Back in 2019, there was an overhaul to contest voting, because the old system often led to a huge number of voting rounds, which is a lot of work for the organiser and puts a heavy burden on voters if they want to commit to taking part in the whole thing, which can lead to excluding those who don't.

The current voting system, while definitely better, is still flawed. We now have only one vote for each rule; that's great. But if the numbers fall out unluckily, we can end up with a situation like that in Contest #29, where a mixed group of six levels needs five or even six voting rounds to establish a winner.

So what's the solution? Well, first we need to decide what the goals of the voting system are. At the moment, they seem to be:
* To establish an overall winner -- obviously the most important goal.
* To establish a winner for each rule, since this carries a certain amount of prestige in itself, especially for rules like "Make a Tame level" where entries have no chance of winning overall.
* To establish overall 2nd and 3rd place -- is this still felt to be important? There are no prizes for these places, but do those who regularly take part in contests care about them?
* To separate out the top three and then rank them, so that the overall winner is not decided until the last voting round.

If all of these are still felt to be necessary, my suggestion would be:

* As in the current system, each rule has one vote only, no tiebreakers.
* The first round of the mixed group aims to establish a top 3. If this isn't possible because of ties, a tiebreaker is held.

For example, with the votes from contest #29 (6 for A, 2 for B, 3 each for C, D, E, F), A would be into the final, B would be out, and a tiebreaker would be held to find the top two of C, D, E, F.

Ideally, this system limits the mixed group to three rounds plus one possible tiebreaker. Unfortunately, because of the requirement that an exact number of entries qualify for the top three, it's still possible for the tiebreaker to need a tiebreaker (e.g. C, D, E, F get 7, 4, 4, 3 votes respectively). I would suggest that in that case, we could just be okay with not having a third place (or having a tied third place), so that the mixed group cannot have more than four votes.

As a reminder, we decided on a meet-up in Leeds on 5 August, which is next Saturday. I'm starting a new topic so that we can keep track of who is definitely coming, so that on the day we know when we've got everyone.

Unfortunately it looks like it might be raining on the day, but I'm sure it will still be great to see everyone and we can have a good time.

The plan is to meet at 11:30 on the main concourse of the railway station, then when everyone has arrived, go for lunch together. There is a Wetherspoon's at the station, so we could eat there unless it's too crowded -- quite possible on a Saturday -- in which case there are plenty of places nearby.

After lunch we could walk around town and chat if the weather is okay; if not, maybe we could establish a base at the Waterstones bookshop? I would be happy to take any other suggestions if anyone has ideas.

Confirmed:
Proxima
WillLem
Ste Woz Ere
∫tan x dx
Flopsy
Kingshadow3
Pooty
Crane (confirmed on discord)

Following on from a chat on the discord today, we are thinking of organising a meetup for those Lemmingsforums folks who live in the UK. It will most likely be in the north, since we discovered that at least three of us are located in Leeds and Liverpool, but nothing is set in stone yet. Some points to discuss before we go ahead with making definite plans:

* Who's interested?
* Anyone responding, please say where you live and whether it's possible for you to travel to a meetup location.
* What dates would be best / are there any dates we should avoid?

I've started watching Ramond's streams and every so often I'm going to pause and note any comments I have, whether it's issues I think should be fixed or just general reflections. This will include my feedback on Simon's comments from the other topic. (Simon -- feel free to merge the topics if you think it's better that way.)

L4 Diamond Dash: This should provide a few walkers instead of imploders and blockers.
L8 Climb to Freedom: It was suggested that we should separate the two snow levels. L8 is very simple so maybe it could even move earlier?
L10 Escape the Pit: Unintended solution by digging and bombing horizontally through the terrain. I checked and this is even possible with imploders alone. I think it's fine to leave multiple solutions so the player can exercise some creativity, but the replay collection should showcase the intended solution (platforming over the pit).
L11 Beneath the Lab: There was a suggestion to move this later. Maybe switch it with L17 Solar Eclipse?
L15 Put Your Lix on Ice: Hacky unintended solution by repeated mining to break through the pillar. Again probably best to leave this alone. Pillar just before the exit should be less precise to find the place where a miner can break through and then stop herself.
L19 Let's All Go Down the Strand: The crowd can be turned around at the very top or on the second step. Any solution is fine here, but the "main" solution is to have the entire crowd go down and build back up.
L20 The Borderland: Requirement of 30/60 allows saving either group while ignoring the other, with the assumption that doing so is a bit tricky and first-time players will be nudged towards saving most of both groups. Is this okay, or should we just make it 40/60?

In the level select menu, clicking on a level sometimes doesn't display its preview, but continues to show the preview of the old level.

I observed this with the pack BadLems, and it might be because some of the levels have the same ID. I spent some time clicking on levels in Lemmings Redux and they all previewed correctly.

If it's decided that this won't be fixed because having levels with the same ID is just something you should not do, then I would suggest that packs on the NeoLemmix Levels board should be fixed to avoid this issue.

During building of a level, it is quite common to have no exit, simply because you haven't yet built the part of the level that will contain it. It is also quite common to want to playtest the level, for instance to check how many skills it takes to get from A to B, before the exit has been placed.

Even though a level, by default, starts with 40 lemmings and a save requirement of 20, when there is no exit then NL changes the save requirement to 0. This means that any playtesting of the level will be a successful completion, and will result in saving a junk replay. While these don't take up much space, generating junk files can be an annoyance and can make it harder to find replays that you actually want.

I suggest that either exitless levels don't have the save requirement changed to 0, or if there's some other reason why that has to be kept, don't autosave replays on levels with a requirement of 0.

I asked namida over discord for permission to make this topic, in view of the decision about "no new physics suggestions". This is actually a suggestion I made a while back that got sidelined, so namida said it was okay to bring it up.

The attached level (requires proxima_greenhill style) shows a problem I have with the jumper: on rough terrain, if you assign it just before a step of at least 2 pixels, the jumper immediately stops, effectively wasting the skill. This is uncomfortable, and my suggestion is to relax terrain checks at the very start of the jump.

namida points out that any change could affect existing content, but I think this is such a small tweak that it would be unlikely to break anything, especially as it's very undesirable for backroutes to be blocked with single pixels.

Any support for this?

Taken from WillLem's "Ideas for challenges" topic. The idea is to find the fewest number of skills per level to kill all lemmings instead of saving them. Nuke is obviously disallowed, and so is running out of time.

Lemmings Redux

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|Rating | 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 |
|-------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|Gentle | 2  0  0  *  1  2  6  2  1  1  1  0  1  0  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  1  1  0  0  1  0  1  0 |
|Quirky | 4  0  1  0  1  1  1  2  7  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  1  2  2  0  0  2  1  0  1  0  0  0  1  1  0  2 |
|Zany   | 1  1  0  8  0  3  1  2  0  0  0  0  1  0  2  1  0  0  1  1  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  4  0  0  0 |
|Manic  | 1  0  1  0  *  1  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  1  1  0  0  1  0  2  0  1  0  0  0  0 |
|Lunatic| 0  0  0  2  0  3  1  1  1  2  0  0  0  2  1  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  1  3  1 |
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* On this level it is impossible to kill all lemmings.