Quote from: Simon on July 06, 2026, 10:33:13 PMGo to a preview screen of a level that has exactly 1 regular lemming and exactly 1 zombie. It will say: "1 lemmings, 1 zombies".

This is now fixed. I've also capitalized the 'L' of 'Lemming(s)' for now to be consistent with everything else:



Fixed in NLCEPlayer commit 53f667d.

We can re-think the capitalization for sure. I'd suggest that we either capitalize every word, as in the above screenshot, or don't capitalize anything. Open to other suggestions.

Quote from: Proxima on July 06, 2026, 10:56:35 PMBut considering that nothing in the level stats is a title of anything (except of course for the level and rank titles), maybe it would be better to lowercase everything and capitalise only the first letter of each line (except when it's a number)?

Agreed, this could work.

Quote from: Proxima on July 06, 2026, 10:56:35 PMI prefer NL's uncluttered screen, with no release rate and no "Infinite Time". (Time limit should be pointed out when there is one, but this is very rare in NL.) Why were these changes made in CE, and was there ever a discussion?

The changes were made mainly for 2 reasons:

1) Simply, to show the player more information on the preview screen.
2) Preview screen text color can now be customized on a per-line basis (using data/ce-textcolours.nxmi). Recoloring each line does make it look a bit less cluttered and easier to read (possibly why it was done this way in the Amiga version).

IIRC, there wasn't a discussion about this specifically. Looking back over the roadmaps/release topics, I don't think it got mentioned either, so apologies for this - it's a genuine oversight. I ported Preview Screen text creation over from SLX when implementing the ability to customise the text color (something that was previously specifically requested for NL), and I prefer the SLX refactor because it's a lot easier to deal with.

Anyway, discussion around Preview Screen text can begin here in this topic, or we can create another one. Of course, it should represent what the majority of the community wants. For now, consider it a demo feature whilst CE is still relatively new.

I feel I should also re-affirm at this stage that nothing that gets implemented in CE is final. Everything is open to suggestions, re-working, and possible removal after the fact if necessary. CE is not a 'WillLem project', I just happen to be the only dev on the Forums who has the time/inclination to take it on. If you don't like something, post a topic and we'll sort it out as a community. What I'm not prepared to do though is post a million topics about every little change and await feedback on every single one before actioning anything. I would very quickly lose interest that way, and CE wouldn't exist at all.

Quote from: Simon on July 05, 2026, 08:58:51 PMI'll sign up for the dungeon crawling. Level 40 Porcupine.

Grateful Level 33 Otter.

Let's do Sunday 12th at 13:00 UTC / 14:00 UK / 15:00 Germany (I think I've got that right!)

Quote from: Simon on July 05, 2026, 08:58:51 PMrelated bug that has hits me sometimes: Input gets eaten during continuous rewinding -- if we're really lucky, we'll find a single root cause behind both bugs.

Yeah, that could well be related. It does seem to be an input-themed bug.

Your help is welcome, no puzzle can beat us both!

This bug is present in NL 12.14, NL Community Edition, and SuperLemmix.

Steps to reproduce:

1) Assign some key to a small backwards framestep (e.g. -3)
2) In game, rapidly refire the key (in NLCE, the best way to test this is by using the mouse wheel framesteps, which can call the backstep faster than a repeating key)
3) The game will backstep by -3 repeatedly for some time, but then will skip by some unknown large amount of frames.

This bug has thwarted the Rewind button in SuperLemmix, and is now having the same effect on mouse wheel framesteps in NLCE.

Best guess is that the game has not fully rendered before the next call to skip back is received, but honestly it could be anything to do with the save state system, the rendering loop, the update loop, etc. I've tried a number of different solutions and none of them have worked.

I'm logging this now so that I can come back to it later.

Quote from: Simon on July 04, 2026, 11:21:10 PMIf you can restrict it to a small selection of smileys (thumbs up), that will be good.
...
it's better to have explicit thumbs-down than, e.g., abusing the sick smiley. I'm not even sure if I'd still remain neutral on those reaction buttons anymore in that case. I'd probably advise against then.

