On 10-13-16_564425c, trying to play the Lemmings Redux pack (using the experimental because a feature I use frequently is bugged in the stable), I got to Keep Your Hair on Mr. Lemmings and noticed that I could not assign any skills to lemmings slightly left of the entrance.

I tried highlighting lemmings and assigning skills that way, but that didn't work either - anywhere. Not sure if the ability to right click a skill to make the highlighted lemming perform it was culled or if it's also a bug - it did work in the stable, though.

I have not determined what about this level causes this behavior. I'll add more if I figure it out.

This may be a little complicated to implement, and hard drives are generally large enough nowadays that this isn't a huge concern (although it certainly makes for some cluttered folders) but I've noticed that if you have auto-save replays on, load a replay, and play it to completion, an identical replay gets saved.

I would suggest that, if a replay is loaded (from file rather than from backwards frame step), don't autosave a new replay unless new actions are taken.

I recently accidentally double posted in a thread, and didn't see a button to delete the post.

Maybe I'm thinking of a site, but I think you used to be able to delete your own posts? If not, it would be nice to be able to delete accidental double posts like this so a moderator doesn't have to.

(Depending on how the new formats work when they're implemented I suspect it may be possible to do what I want to do with with a Find/Replace operation in Notepad but I'd have to see)

In earlier versions of NeoLemmix, levels made using recolored sets (e.g. Genesis, or those EGA ones Giga's been releasing) were easily interchangeable. While overall the functionality of being able to use multiple tilesets for one level is more useful than the older functionality of being able to switch a level's tileset it would be nice to have some way of changing the color variant used.

Suggested implementation: with some number of objects/terrain pieces selected, have some way (perhaps in the Inspector) to replace them with pieces from another tileset while leaving object/terrain IDs intact.

I know the trigger area for the spike object in Pillar is/was weird. I noticed that in the newest version of the set, the object was changed to be half the size, and the full sized one added to the end. I haven't compared trigger areas at this time.

Since this makes older content look different (I'm unsure how it affects function), I wanted to check if the visual change brought to older content was intentional before I bring the changes to the Genesis version of the set.

Hoooooooooly crap, the number of bad user interfaces out there is staggering. I felt like sharing a few things that annoy me. I'll start with some minor ones.

First of all:
Dear iOS:
I am very much aware that Music is not allowed to use cellular data. I am not using the music app in any way that justifies allowing it to waste data. Sure I'm probably not going to go over the data limit, but better safe than sorry, yes? So you don't need to remind me about my choice of settings. There is almost no reason to notify the user of a setting that they themselves personally changed. If it could cause undesirable behavior, and it's possible that the user may have changed it accidentally, then I could see the notification being reasonable...  but only if there's a prominent and obvious way to tell it, "No, changing this setting was not an accident; this is how I want it."

Dear Cortana:
Please stop being such an attention whore. Then again, thank you for at least having a setting that's not completely impossible to find to suppress your desperate pleas to be acknowledged. iOS does a few things wrong; see above complaint; but at least I have to accidentally hold down a button too long for Siri to start bothering me; and she doesn't show up until I ask for her.

Dear Cortana's Overlords:
Cortana's senpai noticed her, and was subsequently displeased. I should think that if I've completely hidden Cortana as much as the settings will allow, then maaaaaaybe she shouldn't start telling me what to do in an update. "Oooooooooh, tell me to make you a to-do list!" Hey, guess what? That's actually really annoying. The reason I don't use Cortana isn't the fact that I don't know what she can do - it's that I would rather just do it myself. I type quickly enough to greatly counteract the amount of time I'd probably have to spend correcting her anyway - I type fast and don't really talk all that fast. That and it's kinda awkward when there's other people in the room. "Oh, hey, could you blah blah blah blah blah?" "Wait, what?" "Oh, no, sorry, just talking to the computer..." Also my desktop doesn't even have a microphone in all the time, since I only plug it in when I actually want to use it.

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But these user interface sins are rather small and petty compared to the pile of absolute garbage I'm going to rant about:

So I have an assignment that involves using a certain program that is not entirely unlike PowerPoint. The only thing that it can do that PowerPoint can't is to have people comment on your slides (which is implemented kinda poorly but that's beside the point). Now, a lot of programs try to do things for the user. When done well, this can be fine. I don't have a problem with a program auto-suggesting some settings for something, or suggesting corrections to possible mistakes...  as long as 1) it can be overridden when the behavior is not desirable without a convoluted workaround (e.g. say if autocorrect won't let you use a certain word, but instead of being able to change it back after it gets corrected, you would have to make an image file of the word you actually want to use and put it in where the word should go) and 2) the behavior helps me more than it inconveniences me (this is why autocorrect is disabled on my phone) - and autosuggesting settings, even if they're not necessarily correct right away, can be a good starting point to adjust things further.

Then some software just decides that it wants to be smarter than the user and that it knows more about how to make something look than the user does. "Hey, here's an image that could totally have more brightness/contrast!" *makes some sort of adjustment that causes any even remotely bright spot on the original to look like kinda like a lens flare* "Oooooh, look how pretty it is! What do you mean you had text overlaid on that? It can't have been that important. Not as important as making it nice and bright " Sure, I could have picked something with which that wouldn't happen - but that's a very unexpected result - there was plenty of contrast between the text and the background in the original and it was perfectly readable. Then this thing comes along and basically desides "Because you used something other than black text on a white background I'm going to mess with the colors to make the whole thing unreadable!" Screw you, program-that-is-not-entirely-unlike-Powerpoint.

