What? Are we late for something?
On the contrary! We are too EARLY!

Temporal (2008) is a freeware action-puzzle game by renboy.

Watch trailer on Youtube

Download Temporal 1.11
Download Temporal's original soundtrack

On Windows: You can double-click temporal.exe, but then Temporal will force a hardware fullscreen resolution of 1024x768. If you have a wide monitor, run Temporal windowed instead:
temporal.exe -win

On Linux: Temporal runs well in Wine, but the forced fullscreen is even nastier here. To run Temporal windowed:
wine explorer /desktop=1024x768 temporal.exe

Controls:
Left/right arrows to move.
Up arrow to fly.
Down arrow to use the device in which you're standing.
F1 shows overview of all other hotkeys.

About: You'll solve real-time physics puzzles that first look impossible, but are solvable by going back in time. You can accomplish more things while your earlier instances of yourself are busy elsewhere on the level.

Temporal has 30 main story levels that you must play in order, plus 5 unlockable challenge levels. Even as a dedicated puzzle solver, you'll spend several evenings on the main story. And I haven't solved all challenge levels either.

Most tasks require experimentation and solid route planning. Several tasks require precise execution; if stuff goes wrong near the end, you'll have to repeat 1 to 3 minutes of work. You have infinite lives and there are automatic in-level checkpoints, but you can't quicksave.

I've known Temporal because, back in 2008/2009, I lurked the Allegro 5 forums and saw renboy's release thread. I have versions 1.00, 1.03, and 1.11 lying around; the 1.11 is in the download above and it's the latest that I know.

Temporal doesn't feature level editing or user content, and I don't know any active dedicated websites or communities. renboy eventually lost ownership of his domain potato-factory.com around 2010.

Music bug workaround: In level 18, named "Synchronized", if you move away too quickly while the long dialog is still on screen, music won't play for the remainder of the level. If you reach the checkpoint in level 18 and you hear no music, you've run into this bug. The workaround is to restart the level and:

• Either cancel the long dialog explicitly (press return),
  
• or stay around until the last line ("Now, begone!") has disappeared.
  

-- Simon

Hi,

geoo and I are working on Sneak, a card game designed by David Parlett.

3-6 players. One or two standard decks of 52-cards.

Sneak rules on Parlett's website

We started with the above Sneak rules. Technically, we didn't start with the website, but with the Entensuppe book, a German book from 2008 with translations of Parlett's games. But the website and the book appear to agree.

We played with 3 or 4 players and always used 52 cards.

Eventually, we changed some rules:

• #1: Replace the standard 52-card deck with Five Crowns, but remove the 6 jokers. This new deck contains 110 cards: 3456789TJQK (no aces, no deuces) in 5 suits and 2 copies per card.
  
• #2: Rank straight flush higher than matches (a.k.a. tuples, n-lings).
  
• #3: Rank flushes higher than straights. (Both still rank below matches.)
  

The re-rankings feel appropriate for the 5-suited deck, and it's handy that the rankings now agree with Poker.

It's possible that even for the standard double deck of 104 cards, straight flush should be ranked higher than matches, but we didn't playtest that. We went directly from the standard single 52-card deck to the Five Crowns deck.

Longer decks increase the scope of play before the stock runs out. Still, hoarding cards in hand until the end may be too good: Never sneak, rarely challenge other people's plays, and if you challenge, do it only with your very strong hands. At the end of the game, be the one player with cards left in hand and put them into your pile of winnings.

We'd like to encourage a more daring playstyle. Toward that, geoo is considering to change Parlett's endgame rule to:

• #4: After a player has drawn the last card from the stock, there will be exactly one more round of turns, starting as usual with the player after the drawing player, ending with the drawing player. On your turn, you must flaunt; if you have zero cards in hand, skip your turn. After this final round of turns, leftover cards in hand become worthless. You don't add them to your pile of winnings.
  

If this proves sensible in playtesting, I'll write down a full ruleset with these adaptions.

-- Simon

Here's some loose rambling from pushing source code around. I don't have concrete plans to rework anything here, but I've re-examined the existing memory layout this weekend. Thus, why not write it down, maybe it's of interest.