Agreed, if we can't restrict it to a select few lemojis, it's probably not worth it.

Also, the .nxmi is now called 'NLCEClearPhysicsColors.nxmi' and is stored in 'settings' rather than 'data'.

Implemented in NLCEPlayer commit 1a888bb.

Thanks for these, Eric!

Will this link change if you update the folder? If so, I'd strongly recommend using a permalink or short url which will stay the same forever, and that way you can add to the folder over time without having to keep reposting the link.

Quote from: Simon on July 04, 2026, 10:37:58 PMThe main hesitation is: I don't want animated thumbs-up under 3 messages out of 4.

We can make an un-animated 'thumbs up' for this purpose, I'd think? Can we choose which lemojis get used for post reactions? If so, definitely don't use any of the animated ones.

Quote from: Simon on July 04, 2026, 10:37:58 PMAmong the installed smileys, there are no good, small, clear smileys for disagreeing.

We can make a version of the 'thumbs up' lemoji with the hand facing downwards instead. And, don't animate it.

I've attached new versions of these lemojis (I couldn't see Lana's anywhere... have they been added yet?). If they look too similar, I'm happy to think of something else. It'd be a shame for 'we don't have the lemojis we need' to be a/the reason not to add this feature.

Still think this one would be a good idea to help boost Forum engagement. Happy to help with the grunt work if necessary.

Option removed.

Colours can now be cycled by typing 'CYCLE' into the relevant field in 'ce-clearphysicscolours.nxmi', or by choosing a fully transparent colour (i.e. $00------).

Implemented in NLCEPlayer commit 7b965a4.

Quote from: Simon on July 02, 2026, 07:58:23 PMIt doesn't work with animated background: I have "Show ..." disabled and nonetheless see the butterflies on Dexter's The Split. Expected instead: The butterflies have gone away.

This particular object is marked as 'NO_EFFECT'. Such objects are not marked as 'Decorations' (i.e. Paint, Animation, Background) - they are simply not designated at all.

Rather than including undesignated objects in the 'Decorations' crowd, we'll instead understand 'NO_EFFECT' as 'ANIMATION' (which is more or less the same thing anyway, and won't affect existing levels/physics).

Reason for this approach: Traps become undesignated when they are disabled, and it's unlikely we'll want them to disappear when 'Show Decorations' is toggled off. Let's keep undesignated state as its own thing, then.

Fixed in NLCEPlayer commit d51c2b7.

Fixed Preview/Postview clicks cancelling the replay. If 'Auto-skip Preview/Postview' is active, the click is added to the message queue and gets processed when the game starts, cancelling the replay iff Replay Insert mode is not active.

So, we simply eat the click.

Fixed in NLCEPlayer commit 8dbba16.

We also now skip levels with missing pieces during playback:

Fixed in NLCEPlayer commit 4b205ff.

We still need better user feedback when Playback Mode is first initialized. Printing a message on the Window Caption is OK, but not if the user has NLCE in fullscreen. Working on it.

Quote from: darkshoxx on July 02, 2026, 08:06:08 AMjust to be clear, it's a submission so there's no guarantee it'll be accepted, so don't put additional effort into it for the sole purpose of the submission.

Rest assured, the effort is to get the best working version of this feature. The submission has simply brought attention to it and generated useful feedback, so thank you for that!

Quote from: darkshoxx on July 02, 2026, 08:06:08 AMOkay ignore the by-level vs. by-replay issue.
...
Tested it multiple times again just now, if I don't click, everything works just fine in both modes, and clicking stops them in both modes.

Confirmed!

Well that's a relief (in that the system itself isn't completely broken!), however it does highlight a considerable flaw with the UI: user input should not cancel the replay whilst Preview/Postview screen is displayed.

