At least to everyone in our generation 2020 will likely go down as the worst year in our personal history. But for a moment, instead of focusing on all the awful things that happened in this year; let's focus on the good stuff. Share anything positive that happened in 2020.

-Back in March, before Covid hit my area; I performed live, on stage, in front of an audience for the first time ever and I did great! I mean, I wasn't Grammy award winning or anything, far from it obviously, but for what I was expecting; I did amazing. I far surpassed my own expectations. Part of me fully expected to piss my pants on stage and run off crying like a pathetic baby. Not only did it go well; with few mistakes, but I actually enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun and wanted to do it again. One of my biggest let downs of 2020 and the virus was not being able to perform again soon!

-In October I finally got the courage to contact a real estate agent and start looking to move to a new house. I haven't found anything yet, but it's a major step.

-All thhe downtime during quarantine allowed me to focus on some things I had been neglecting for some time, like teaching myself some useful skills.

-Met some new fun people in the gaming community And had lots of hilarity.

-roundthewheel came back to youtube!

These are mostly issues which I've experienced for a long time now; But some of which were particularly problematic on Sunday;

--It would be very nice if stats like; number of lixes, spawn interval, skills were displayed when a level is selected.

--display a message "xxxx is selecting a level". Even if xxx closes the window and doesn't pick anything this lets everyone in the room know what's happening so you don't have someone pick a level and another person unknowingly swap out their pick.

--time outs; This is a major features I've noticed almost all multiplayer games of any kind have. Someone (usually the host, not sure if that's applicable here) "starts" the game and then the game will begin as decided in 10 seconds or something.
One way of dealing with this issue, I think I've proposed before;

Once someone presses "ready to play" a countdown starts. Then, whoever has not pressed ready to play by the time the countdown begins is either entered or ejected or made spectator. I don't know which I'd prefer but I'd lean toward enter.

--changing color disables all ready's. ;;; while I can see why this happens; I can see the abuse that could happen without it; someone changes teams last minute to screw with another player then they can't do anything about it cause the game begins... It causes major issues sometimes with people constantly changing colors and the game can't begin. Admittedly part of the problem here is when some people are voice chatting and others aren't. Still feels like there might be another way to handle this.

--Include two more colors/players. The most people I've ever seen play is I *think* 9? 10 sounds like a good limit. Although I can see arguments for *decreasing* # of players (perhaps see below?). A party could always make another room to split it up...

--Limit overall map size a bit? With very large maps there's almost always lots of lag and crashing. These are unplayable. Maybe just limit the overall size and lix count for multiplayer levels.

How many people here having/play Super Smash bros. on the Nintendo switch? (I'm assuming there is only one smash game or should I say; the most recent smash game that everyone is talking about. I'm considering getting it myself but it wouldn't be worth the money if I don't really have anyone to play with.

I don't know a whole lot about this game; only that it's a multiplayer game something like the "Mafia" forum game we played years ago. It's only 5 dollars on steam.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDRJl-H9gzc

Post here if you'd be interested in doing this sometime, probably on the weekend like we usually do Lix or UCH, before or after 18:00 UTC.

how about a game on either Saturday or Sunday of that week? usual time?

chalkboard sprites are still missing (I'm told its the shimmier that's missing); it defaults to normal lemmings when playing a Chalkboard themed level.

If someone needs to manually create a shimmier sprite for this set I can do that.

It seems like every time we play lix (multiplayer) I at least, but others sort of alluded to this as well, struggle to find levels we're looking for. And almost every session we end up playing through at least a few levels that are out date and unbalanced, from back in the day when people didn't know better. Playing through some of these is always good for a laugh but the main issue is there are so many levels that it seems difficult to find new stuff or 'good stuff'. Perhaps a re-organizing them or getting rid of some is in order?

So I tried making this point before with only words and it didn't work so this time I'm going to do it with pictures.

IMO; some of the default colors for the one way arrows are fine; blue for marble works great. It's clear and contrasts well with the terrain colors. But some are awful; take a look at my example pics and you tell me which one looks better. (or more importantly; which one is easier to see)

First is the default for fire:


this is another (red arrows from a L2 set, Egyptian I think)



Here is the default for rock:


now here's a a brown colored set (from one of Gronkling's sets)


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I know it's now possible to add any arrows you want thanks to the new formats and I appreciate that but it's still an issue because sometimes the only thing I can find to work really well, to stand out is an odd graphic set that not everyone may have or it might be a graphic set that doesn't get updated because the person might not be around anymore. And I don't really like the idea of having a level that's only a rock level for example except for this one part of the level, the arrows being from some other random tileset and having someone unable to play the level because they didn't download that style for that tiny purpose. The other method I had of solving this problem was changing the theme of the level to another set but this has the downside of changing other things like the color of builder bricks which does not necessarily look good. Not to mention that it's just FAR EASIER if the damn default color looked good in the first place.

The color ideas I have come from Lemmini; I don't know who or why they changed the colors when making Lemmini but they made excellent choices as all of the arrows stand out really well and look really good imo. The key is to pick colors that contrast really well and can't blend in easily with the terrain; so essentially try to pick a color that doesn't exist anywhere else within the set already, or not very much. Look at the crystal set for example; the red arrows stand out (and people have commented on how good they look in the past) exactly for this reason.

Look at this example for the bubble set:
https://youtu.be/ylzQwaNRkgk?t=491
IMO the red looks FAR better than the pale default color from original Lemmings.

So here are my proposals:

marble: no change needed
pillar: change to blue the pale doesn't stand out so well especially on the lighter yellow blocks
fire: change to red?*
dirt: no change needed
crystal: no change needed
brick: change to yellow the pale color doesn't stand out at all on the pale/grey blocks and chains.
bubble: change to red the pale doesn't stand out so well on some of the lighter pieces
snow: no change needed
rock: change to brown or yellow


some of the L2 sets maybe could use a change as well but I haven't really looked into that too well yet. Many of them like Egyptian are okay imo.

*this one may be rather tricky actually because the fire set contains both a lot of blue and red but thinking about it I'm not sure what other colors would look alright in it. But imo; it's a pretty clear winner for red in that image above.

Now if everyone still thinks no change is needed or doesn't approve of any of these choices; can we get some kind of better way to choose our own color; without changing other things in the level??