So, as Arty told me, his Rain background object has become part of namida's Sky tileset in New Formats, and his blue fire traps, as we know, are part of the original Fire tileset now.

What I can't seem to find is the Snow object (white circles rather than blue diagonal lines moving downward). Has this been converted to New Formats yet?

Also, when I try to use the Rain object in a new level, the rain is visible during level editing, but not when actually playtesting the level inside the editor (which kinda ruins the point because it's merely an aesthetic feature).

My converted levels from Old Formats using these objects do work with the proper objects in the New Formats player, though.

Then again, I edited the graphic set in Old Formats, where it was all part of a graphic set called "general", by adding some of my own or recoloured pieces (for example, I made a purple version of Arty's Rain for the level "Purple Rain", go figure ). Then I converted my version of the general set. Thus, currently, all my converted New-Formats levels using Rain or Snow refer to the conversion of my edited general tileset, rather than to namida_sky.

Thus, I don't know whether it's something about the Rain object placed in namida_sky that makes it invisible while playing (i.e. something that was converted correctly in my edited Rain object), or whether it's about the Editor-vs-Player difference again.

Given that moving background objects, like the bees from the Honeycomb tileset, are supported by the New-Formats NeoLemmix player, but not the editor, I presume the same is true for the Rain object? I didn't expect that to happen, since the placement of the Rain object in its entirety doesn't actually change, so I wouldn't have considered it a moving background object, but of course, it's a background object that does include motion of some sort.

So my questions are:

1) How can I get the Rain object from namida_sky to work in the New-Formats editor?
2) Do we have a converted version of the Snow object somewhere? (It's neither in Christmas, nor Ohno-Snow, nor raymanni_snow.)

If we don't have a conversion of the Snow object yet, I could include it in my custom edit of the former general tileset (credit to Arty for creating it, of course! ), because I need to share that anyway for the New-Formats version of Lemmings World Tour - and if it's only for the terrain pieces (pre-placed builder staircases) and recoloured background objects (I recoloured the background of the Ancient tileset to look like lava for one level, plus the Rain object to purple, as explained above.)

Meanwhile, everything from the former general tileset that already is present in New Formats, like the blue fire traps and the Rain, I'd simply text-replace then in my levels to point them to the original objects in orig_fire and namida_sky.

But before I do that, I want to be sure the Rain object in namida_sky is actually working.

Don't know where to post bugs for graphic sets (i.e. rather than NeoLemmix player or editor itself ), but I just noticed the trigger area for the exit from (mobius's?) TanCastle graphic set is way off to the right in New Formats.

I don't know who's currently responsible for that graphic set, but they might wanna fix that .

As some of you might know, I used the flag poles from the L2 Circus tileset a lot in my pack Lemmings World Tour. Whenever these poles were in front of terrain in Old Formats, I obviously set them to "no overwrite".

In New Formats, this doesn't suffice anymore: Even though the poles are already set to "no overwrite" properly after conversion, the poles disappear behind the terrain.

It is possible to make them visible, but only by clicking "only on terrain" - which is the opposite extreme.

Meaning:
If a flag pole is entirely on terrain, it can be made visible.
If a flag pole is entirely not on terrain, it is visible by default.

However, if a flag pole is partly on terrain, partly not, you have to click on the individual pieces, setting some of them to "only on terrain", others not.

This is a workaround, but I don't think that's the way "no overwrite" and "only on terrain" are supposed to operate, is it?

Because as of now, ticking or unticking "no overwrite" doesn't change anything, as far as I can tell.

Steps to reproduce:

1) Open a level in Old Formats level editor to check whether it has a background (e.g. one in a standard Lemmings graphic set like Marble, Fire etc., with mobius's added backgrounds)
2) Check the translation table for that style in New Formats data --> translation to see whether it references background objects
3) Open the same level in New Formats level editor; you'll find that the background is the standard black, even if the appropriate background is mentioned in the translation table

This does not affect the monocoloured backgrounds from e.g. Lemmings 2, because they don't actually refer to image files, but are drawn "on the fly".

Both this and the fact that this error has to do with the New-Formats NeoLemmix player, rather than the editor, were told to me by namida.

Just like with the Shimmier back in the day, I just wanted to quickly open up a thread long ahead of the development of the Jumper to discuss its behaviour as it is planned to work.

1) Will it be possible to assign a Jumper to a Blocker to free it?
In Lemmings 2, to my knowledge this never comes up, because the Blocker only exists in the Classic tribe, which doesn't feature the Jumper, and vice versa for all the other tribes, which provide you with Attractors instead. And as we all know, having an Attractor jump is probably the most common way to free the crowd at the end of a Lemmings-2 level. Since my guess is that nobody sees a reason why we should bother having Attractors in NeoLemmix, because they'd simply be redundant, the Blocker is going to remain the Attractor's surrogate. Therefore, if Attractors can be freed with Jumpers, the same should be true for Blockers.

