Quote from: Proxima on June 22, 2026, 01:25:22 AM* Buttons that unlock an exit. (If you want the buttons to be optional, for a talisman rather than for passing the level, you can have an open exit in the main part of the level, and a closed-off part with a locked exit, then have a talisman for saving all the lemmings in the closed-off part.)

Quote from: UGO on June 22, 2026, 03:15:21 PMthese solutions are not satisfactory for my level.

I'll wager that it's reasonable to use buttons. Post your level and we'll look at it together how to do it with buttons!

When you use buttons, you have immediate support. And buttons will be easy to understand for your players. Many players will even expect your design problem to be solved with buttons, and would find skill-spamming strange.

-- Simon

Replays from the June 10 and June 21 livestreams.

Solved Levels

Blues Walk With Me
Cursed Treasure
Cursed Treasure
Down The Upside
Epilogue
It's Crazy Sports Day
kaywhyn's Organic National Park
Lawful Neutral
No Looking Back
Oh Yes! A Hardcore Molten Problem
Palace of Ice
Quick Lab Rush
Rusty Ruin Zone
So Many Spikes

kaywhy's Oh Yes! A Hardcore Molten Problem: We conjecture that our solution is a backroute.

-- Simon

Still no hunch about keeping or cutting the nuke. From one viewpoint, it's part of the future of every lix lemming. From another viewpoint: NL has nuke levels. On some nuke levels, you'll nuke first, then insert skills around the nuke. Hard to say how many nuke levels need the nuke preserved. I'll let you know when I have further insight.

In my stream today, again I wanted to be in insert mode by default. I imagine the following development progress.

• I implement always-insert in Lix.
• I playtest that on livestream with Nepsterlix, Clamlix, or Rubix's pack.
• I'll summarize results. Maybe I'll have confused myself with always-insert.
• I'll make a new topic about NL-CE.

Of course, other forumers are free to make a case for always-insert in CE before I finish my investigation in Lix. If you think that I'm on the right track, spearhead the discussion, I'll be happy. And if you think that I'm insane, make your case against it.

-- Simon

Stream is over! Recording will remain for 14 days at: https://www.twitch.tv/simonnaar

We played 2 levels by Dexter, the remaining 2 by Kaywhyn, Ice Palace by Giga, and So Many Spikes by Guigui. We backrouted Kaywhyn's Oh Yes Molten Problem.

Left unsolved: 3 by Dexter, 1 by Kaywhyn (Oh No Molten Problem).

-- Simon

I've tested this today, immediately after CE 1.1.2's release. Every other bug can wait until tomorrow's livestream.

Yes, everything works. The player must, in the user options, uncheck the color cycling. Gadgets will now be dark green. And if the player doesn't like the dark green etc., he can edit data/ce-clearphysicscolours.nxmi for gadget and lemming colors.

I got exactly what I had emphasized, and it's released well in time for the stream tomorrow. In hindsight, this bug bothered me during play the most. The (overall more important) data loss on settings import is also fixed, so WillLem didn't even have to deviate from the most sensible order.

There are smaller things left to discuss for later. E.g., should ce-clearphysicscolours.nxmi sit in user/ (we expect the user to edit it) instead of in data/ (here it gets overwritten by next release), or should color cycling be default. But none of that is urgent. It's better for me to have the immediate dark green available.

WillLem, this was an excellent way to handle your user feedback. It works, I see no bugs, but I mean this especially from the non-technical angle. You guessed that this bothered me and Proxima the most, and we had no workaround.

-- Simon

Quote from: WillLem on June 18, 2026, 11:00:59 PMDarkened the green to 004400 as suggested.
The lems are also lighter (77-77-FF)
Better?

Yes, looks good! Happy to playtest it. Thanks!

Light lemmings make more sense to me than dark lemmings. But I haven't tried to guess Proxima's reasons for dark lemmings. I'll let you know if I find counterarguments to light lemmings in the future.

Dark-green gadgets against the black air are still easily visible to me at your (0, 0x44, 0). I have no answer for buried gadgets.

-- Simon

Quote from: WillLem on June 17, 2026, 01:25:54 AMThe blue you suggested was a tad too close to the purple

My medium blue was also too close to the grey of the earth (diggable terrain), hmm.

Quote from: WillLem on June 17, 2026, 01:25:54 AMHow's this?

You chose (0x44, 0x44, 0xFF) for the nonpermanent blue.

Now the medium green from the hatch will clash with your nonpermanent blue. Lemmings overlapping gadgets will be hard on the eyes.

