It occurs to me that you've basically reinvented namida_machine's exit at this point:



I personally would think of the Dirt / Marble exits as being the iconic ones. But, Dirt is not really the best for generic-ifying.

The Pillar exit has the typical background, unlike the Crystal one's solid red color. I'd vote for it over Crystal, though I'd still say recolor it to be a bit more generic. (Of course, the modified-crystal custom one could also add that background.)

However - I also think you're being a bit too quick to rule out (a modified version of) the Marble exit, too. I think it would work well as a generic one - it's somewhere inbetween straight-edged and rounded. Yes, it's made of bricks which might at first glance feel tied to the Marble style, but I feel like there might be other styles even more associated with (a different color of) bricks...

I'm surprised The Far Side is getting as many votes as it is. I really like it, but I wouldn't have thought it would be a particularly popular level.

I mostly voted (as expected for me) for the ones I actually consider good levels, but Just Dig also got a vote on the grounds of how iconic it is.

My votes would go to "Every Lemming For Himself", "Upside Down World", "How Do I Dig Up The Way?", "The Far Side" and "The Steel Mines Of Kessel". Maybe at a stretch, "One Way Or Another" too.

And I guess, not on level quality but simply how iconic it is, "Just Dig" has to be in there too.

Quote from: WillLem on January 22, 2026, 02:42:32 AMYeah, I'll make sure that CE can read from "sound" as well as "sounds" in 1.1 proper.

Scratch that, I've already done it! In commit 5d091f3, full cross-compatibility with legacy NL directories has been added. This was done after the release of 1.1 RC-1. I don't even remember doing it, but it's there and it works! EDIT: Thinking about it, it was probably done in response to this topic. I've made directory cross-compatibility a fairly high priority in general, since it does make a lot of sense that people would want to run both NL and CE from the same directory.

One thing to note is that some of the sounds themselves may have different names or may use different sounds for the same thing. It's worth combining all sounds from CE and NL into the same directory (whichever one you use) to ensure that both programs can access the sound files that they need. You should only need to do this once, and thereafter add any sound that may later be added to CE (this would need to be done for regular NL anyway).

I would go a step further and say - discontinue support for the alternate "sounds" folder. Otherwise, it could cause problems if people use NLCE when creating their packs, and it works fine there but (due to the different folder name) doesn't work on standard NL.

There's no reason this should ever have been changed in NLCE in the first place. That's an SLX-type change; there's no reason for NLCE to be changing file/folder names or adding alternative options for them (it should only, where necessary, add entirely *new* files, not rename - even as optional things - existing ones), given the goal is data and physics compatibility with 12.14. It's too late to not do it in the first place; best to nuke it now while it's still early days (and might cause issues *once* for people upgrading from an older CE version) than have it become a long-term lingering problem.

Agreed, this bothers me too, I just never remember it when I'm working on the site. Something to keep in mind next time I am - and that should be easier now that there's a topic here to remind me. (EDIT: Let's just have a quick check in the admin panel now, in case there's already an option to change it.) (EDIT2: Doesn't seem like it.)

Not necessary. If people have something to post, they will; no one needs to post "just for the sake of posting".

Things do tend to be quiet around this time of year in general - a lot of people are on holiday and not really focused on Lemmings and/or online communities.

^ This needs to be fixed. I would consider it a data file incompatiblity if NLCE expects the sound folder to have a different name, as it means NL files can no longer be used as-is.

Seems like it might be an SLX change that accidentally got backported to NLCE?

I think one of two options could be considered here:

a) Sub-boards of Levels For Other Engines for particularly popular engines - I feel the candidates here are CustLemm et al, the Lemmini family, and maybe SuperLemmix - I'm not overly familiar with the level of content it's getting, if that's reasonably high, it's worth giving it a board too.

b) Add an entire "Levels" category. Put the NL and Lix level pack boards into this category too. Create sub-boards for other engines. IMO, CustLemm family should be grouped into a single board, and Lemmini family should be grouped into a single board. Same statement as above applies to SuperLemmix. It might also be justified to have seperate "Other Official Games" and "Other Engines" boards - or perhaps just to have an L2 board, since it's the only other official game with anywhere close to a significant amount of custom content (L3 and L3D have what, one pack each?). Perhaps have a single shared "In Development" board rather than select boards having their own In Development sub-boards. Maybe we don't even need a seperate In Development board anymore - the volume of packs being worked on isn't what it once was (but then, where do the existing topics from it go?).

Quote from: The Lemmings Encyclopedia on January 12, 2026, 07:09:25 PMHi all. I'll try and contact that person once more to see what's happening. If it's nothing, I can offer up the codebase to Lemmings Forums.

