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.

I just finished (as in reached the credits, although there is still plenty more to do in the game) Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel to Hollow Knight, which is just about the only modern game that I love as much as I love the classics    Both games are Metroidvanias with vast worlds to explore, and I love the feeling of exploration and discovery, not knowing what's around each new corner, and gradually piecing things together and building connections. Both games also have a ton of colourful characters and fascinating, well-developed worlds, presented in a very cryptic way so that as you explore, you gradually come to understand them.

However, I discovered Hollow Knight through a Let's Play, which I'm grateful for as I might have missed it altogether, but that did mean that I never had the experience of playing it completely blind for myself. So Silksong has been an amazing opportunity to immerse myself in that experience. I have recorded my playthrough (96 episodes so far!) but haven't started uploading it yet as that would take huge chunks of time away from playing. At this point I'll probably just keep going, either until I 100% the game or until I decide I've reached a point where it makes sense to stop recording and play the rest by myself, and only start uploading then 

Namida is also playing this game at the moment.

Dolly Dimple is the 22nd level of ONML and it has six tracks, so on Amiga/Mac it will have the fourth track in the rotation. That's the one called ohno_05 in NeoLemmix (because NL numbers the ONML tracks following the DOS version).

You can already do that; create a background image that's a single colour, and place it in the "backgrounds" folder inside the style folder. See the ones in proxima_tile for examples. For good performance, it's better for the image to be relatively large, not 1x1.

I think the important thing is to disentangle the two questions. The number of votes everyone gets to cast does not have to equal the number of levels that make it through to the mixed group. If we separate those, then we can make meaningful decisions on each one, and we won't have a tug-of-war where both want to change and drag the other with them.

My thoughts on both:

Only one level should go through, except in case of ties. If we keep the "3 rules, with a mixed group to determine the overall winner" structure (and that structure has worked well and I don't see a reason to change it), then the ideal is one voting round per group and one for the mixed round. We have to have some system in place in case of ties, but if we go back to multiple levels going through then we have more voting rounds even in the best case, with even more if tiebreaks are needed, and we risk a return to the bad old days of contests being bogged down in an unending stream of votes.

(In case anyone doesn't know or doesn't remember how bad things used to be, the contest that provoked the discussion that led to us changing the system had eleven votes to select a winner out of twelve levels.)

It's true that with only one level going through from each group, the second-best level in each group can't get a prize even if it's second-best overall. I'm fine with that. "Best" is subjective anyway, and the important thing is to have a voting system that does the job of selecting a top three that is in some measure representative of the community's preferences, without the voting being too complicated or taking too long. The phrase "the perfect is the enemy of the good" comes to mind.

As someone who occasionally enters contests but usually doesn't, yes, I would like to be able to vote for more than one level in the rule groups, if there are at least 4 entries. There being a lot of high-quality levels is more common than not, and it's great to be able to recognise this by voting for my favourite two (or even three in a large group); then even if they don't win, I feel at least I was able to give them my support.

Quote from: Simon on May 27, 2025, 07:30:52 PMThe color cycling is fundamentally problematic. NL color-cycles the gadgets in clear-physics mode, I don't like that either. With the glaring color cycle, the designer is telling me: He has no clue what colors are best, therefore let's cycle through all colors in hope that, sometimes, non-clashing colors are in the cycle. But now the designer has dodged the design problem at hand. His job was to make stuff look distinct. Instead, he distracts me with animation/motion, and there will be clashing colors in the cycle, i.e., stuff looks temporarily the same. Exactly what his design should have avoided.

 

See Styles download links for an explanation. You can either download all styles at once with the top link in that topic, or you can download the LP2 styles using the second link, replacing "XXXXXX" with each style's name; for the LP2 styles, these are namida_desert, namida_metal, namida_psychedelic, namida_purple and namida_tree.

Quote from: kaywhyn on May 19, 2025, 11:10:22 AMFor example, this is what makes it possible to complete the WAFD (We All Fall Down) levels with only two diggers in NL, but if I'm not mistaken, the 2 digger solution on Dos is impossible. Instead, I believe it takes a minimum of 3 diggers to complete IIRC?

3 for Fun, 5 for Tricky, 7 for Taxing, 9 for Mayhem. Because no cancelling is possible, the best solution on DOS is to crowd the lemmings as tightly as possible into each digger's pit, so you need 1 digger per 9 lemmings (rounded up).

Let's keep it together in one topic. Also, it's a good idea to take a look at other games on RetroAchievements, and especially existing sets for Lemmings games, to get an idea of point values.

Anyway, some suggestions. Obviously, pretty much any level could have an achievement for saving the maximum or for minimum skills, so I'm trying to pick out more interesting ones. (Some of these will overlap with talismans in Lemmings Redux.)

Fun 3: Save 47/50 (1pt)
Fun 7: Save 100% with 2 builders (5pts)
Fun 8: Save 100% with 3 skills (3pts)
Fun 11: Save 100% with no builders (5pts)
Fun 13: Solve with 10 diggers or less (10pts)
Fun 17: Save 100% (2pts)

Tricky 19: Solve with no miner (10pts)
Tricky 23: Save at least 95% (20pts)
Tricky 24: Save 100% (5pts)
Tricky 25: Save 100% (25pts)
Tricky 30: Save 100% with no builders (5pts)

Taxing 1: Save 100% with 6 builders (5pts)
Taxing 2: Save 100% (2pts)
Taxing 4: Save 100% (5pts)
Taxing 16: Save 100% (50pts) (maybe this is too hard to include)
Taxing 18: Save 100% (25pts)
Taxing 22: Solve with 2 builders (10pts) (note that Amiga already requires 100% on this level)

Mayhem 3: Solve with no climber (10pts)
Mayhem 7: Save 100% (5pts)
Mayhem 25: Solved with 5 builders (10pts)
Mayhem 26: Save 95/100 (20pts)
Mayhem 30: Save 100% (10pts)