I've refactored the Playback Mode playlist building system anyway, because it previously relied on a bunch of mutable lists and, on looking again at the code, was way messier than it needs to be. The refactor makes every playlist item its own object, so the matchup and playlist-building process is much snappier and less prone to bugs; this is a win, even if it wasn't actually needed for this particular bug report!

Refactor in NLCEPlayer commit 1f50f71.

So, the third issue is actually:

User input during Preview/Postview screen cancels the replay!

This is unusual, because in normal circumstances clicking the screen would advance to game/next preview. We need to be extra careful if Playback Mode is active, then. Clicking should do absolutely nothing!

I'll fix this later tonight.

So, we've identified 3 separate issues here.

Issue 1: Hotkey display

We do in fact have a default hotkey [Y], but all hotkeys are overwritten by the user config. So, if a user copies over a hotkey file without the 'Cancel Playback Mode' key specified, it will be blank.

I think the best solution here is to print the hotkey onto a button rather than a simple text label. If the hotkey is blank, the button displays '...' (otherwise, it displays whichever hotkey is set). This should prompt the user to click the button, which opens the hotkey config dialog:



We can probably do even better than this, but this seems a decent enough fix for now.

Implemented in NLCEPlayer commit 90648d9.

Issue 2: Use directory picker to select folder

This is now fixed. We open a directory picker rather than asking the user to select a replay within the directory (which is both confusing and misleading - we're loading all replays in the directory, not just one).

Implemented in NLCEPlayer commit 4c05ce9.
Also implemented for Replay Manager in NLCEPlayer commit e153480.


Issue 3: 'By Level' doesn't playback replays correctly, whilst 'By Replay' does

This one will require further investigation.

I tested the replays supplied by darkshoxx and they played back as expected for both 'By Level' and 'By Replay', although I did observe the following issues:

• It takes a while for playback to begin when running the replays 'By Level'. I'll see if there's a way to speed this up
• We should probably show something like 'Beginning Playback...' somewhere in the UI, otherwise it looks like nothing happens. Long waits will exacerbate this
• One of the Steel Works replays appears to be broken (i.e. it doesn't solve the level). Since physics are identical between NL 12.14 and NLCE, this shouldn't be happening. One possibility is that I might be using an edited version of Steel Works to play back the replay.

After testing some of my own Lemmings Redux replays, I found that 'By Level' does indeed play replays correctly; the replays were matched to the levels correctly (even when a level appears multiple times), but the ordering was incorrect - for example, The Crankshaft was played before Just Dig!. Not sure as to the reason for this, but clearly the playlist system needs another look.

So yeah, this third issue is proving to be one of those elusive things that's a problem for one user but not another. Ideally, I'd have feedback from multiple users regarding Playback Mode, but so far I only have my own tests (I ran several tests on different packs when developing Playback Mode and fixed any issues detected) and darkshoxx's bug report to go on.

I'll release 1.1.3 in the next few weeks with the first 2 issues fixed, if not the third. What's the deadline for the showcase?

Quote from: darkshoxx on July 01, 2026, 08:18:54 AMHere's the playbacks I used. Maybe it's because two are for the same level?

Thanks for these. 2 for the same level shouldn't matter. The red flag is more that it doesn't work when 'By Level' is selected, but does work when 'By Replay' is selected. It could be that 'By Level' is broken, then (although it worked fine for me during testing).

I watched the stream posted by Simon and you're absolutely right: the 'R' is purple when Playback Mode is active and there are no more actions in the replay stream. It's to let the player know that Playback Mode is still active even if they cancel the replay mid-playback; Playback Mode itself persists until it is cancelled.

Quote from: darkshoxx on July 01, 2026, 08:18:54 AMCan you post a link to the github, then I can raise it as an issue there.

On second (well, third!) thoughts, you don't need to bother with this. I prefer to handle issues via the Forums anyway.

I'll investigate this tonight and tomorrow and hopefully come up with an answer, if not a fix.

It's definitely not the easiest audio format to work with, but it has that old school charm and is bursting with possibility.

Good luck, give it a try!