A lix (the struct Lixxie that describes a single lix) is 56 bytes long, assuming we're on a 64-bit machine with 64-bit pointers. The layout is roughly like this:

Bytes 0-32: The lix's job, an emplaced subclass of Job. All subclasses fit into 32 bytes.
Bytes 32-36: Position as two 2-byte integers
Bytes 36-38: 2-byte bitset for all the bools such as facing direction, ability to climb, ...
Bytes 38-40: Queued fling speed as two 1-byte integers
Byte 40: Style (color, player affiliation)
Byte 41: Encounters (water, exits, ...) during the current physics update
Byte 42: Exploder timer in multiplayer
Bytes 43-48: unused (5 bytes)
Bytes 48-56: Pointer to the entire physical world. Kitchen sink object, only filled & used during updating.

The first 32 bytes of that are the emplaced Job; in detail, the Job looks like this:

Bytes 0-8: vtable pointer for the Job class object
Bytes 8-16: monitor pointer for the Job class, an unused (?) multithreading D object per class object
Byte 16: Activity (determines vertical frame in the spritesheet)
Byte 17: Horizontal frame in the spritesheet
Bytes 18-32: Subclass payload: Job subclasses define it, e.g., leftover builder bricks, miner anti-shock

Things in the Job subclass are properly aligned. If the first field wants to be 4-byte-aligned (e.g., the common 32-bit int, which has size 4 and alignment 4), it goes at byte 20 in the Job, with bytes 18 and 19 unused padding. In D as in C++, a single-inheriting subclass starts its data after the base class's data, and the base class's data comes after the hidden vtable pointer (and in D the monitor pointer).

+----------------------+
| 0-8: vpointer of Job |
+----------------------+
| 8-16: monitor of Job |
+--+--+----------------+
|Ac|fr|      18-32:    |
+--+--+     subclass   |
|           payload    |
+----------+-----+-----+
| 32-36:pos|flags|fling|
+--+--+--+-+-----+-----+
|st|en|tm|  5 unused   |
+--+--+--+-------------+
| 48-56: world pointer |
+----------------------+

---

Cache lines in most computers are 64 bytes. If you fit into a cache line, you're quick to load.

The lix is 56 bytes long, that fits. Still, I should try to pad it with 8 more unused bytes. The padded lix would then always be 64 bytes long, and it's possible that it'll be even more cache-friendly (even though it's longer!) than the 56-byte lix.

The alternative experiment would be to pack everything into 32 bytes. The bytes will then be as snugly packed as a pile of kittens. We'd have to pass the pointer to the outside world in the methods, or abuse the memory layout and cram it over the (hopefully unused) monitor pointer. I think I could reduce the Job subclass payload from 12 to 8 bytes, and cram the Job-independent fields from 16 bytes into 12. It would be an elaborate experiment.

The elephants in the room are really the pointers. These 64-bit pointers (8 bytes) are fat walruses. You can't herd too many of those in your bathtub at the same time.

-- Simon

Prompted by the DMA manual's figure of level width 1600, I've re-tested level size and edge behavior on DOS Lemmings 1.

You can scroll around to see 1584 pixels of the official 1600 pixels, i.e., all but the rightmost 16 columns. You can't scroll any further to the right.

The left edge turns lemmings.

The right edge extends even beyond 1600 pixels as extra air, still inaccessible to the game's main camera, but observable on the minimap. There is considerable empty space at the right, certainly more than 16 pixels beyond the visible 1584. On DOS, in Rendezvous at the Mountain (DOS password GKNONNIIJQ), I can build an entire 12-brick bridge into the unscrollable void and I still see lemmings fall off the end of the bridge, dying only in the void at the bottom. With only the first brick visible, the bridge is 22 pixels long, and I sneak in another builder to make it at least 23 pixels long beyond the visible 1584.

So far, this agrees with Proxima's post about L1 edge behavior: Left is solid, right is open on DOS and Mac.

Compare with the Rendezvous Amiga screenshot on Lemmings Encyclopedia, which is 1591 pixels wide. The rightmost 7 pixels in this screenshot are not viewable on DOS. The left edge in the screenshot agrees with the DOS visible left edge.

But, lurking in the darkness, there is more.



New and exciting! There is an eventual solid right edge on DOS Lemmings 1. It's about 2 or 3 bridge-lengths away from the visible section.

You can't hover the mouse over lemmings in the scrolling-incessible section, which is everything beyond the first 1584 pixels. The method to build bridges in the inaccessible section, to eventually reach that solid right edge, is to abuse the right-click bug:

• Select builder in the panel.
  
• Hover over an eligible lemming which you want to build later.
  