An immediate fix is to darken the gadget green from (0, 0x80, 0) to (0, 0x40, 0). Even 0x50 would be too light. At first glance, I don't mind the pretty dark gadgets at 0x40. I can playtest and report.

A more elaborate fix is to move the blues/cyans/purples/... around to allow 0x50 or 0x60 on the gadgets, but I don't have time today to investigate. It's not obvious what's best.

The main guideline is: The most common colors will be background black, earth grey, steel grey, nonpermanent blue, gadget green, and trigger area pink. Those should be clearly different from each other. It's more important to {distinguish lemmings from gadget silhouettes} than it is to {distinguish gadget silhouettes from the black background}. Reason: The silhouette becomes less important after you know that it's some exit, or some trap, ... The trigger area is more important than the silhouette.

-- Simon

Quote from: WillLem on June 17, 2026, 01:43:46 AMreason for the extreme ends of the ruler being 2px tall rather than 1px?

Design history was: I wanted to avoid the inclusive/exclusive problem at all costs. You should never worry whether you must insert the bottom by 1 pixel into the ground or stand it onto the ground. The obvious way to kill all risk was to make the bottom two rows identical.

Quote from: WillLem on June 17, 2026, 01:43:46 AMI've attached a version which Proxima and I slightly prefer.

I think it solves the inclusive/exclusive problem, too, yes. This still has the white triangle and the vertical black line, both 3 pixels tall. That feels enough to show that you should stand this onto the ground (instead of pushing it by 1 pixel into the ground).

Both rulers have a 1-pixel-wide middle part, which I like.

Use yours! I'll let you know if I eventually miss the wider end; I don't expect to.

-- Simon

Quote from: WillLem on June 16, 2026, 09:30:54 PMThey may have already made a levels.nxmi, but still require access to all levels for editing.

Ah, if the levels.nxmi system will hide unlisted levels instead of implicitly sorting them at the end, you have a counterargument.

Quote from: WillLem on June 16, 2026, 09:30:54 PMlevels.nxmi, I'm not ruling out by any means. I just think that we should try and live with directory-only ordering and see if it suffices.

Yes, ship it with the lexicographical order. Get feedback from heart66 and the established authors. Can always change it later. And a nice idea by heart66 in the first place!

-- Simon

Quote from: WillLem on June 16, 2026, 09:00:00 PMWhat about lemmings with permanent abilities? Keep it the same as it is now?

Yes, I think you can keep permanent-ability lemmings as they are, light cyan (0, 0xFF, 0xFF). The idea behind the medium blue for plain lemmings was: Medium blue is noticeabley darker than light cyan, but both colors still contrast well with anything really dark for the gadget silhouettes.

If you happen to release CE with static physics colors by Sunday morning, I'll playtest it on the planned livestream (Sunday, June 21, 13:00 UTC) and I'll prompt the chatters for opinions. But you do you. If you ship other bugfixes, I'll playtest those fixes instead. And I'll have a few more topics to post anyway, based on handwritten notes. These topics will trickle in at a slow rate. When I write a topic, I want to present an argument and be able to react to your questions.

Quote from: WillLem on June 16, 2026, 09:00:00 PM3 reasons:

Thanks for the reasons, at least I don't have to write long essays about human perception then. At most, I might eventually argue to make the static setting the default. But that's for after the user testing.

-- Simon

Quote from: Simon on March 09, 2026, 08:08:15 PMWhen you hover over a lix with 7 future assignments, say "Click to replace 7 future assignments."

WillLem implemented this for NeoLemmix Community Edition, and I should follow in Lix.

It's possible to user-test always-insert even in existing Lix 0.10.32 and 0.10.33; you must select this style in the Game Controls tab of the options menu. Later in summer, after Level of the Year 2025, I should solve some levels on stream with always-insert.

-- Simon

This is still annoying. We are in Clear physics Mode often enough, and we zoom into the levels because we are interested in finnicky details. The glaring cycling colors cover huge parts of the screen. So hard on the eyes. All while it's hard to see lemmings.

For the record, Proxima agrees that this is annoying and distracting.

I still recommend dark green (0, 0x80, 0) for the shapes of the gadgets and a medium blue (0x80, 0x80, 0xFF) for lemmings without permanent abilities.

I don't know what you like about the color cycling. If it weren't for you, I'd recommend to rip the entire color-cycling code from the codebase. Good riddance. Are you sure that you like it and why you like it? E.g., I understand {your preference for the never-deleting insert mode} more than I can get behind {your like of this color-cycling in light of all these visibility problems}.

