Good suggestions for larger groups. Both games in early 2021 had large groups. Free-for-all map selection becomes nasty. Telling people to press ready is annoying.

Maps already know their intended number of players, it's reasonable to support that more in the lobby.

-- Simon

From writing the dissertation, I remember this kind of mental block that prevents one from sleeping. Basic ideas:

• No caffeine a few hours before sleep; also reduce caffeine if you're on unholy amounts like 3 liters of Pepsi Max Lemon per day. (Complete caffeine abstinence is also possible, but might be not even necessary.)
• Physical exercise during the day, or in the hours before bed. There is no day job to get you tired yet, so replace it with some exercise. It needn't be much.
• Some recommend no electronics half an hour before bedtime, but I never stuck to this.
• Once the rhythm is roughly where you want it, add routine, and rise every day at the same time.

Fixing a rhythm is hard, at least you have no pressure to fix it within N days, but can fix it gradually.

Naps are fine and will recude the duration of the core sleep. It's your choice if you want that.

-- Simon

I wanted to reply about the trap design. I'm still sorting through the different zip archives, trap examples need the exact right version of the tileset to play. The most recent archive has subdirectories, the trap examples seem to need the old, flatter tree.

It's getting too late today, I'll come back to that in a couple days!

If you already have the tiles/matching levels in git somewhere on the internet, that would help me. But don't stick the tiles in git merely for me; if you prefer zip archives, then stick with those. Eventually, we'll put the tiles directly in the Lix main repository.

-- Simon

They're mystery puzzles without instructions. They solve to a word that isn't logically deducible, but once you have it, you feel that it is probably correct. A ton of lateral thinking is needed.

Example: The puzzle shows a maze on six squares. You had to realize that the squares would form a cube, and the maze's squares would thus connect in different ways than on paper.

Example: The entire puzzle consists of a sequence of single-suit mahjong hands that each were one tile away from winning. The solution was, for each hand { determine the waits, sum their numbers, convert the number into letter of the alphabet } and read the letters in sequence.

-- Simon

19 UTC is good, I'll play!

Dullstar: I'll PM you the voicechat details. It's optional, there is always text chat in Lix itself.

-- Simon

I'd be up for a couple of the MIT 2021 puzzles.

I'd suggest IRC and Mumble to collaborate; I'll give details to all participants. There is also ye olde forume of our Suicidal Rodents that we haven't used since 2015 in case we get more participants.

The hunt runs from Friday Jan 15 through Monday Jan 18. My main problem is availability, I have a full-time job, a household, and other projects, I can't guarantee that I'll bring all 4 evenings to the table. But I should make ~2 at least.

On their registration page, I would disallow that we receive unattached hunters. 🐹 🐿️

-- Simon

Happy New Year.

Undo is completely finished and can be crossed off the roadmap. If issues come up, tell me, we can work on those.

Liebatron made his Chicago train tileset, I promised to look over the trap design, tile naming, etc., and I'll focus on that these 1-2 weeks. There are still ambitious coding projects around the corner, but Liebatron's set, I promised to look over it, and haven't done anything over the holidays yet. This must come first.

Then I'll look into (server sends nuke on player leave) because mobius prodded me to do that. It's good if people prod me to prioritize certain bugs, I want to reward that.

Then, the next big feature in Lix is better caching of levels (or at least their metadata) and trophies (= results from playing levels). This leads to fun benefits:

• End-of-level dialog that can quickly determine the next level, and/or the next unsolved level, and preview them. You can then immediately play either, or return to the level browser.
• Solving statistics for entire directories when you browse ranks/packs in the level browser, e.g., "lemforum: 173/240 solved".
• No re-indexing every time you hit Search in the level browser. Re-indexing costs 10 seconds on Windows for ~1400 levels.

I'll see how my mood is for shoving the other 2020 roadmap item, insert in the replay tweaker, in between. If you want stuff done, tell me. Otherwise, I have no idea which bugs are most important and I'll work on what bothers myself most.

-- Simon