• Press RMB, holding RMB throughout all remaining steps.
  
• Hover over a blocker. (Or any lemming that cannot receive builder.)
  
• Wait until the eligible lemming is where you want him to build.
  
• Click (press LMB) on the blocker. The eligible lemming will now build.
  

Repeat this bug 1-3 times with fresh lemmings from the rightmost hatch on Rendezvous. Eventually, you've reached the solid right edge, and lemmings will return to the visible area, as in the screenshot above.

It's so far right that the green points (that mark lemmings on the minimap) are getting on the minimap's red border. There is more to research here about where exactly that solid right edge is. I took a wild guess in that it's around X = 1640; it took me 3 bridges to get there. But I didn't build optimally.

There seems to be nothing special about the DMA manual's figure of 1600 for the level width. Scrolling stops earlier than that (at 1584), but physics stop later (at ~ 1640).

-- Simon

Forestidia suggests to fix:

github #375: Sound/Music Volume, Apply/Preview Changes Immediately, Before OK
github #367: Rep4Lev, interrupt, re-win: New Replay saved to wrong dir
github #361: Editor: Show Grid Lines
github #362: Warn about MP3 in main menu (unsupported but common format)

In particular, Sound/music volume previewing is a big quality-of-life feature, more important than it might seem.

-- Simon

Test Release 3 - 20/01/2022, Linux version

• Download and extract the Linux release to new directory.
  
• $ chmod +x L2Player
  
• Copy an entire L2 directory over the same directory, so that L2Player and L2.EXE now sit in the same directory.
  
• Run L2Player. It extracts many files, then crashes with log below.
  
• Look at ./data/music/: This directory contains only one file, Readme.txt.
  

Log:
[...]
PCMA: Load ./data/cache/sound/sound_77.pcma
PCMA: Load ./data/cache/sound/sound_78.pcma
PCMA: Load ./data/cache/sound/sound_79.pcma
Cached 80 sound(s)
SpriteSheet: Calculated 102 font widths for ./data/cache/font_0.spt
SpriteSheet: Calculated 59 font widths for ./data/cache/panel_2.spt
SpriteSheet: Calculated 102 font widths for ./data/cache/font_0.spt
SpriteSheet: Calculated 102 font widths for ./data/cache/font_0.spt
Starting OpenAL... 1.1 ALSOFT 1.23.0, OpenAL Community, OpenAL Soft
AudioStream: Unable to find file ./data/music/title.mod
PlayStream: Error - Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Unhandled exception. System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at SharpMik.Player.ModDriver.MikMod_Exit_internal() in C:\Dev\Retro\Lemmings2\SharpMik\SharpMikCore\Player\ModDriver.cs:line 535
   at SharpMik.Player.ModDriver.MikMod_Exit() in C:\Dev\Retro\Lemmings2\SharpMik\SharpMikCore\Player\ModDriver.cs:line 549
   at L2Player.AudioStreamMOD.CloseStream() in C:\Dev\Retro\Lemmings2\L2Player\L2Player\Audio\AudioStreamMOD.cs:line 73
   at L2Player.AudioPlaybackEngine.PlayStream(String fileName) in C:\Dev\Retro\Lemmings2\L2Player\L2Player\Audio\AudioPlaybackEngine.cs:line 118
   at L2Player.Game..ctor() in C:\Dev\Retro\Lemmings2\L2Player\L2Player\Game.cs:line 84
   at L2Player.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\Dev\Retro\Lemmings2\L2Player\L2Player\Program.cs:line 91
Aborted (core dumped)
Expected instead: If I have no music, I can still play without music.

./data/music/Readme.txt says: "If you don't like the midi versions of the music, you can place .mod or .it (Amiga Tracker) versions here [...]" This sounds as if you want to ship midi music with your release. Do you want to ship midis?

-- Simon

First,

git clone https://bitbucket.org/namida42/neolemmixplayer

The obvious entry point then is Readme.txt, which tells us that we need Delphi XE6, but namida wrote in 2021 that we need "10.3". I assume this is still accurate and it means Delphi 10.3 Rio. This is available as Delphi Community Edition, apparently under some proprietary gratis license, and they want me to make an account, and invent a fake address and fake phone number.

namida, do you recommend this community edition to build NL? Or are there more up-to-date build instructions that I haven't found yet?

Is there a way to compile NL with commonly available tools where we don't have to create accounts?

-- Simon