-- Simon

Guigui, thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, execution with our suboptimal way was still bearable enough that we nailed it after a few tries. I assume that, had we not solved it like that, we would have tried things similar to your spoiler.

---

The levels yet unsolved are 1 by Giga (Palace of Ice), 3 by kaywhyn, and 6 by Dexter. Guigui backroute-fixed his So Many Spikes, we'll see if we have time to return to that.

The next stream was Sunday, June 21.

-- Simon

Your examples have fixed saturation boundaries of 999 or 1, and that is common indeed. For the dynamic boundaries, I haven't found other examples within the year.

I'll see if I ever the dynamic boundary for something. It fails to conserve physical energy, which grows quadratically, i.e., speed of 2 + speed of 2 = speed of sqrt(8) = speed of 2.82842... And it doesn't compensate with over-the-top cartoon physics, unlike Lix's current plain addition. But saturated addition is probably reasonable nonetheless. You shouldn't stack 3 steam blowers, it's hard to see the stacking anyway.

---

Link dump: daniel.games, tips for board game designers by designer Daniel Piechnick. Many things apply to video game design equally well. Such as these chapters:

Chapter 3 on the Depth-Complexity ratio:

QuoteThink of complexity as a kind of money you can spend. When you spend it, you want to add as much good stuff to your game as possible. Also, you want to "sell" (remove) parts of your game that are complex, but don't add much to the game. That complexity can then be re-spent elsewhere, to add something that adds great gameplay.

Yes! Cut cut cut, and then you can fill the void with something better and smaller.

The wording with "sell" is wonderful.

Chapter 82 on Terminology:

QuoteIf anyone is failing to understand something [in your game], it's your problem.

Happy Simon indeed. Yes, you must make your users guess right. When users have a problem with X and come to you, it's not enough to tell them how X works by describing it in the report/chat/forum. You must redesign X, or replace it.

As I still joke: "Design" comes from "de" and "sign", i.e., it's the removal of signs. When you don't have to explain something, it's well de-signed.

Mobius asked in Twitch chat: What does the red cursor mean in NeoLemmix CE? I told him: Please guess, this is user testing for WillLem. Mobius guessed: I don't know at all, maybe it's that we are in replay mode. I said: Yes, you are correct, but we should tell WillLem that you felt unsure.

QuoteDo not cater to rules pedants, by adding extra text to your cards to make them exactly accurate. Cater to the 99% of reasonable people.

On this, I disagree. Okay, you can't make everything 100 % rock-solid, but you want to make stuff more solid than he makes it sound. He also overestimates (he says 99 %) how many players will enjoy ambiguity.

It's especially important with the kind of cards of his paragraph's concern: Cards that you hold in your hand, hidden from other players, until you decide to use them. You must understand what your cards do, and you can't ask the other players because the information (that you hold this card) is supposed to remain hidden.

Many board games suffer from this. The only reasonable antidote that I found: Memorize the entire deck of bullshit cards by heart. Then harvest and memorize all the information on the internet about relevant corner case rulings and interaction technicalities. Extra fun is due when your game got reprinted 3 times, each with subtle wording changes because the publisher didn't notice the ambiguity and confused it more. Then have the right judgment about when and how much to explain this to other players (who will certainly not have done this) before/during play, so that it doesn't feel ad-hoc.

-- Simon

Quote from: WillLem on June 15, 2026, 03:24:30 AM'Previous' and 'Next' rather than << arrows >>

Neither says of what it will be the previous/next. You can print the filename next to these buttons. Or you can caption the buttons with "Level <<" or "Previous Level" or similar.

Quote from: WillLem on June 15, 2026, 03:24:30 AMactually mean 'Previous' and 'Next' as per their intended positions in the level pack, the level files should be named in such a way that their order is correct within the folder itself (which is good practice anyway IMHO).

With this implementation, there are now three meanings of "next level" in the NL ecosystem:

• Next filename by lexicographical order, presumably wrapping back to first in same directory
• Next level by level-ordering file, wrapping back to first in same directory
• Next level by level-ordering file, proceeding to first level in the next directory

The discrepancy between #2 and #3 appears in the NL game application: Left/right arrow keys on preview screen do #2, and the next-level button on the after-play results screen does #3. It's not in the editor. I should file that as a separate issue. This discrepancy has annoyed me a few times and I had to open the level selector that shows the entire level tree.

The concern for the editor: Do you really want a third way #1? Which of #2 and #3 makes more sense?

-- Simon