I should be clear - I am offering to provide hosting for it. I am not offering to take over updating of the site.

If you ask me to host it, one of two things will happen - either I will set it up so you (or another person of your choice, with their agreement) has access to update and modify the site, hosted on my server; or I will host the site in its current state as an "archive", never to be modified again (unless or until you or someone else decides to take over it again).

Quote from: Baldem1990 on January 13, 2026, 10:00:56 PM*original* WAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWWAWA I HATE YOU SO MUCH FOR USING THE (?) MARK AND STRIKETHROUGH THAT IS NOT ABLE TO BE ERASED WAWAAWAWAWAWWAWA FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU WWAWAWWAWAWAAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAAAAAWWAWWAWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAWAWAWAWAWWAWWAWAWAWAWAAWAAAA

Firstly - chill the hell out, dude. That's a ridiculous degree of overreaction to a post coming up slightly awkward when quoted.

Secondly - to explain why that happens, it's because that was a post originally made on the previous incarnation of the site. We had to resort to some very unconventional tricks to migrate posts from that iteration to this one, on account of having no access to the database and the admin being nowhere to be found. One of the side effects of this is that it semi-broke formatting in posts - the formatting remains mostly fine when viewed in a browser (although it does appear the SMF2.1 update somewhat broke things), but all goes to hell when you try to quote or edit the affected posts. So it's not in any way the fault of the original author. If you really need someone to blame, the closest you're going to get to that is blaming the owner of the old Lemmings Forums (who is no longer present on this site) for abandoning the site and not providing us any way to access a proper backup. But really - this shouldn't be a matter where you need "someone to blame" in the first place. It's the kind of matter where you say to yourself "oh, that sucks" and move on, because it isn't remotely a big deal.

He briefly considers the idea of using skills such as the climber, builder, and even aardvarker to reach it, but then remembers that he's a lemming, not a lemmings player, and does not have the intelligence to come up with such a plan. So instead he walks, and walks, until he finds a blocker.

What would happen if the lemmings themselves were allowed to invent a new skill?

I'll have to check that out!

One I feel needs to be mentioned: Ducks. This was a shareware game by Hungry Software back in the day. HS's website has long since gone offline, but before it went down, the dev released it as freeware - he didn't have the source code anymore, so he did this by providing a registration code that anyone can freely use and share. You can find it, its editor, several of the official addons, and a couple of other Hungry Software games ("Get Piste", which was a prototype that eventually evolved into Ducks; and "Out Of Order", a point-and-click adventure game that is maybe the only game from that genre I was actually able to finish without getting bored of it), here: https://1drv.ms/f/c/d773beb8dc4d8d6e/IgBujU3cuL5zIIDXewUAAAAAASHaA5ue8C1eSRfva3_XHC8?e=aaLEoq

Quote from: Proxima on December 28, 2025, 04:56:05 AM

Quote from: WillLem on December 28, 2025, 04:10:01 AMDo we have an existing way to convert this [Cheapo] content to .nxlv (or .lvl or .ini)?

Not automatically! The problem is that Cheapo levels are saved as bitmaps, so it's hard to convert that back into individual pieces. (And many Cheapo tilesets never got converted to NL.) Unless you could somehow write a program to calculate the tile locations from the bitmap, the only way would be rebuilding every level manually.

Very old versions of NL actually had tools to convert Cheapo levels. I initially looked into reconstruction of tile positions from the bitmap, but it just wasn't feasible outside of very, very simple levels (especially in rough-edged tilesets), and resorted to just treating every level as a VGASPEC level.

This is actually a relatively small problem. Having to convert the levels in a VGASPEC-like manner is a minor annoyance, not a dealbreaker.

Much bigger is the physics differences - the most significant one being that Cheapo's splat distance is about 25% longer than most other engines, including NL. This is a hugely breaking change for a lot of levels; NL had to specifically have a "Cheapo mode" (which was basically treated as a gimmick, albeit one intended for compatibility with another engine rather than to make unconventional levels) that implemented this different fall distance, as well as a couple of other Cheapo/NL differences (another one is checkerboard terrain - whereas L1 / NL allow lemmings to slip through a checkerboard hole, Cheapo would have the lemming step up instead). And of course, there's the fact that some Cheapo features are not supported by NL, most notably inverted gravity (and the associated objects).

There really isn't any "good" way to play Cheapo content at the moment. NL 1.43 is probably the best option on a modern PC; but best of all would be to dig out an old PC and put actual Cheapo on it. (I wonder - how well does it run under a VM running an older Windows, or under Linux+WINE?)

Here's one I can't believe hasn't been done yet:

With A Twist Of Balls Please