Then again, Shimmiers also jump, both in NeoLemmix and Lemmings 2, and Shimmiers (I think that's been set in stone by now) can't free Blockers. So then it would also be plausible to assume for a new player that Jumpers can't accomplish this, either...

2) Will it be possible to cancel another skill (constructive / destructive) by assigning a Jumper to it?
In Lemmings 2, this is also possible: Cancelling Builders / Platformers with Jumpers is commonplace. In the case of destructive skills, jumping will almost inevitably lead to the Lemming bumping its head (unless you have e.g. a miner jump out at the end of its tunnel to prevent it from going further down). So that's where the old question of "tumbler-physics-or-not" comes into play. But even without tumbler physics, the Jumper should still be able to cancel other skills.

With these two factors, we can already see that the Jumper is going to become, in many regards, almost as powerful as the Walker. I guess that's the reaason why, despite all the skills it featured, Lemmings 2 didn't have a Walker yet - it simply wasn't needed, because the Jumper already performed those functions, and any Lemming turns back into a Walker immediately after that little jump.

3) If a Lemming jumps into a teleporter and reaches the trigger before the jump is completed, is the motion continued after he leaves the receiver?
All other skills moving into teleporters behave this way, even Swimmers used to do so for a while, which caused them to swim on terrain if the receiver wasn't placed in water. Destructive skills still continue once they come out of a receiver.

4a) A Disarmer that jumps into the trigger area of a triggered trap can't disarm if there's no terrain under his feet to stand on while performing the animation, so he should be killed by the trap. Is that correct?
This is an interaction that has never come up so far, obviously, because neither Lemmings 2 nor Lix have Disarmers.

4b) Will it be possible to assign a Jumper to a Lemming who is currently performing the disarming animation?
Because, as can be seen in true-physics mode, the trap trigger actually disappears right away as soon as the Disarmer walks onto it. So one could save time by literally "skipping" the animation with a Jumper, which should not be allowed, I think.

5) If a Climber jumps towards a wall, will he bump against it, turn around and fall down, or will he hold on to it?
Just like the Blocker-Jumper interaction, this interaction is typically avoided in Lemmings 2 by providing the player with a Rock Climber instead of a regular Climber. With the Shimmier, we've decided to make the Climber-Shimmier transition at the ceiling possible, though, so it would be nice to have the Jumper-Climber transition work as well. It would allow pioneer lemmings much more flexibility to take paths that haven't been sealed with constructive skills yet - i.e. paths that the crowd can't just take as well. Pioneer-style levels become much more interesting when the pioneer can / needs to go a completely different route than the one the crowd has to take at the end.

6) Will it be possible to bomb or stone a Lemming in the middle of a jump?
If so, I'd expect the Lemming to explode immediately, without performing the "oh-no" animation (I mention this because in the first iteration, Shimmiers used to fall from the ceiling in order to oh-no, rather than exploding straight away under the ceiling).

7) If you clone a Lemming in the middle of the jump, the clone is only going to carry out the rest of the jumping animation, I guess?
Just like a cloned builder builds a shorter staircase.
This would make it possible to jump from a wall which has an abyss on the side behind the Jumper, and terrain ahead of the Jumper leading up against that wall.
Now, instead of jumping into said abyss, if you assign the Cloner later during the jump, the clone would rest-jump in a way so that he would still land on the ground before reaching said wall, turning around on it, not on top of the wall, which would lead him into the abyss.

Hi, just a quick question: Whoever created the official New Formats conversions of the graphic sets grnk_6_electric and grnk_8_digital also must have created the translation tables that point to the two respective "split-up" styles gronkling_cyber, gronkling_cybertrack, and gronkling_technobase.

So it would be helpful if that user shared those translation tables. I did one for Ancient myself, and I believe I have already uploaded it here (splitting it up and translating the levels into the two tilesets gronkling_angelisland and gronkling_chaosangel).

Having to go through each individual piece and check where exactly the split from one tileset to the next is supposed to take place is not only tedious, though, it's also superfluous if other people have to do the same, as well, anyway.

I re-downloaded all the styles again, however, translation tables are part of the data folder. Since there are currently different versions of NeoLemmix (one with the Shimmier and one with moving animations for triggered objects), I don't know which is the most current version that won't remove the Shimmier again.

The latest experimental version of the player containing the Shimmier features a minor annoyance which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the introduction of the new skill at all:

The "Let's go!" sound at the beginning of a level is only presented on the left ear exclusively, no matter how far to the right the hatch is placed. Since the location of the sound usually tries to emulate the position of the hatch relative to the camera, meaning the sound will wander from left to right if you move the camera around before releasing the pause button, I guess there's something off with that location-determining routine? Because the sound file itself did not change, so there's nothing wrong with the inherent panorama information of the WAV file.

