So, it's time we had another of these

To give the contests a bit of variety, I've made a Lix level this time; it's a bit smaller, and the skillset is a more restrictive 5 of everything.

The rules are pretty much the same as last time, except that because this is Lix, there's no "time taken" tiebreaker.

In short: try to save as many lix as you can (but at least 12), with a secondary goal of maximising the skills left over. Send replays to me by 12 noon GMT, 19 January. The winner has the right (but no obligation) to create the level for round #3.

Good luck!

* * *

Entries received so far:

geoo
Simon / Forestidia
Nessy
Minim
Nepster
SQron

We've had so many contests now, it's about time someone compiled a list of all the rules that have been thought up. This may be inspiration for anyone thinking of rules for future contests. Of course, it's okay to repeat a rule from an old contest -- that will give people who missed out on the old contest another chance to come up with something.

There were three unofficial contests, before the numbered official contests started. Lemmix was used for these, so the first contest refers to the original 8 skills.

1 - Make a level with one of each skill
2 - Make a level in the crystal style with no builders
3 - Make a level with 5 or fewer lemmings

The first eight official contests only had a single rule each:

1 - Make a level using an unofficial tileset
2 - Make a Fun/Tame level
3 - Tag Team (one person designs the terrain, the other places objects and assigns stats)
4 - Make a level with exactly 5 total skills
5 - Make a level with a save requirement at most 10%
6 - Make a level with no constructive skills
7 - Make a level with at least 4 exits
8 - Make a level with a L2 or L3 style

Contest #9 was the abortive "here are three rules, try to loophole one of them", which attracted no entries, but led to the three-rule format followed by all subsequent contests. (Note that this contest was ignored in the numbering, so the next contest is also numberered 9.) An asterisk before a rule indicates a repeat of a rule from an earlier contest.

9R1 - Make a level with only new skills
9R2 - Make a level with only one lemming
9R3 - Make a level with exactly two types of skill
10R1 - Make a level with no permanent skills
*10R2 - Make a Fun/Tame level
10R3 - Make a level with at least two new object types
11R1 - Make a level with save 2/2, at most 1 of each permanent skill
11R2 - Make a level with 1 of each provided skill
*11R3 - Make a level with no constructive skills
12R1 - Make a level with a time limit of 1min or less
12R2 - Make a level with no destructive skills
12R3 - Make a VGASPEC level
13R1 - Make a level with tileset mixing
13R2 - Make a level with at least two intended solutions
*13R3 - Make a level without using any official tilesets
14R1 - Make a level with 3 hatches and 3 lemmings
14R2 - Make a level with no steel and 2 hatches
14R3 - Make a level with exactly 2 of any 8 skills
15R1 - Make two levels with the same terrain, but one is flipped
15R2 - Make a minimal-size level with at most 10 lemmings
*15R3 - Make a level with only new skills
16R1 - Make a level with height at least 3 times its width
16R2 - Make a level with at most 2 minutes and hatch-exit distance at least 2 screens
16R3 - Make a level with at least 3 hatches, save requirement (h-1)/h * 100%

The current situation, as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong): the file "music/menulix" gets played for both menu and editor music, and although you can get different music by saving a different track with this filename, there's no way to have different music in the menu and editor. This is really annoying, because designing a level can take a long time and needs more variety of music; also the default track isn't well-suited to it

Suggestions:

- In Options, have separate on/off buttons for game (including menu) music and editor music
- Have a subfolder "music/editor" and have editor music randomly select from all tracks in this subfolder

Even more seriously, if the replay saves more than my own record, NL overwrites my record with the number achieved in the replay.

...making it awkward when you're trying to place pieces that go exactly up to the bottom or right edge.

To reproduce:

* Start a new level in the Rock tileset. Place some terrain.
* Attempt to place one-way walls from the Snow tileset. Instead of Snow's red one-way walls, the editor will place Rock's pink ones.
* Change the Theme of the level to Snow. There is no change immediately, but if you click "Get Terrain" and then "Get Objects", the already placed arrows will still be pink, but now the object selection scroll will have red ones.
* Place a new (red) one-way wall object. The already placed pink arrows now change to red as well. Alternatively, playtest the level, which will also suddenly change them to red.

I'm not sure what the intended behaviour is here, but certainly the editor is not being very honest about what options are available to the designer.

I would certainly like, in some cases, to be able to place one-way walls from a tileset that doesn't match the main "theme". For instance, Rock's pink arrows look fine on the green crystals, but are horrible on the rocky terrain -- and Snow's red arrows would be perfect.

Firstly, if the grid is on, then clicking on a piece to select it makes it jump to the grid. This is bad because the user may want to select the piece to make copies of it without changing its current position; and if they do want to adjust it to the grid they have the option of dragging it a short way and then back to its original position.

Secondly, again only if the grid is on, clicking on a piece with a negative X- or Y-coordinate, even if it is aligned with the grid, makes it jump by one grid-tile. This part is definitely a bug