individual pieces. (And many Cheapo tilesets never got converted to NL.) Unless you could somehow write a program to calculate the tile locations from the bitmap, the only way would be rebuilding every level manually.

It's good to maintain a list (with short descriptions and links) to currently maintained engines, to help new arrivals connect with the content they are most likely to want.

But it's also good to keep these lists of older engines, as there are many reasons readers might want to check them out. Cheapo, for example, had hundreds, maybe thousands, of levels made for it that have never been converted to more recent engines.