It's especially striking because the hatch opening sound which comes immediately afterwards is presented on both ears again, dead centre .

Well, what this seemingly useless hobby of creating fictional problems for fictional little green-haired people can be useful for sometimes : I'm currently trying to backroute my own stuff.
Not so much my Lemmings levels, though (Arty is taking care of that! ), but my writing.

And indeed I think the concept of the backroute might be a good idea for any hobby writer or similar in order to clear up inconsistencies in their stories:

As someone who is guilty of somewhat enjoying criticising other people's works for plotholes and similar, of course I try to be equally strict with myself - even though it's just a hobby of mine . And one thing I've noticed is that a lot of logical missteps in stories arise from overpowered skills or items - kinda like in Lemmings .

One famous example would be the time reversal tool in Harry Potter (don't know what exactly it's called in the English original); as soon as an author adds something as powerful as time travel / teleportation / telepathy / telekinesis (funny how these all start with t ), that always begs the question: "Well, why didn't the characters use this in situation A / B / C?"

Likewise, in Lemmings, once a skill is on the panel, you must always consider the option of the player employing that skill in a totally different place than you expected them to - and that is just as valid, until you come up with a way to prevent it without simultaneously preventing it from being used in the intended location as well.


Human beings, both while playing Lemmings as well as in real life, like to take the path of least resistance. Which means, if there is an easier solution to something and it's apparent to them, they will usually use it. In essence, you could consider backroute searching an application of Ockham's razor, always asking the question: "Is there an easier way to do this?"

So it's nothing new, far from it; however, thinking of plotholes as backroutes to intended solutions gave me somewhat of a new incentive to actively try looking for such inconsistencies in my stories myself . It feels like a more "scientific" approach, where you actively try to falsify your own claims.



So, why did it take playing a lot of Lemmings in order for me to discover this for myself?

Maybe it is due to the more or less established mindset of a backroute in a level being usually regarded as the level designer's fault - combined with the awareness that it is in a level designer's power, and thereby their responsibility, to fix it. With plotholes in stories, in contrast, you often find both the authors as well as devoted fans rationalising the events after the fact, making additional assumptions in order to make excuses. This is because both the loyal fans and, obviously, the authors themselves, have already "locked in" on the intended solution, and now try their best to enforce it.

Hence, in both cases, it is usually easier for level testers / beta readers to discover "backroutes". And I think this is down to the same phenomenon that prevents a level designer or story author from finding it : I've already mentioned functional fixedness and mental set before on this forum - aspects of problem solving which mean that once we found a working solution to a given problem, we have a hard time coming up with possible alternatives.

This affects both level designers / authors and players / readers:
1) The author knows the intended solution, which obviously works, so they have trouble contemplating other solutions that might also work - because it would require them to actively stray from an already successful approach.
2) The reader is presumed to have a natural scepticism that needs to be overcome in order to achieve immersion in the story (suspension of disbelief); if common sense would suggest a less complex and more obvious approach to a problem, and a character still decides to do it in a more complicated way, it's going to ruin the immersion, because usually people don't act this way in real life.
The Lemmings player, likewise, is naturally "lazy" in the sense that he doesn't want to waste more time on a level than necessary. So once he finds a solution that works, there's no need to keep fiddling around to try something else: You find a backroute, you go for it. And then, later, once that backroute has been removed, re-solving these levels is often harder than solving new ones, because now you have to actively bypass the formerly successful approach which you still have somewhere in the back of your head.

Thus, the author can't stop not finding backroutes, and the player can't stop using them if they find them. The reader can't ignore a plothole once it's discovered, and trying to ignore them in order to  re-immerse onself in the story requires active endeavour on one's own part.



The irony is that this mechanism is probably usually beneficial: The Rubicon model makes a clear distinction between considering different options at first, and then, once you have decided on the one you're going to use, initiating action. Meaning: You don't go back to the planning phase anymore . No way "back to the drawing board". I also like to think of this as "putting blinders on a horse before having it move forward" .

But backroutes and plotholes fall into the category "what must not be cannot be", and in those cases, you have to force yourself to go back to the drawing board. So for such purposes, this mechanism seems to be disadvantageous.


Don't really know how useful or interesting this might be to anyone of you, but I like discovering such "patterns" by drawing analogies between seemingly totally unrelated fields. Sometimes, these analogies may end up a little too forced. (That's why my brother and I refer to these shitty analogies as analogies .)

But if I didn't enjoy looking for abstract patterns and ways to connect the dots between them, I probably wouldn't enjoy playing Lemmings either in the first place. So I guess we've come full circle here .


Any other "life lessons" you guys learned from playing Lemmings, no matter how arbitrary they may seem?