Also, making a narrated slideshow is just EASIER in PowerPoint. Why? It lets you edit things so you don't have to do the entire narration portion and slide timing perfectly in one take (this program will let you upload audio from an external source, but the narration and slide timings are tied together so if you upload it then you can't add slide timings which becomes a problem when the assignment has auto-advancing slides as a requirement). So because I am too lazy to repeat the same long-as-crap thing repeatedly into a microphone until I get it perfect, as single mistake forcing a restart (I don't mind this so much if it's live, but it feels like something that's recorded should be done until it is free of obvious mistakes), I figure this convoluted setup is the best I can do with my current equipment:

1) Record into audacity.
2) Edit the audio to be correct.
3) Position microphone next to speaker.
4) Use the microphone to record the sound from the speaker into the program while adding the slide timings.

This would have worked so much better if they'd just let us use PowerPoint instead.
Also note that if you want anything more professional than "I took a bunch of pictures from Google Images and talked over them!" you have to make a PowerPoint anyway because the only way you can add slides is to import them from PowerPoint. (Assuming you want slides that are visually more than just a single picture with literally nothing else, which you probably do, because this is a presentation for a class, not a "My Vacation Pictures" slideshow.)

Also note that the school is literally paying Microsoft so that every student has access to the online versions of Office anyway so there's literally no reason not to be using PowerPoint other than "We wanted to use something that isn't PowerPoint but has a similar, but much less professional-looking unless you like convoluted workarounds, end result!"

I will also note that it's not related to open source, either. This is just as proprietary as MS Office, but like 10,000 times less useful.

Did I mention that, in order to narrate the presentation, which is a requirement of the assignment, you literally have to leave a voice comment on your own presentation, meaning that the narration is considered a comment? That doesn't make sense from a design perspective, as it doesn't match the way any other application ever uses the word "comment."

And to clarify even further: this is not a presentation class, and I have no reason to believe that they want to enforce you doing it in one take.

/endrant

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Got any stories of your own dealing with crappily designed programs? Feel free to post them here!

[let me know if you can think of a better name for the topic]

Sometimes I create partial terrain for a level and can't decide where I want to go with a level. Other times I come up with something that looks nice but I don't really know what to do with it after.

I had a thought that it might be an interesting idea to post anything you don't intend on finishing yourself, the intent being that others may take what you started and make something out of it.
(if you do this it would probably be polite to list the original author as a co-author, though )

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The attached terrain here is in a fairly preliminary state. The original concept I had for the level was that it was going to involve splitters and multiple tilesets, with some lemmings being thrown to the fire side and some lemmings going to the other side (it probably would have ended up being marble). But I wasn't really sure what I was trying to do for the puzzle aspect and lost sight of the concept fairly early on.  I might resume development on the level but if I do I'm going to do it from scratch.

Found leftovers from Rising Water gimmick.

I don't know if I have the latest experimental editor, but it is a 1.47 editor, downloaded at some point after the player was updated.

With the new update to NeoLemmix allowing background colors, it was brought to my attention that, for gameplay reasons, the background color of the Crystal set should be changed to avoid things being the same color. Just to see how things were in the Genesis version itself, I loaded it up in an emulator and noticed the background was tinted in the Genesis version.

The colors appear different. The darkest color in the crystal set is still the same as the background color, but the background color is different. So at first I was like, oh, the background color doesn't need changing, since if the background is black and the darkest color is dark blue, we're fine! Then I looked at the set in NeoLemmix and noticed its darkest color is 0,0,0. The colors don't match each other.

So I checked more colors and noticed that none of the colors actually match. But I'm not sure if it's just the emulator being stupid. It doesn't appear to be, though, simply by logic of the fact that there is both 0,0,33 for the background and 0,0,0 on the interface itself (see screenshot)



Anyway, going through the rest of the colors in the screenshot I can see discrepancies between the colors within it and the colors in the NeoLemmix tilesets.

As a result, I'd like to know more about how the tilesets were first created and try to isolate whether the tilesets are wrong or my emulator's wrong (or if both are wrong!). I remember there being Genesis versions of the tilesets back in the Lemmix (not neo) days, so I would hazard a guess that these sets are probably descended from those, especially since the tilesets contained no NeoLemmix exclusive features before I updated them - but if that's the case, how were those created?

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Upon a bit more research, I can quickly verify that the emulate-and-then-extract-colors-from-a-screenshot method is probably not the best way to go about doing things, since I was able to get different results simply by tweaking the emulator settings slightly.

I imagine that if the color data was ripped from the game directly, it's probably correct. (If we don't know, does anyone know how to extract this data so I can compare it with what I've got?).  The explanation I've come up with for the issues with the crystal set specifically would be that the palette was extracted then a palette switched performed involving the original pieces; and with black being in the orig_crystal set's palette twice, the switch didn't work correctly. I have no way of verifying this, however.

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I want the coloration in these sets to be accurate as possible where it doesn't cause gameplay issues, so if there's a color problem, I want to fix it.

I modified the existing Genesis sets to include the new NeoLemmix objects. Now, any NeoLemmix level created using the original game's sets can be converted to the Genesis styles without issue.

In addition to the objects that had been added to the original sets, I added updrafts to each set, since it's just a simple, straightforward recolor.

Now updated to 1.47! However, the updated release is for testing only. The original files are still attached to the post.
"CompleteGenesisStyles.zip" is the old 1.43n version.
"CompleteGenesisStyles-147-Beta" is the new one. It has not been thoroughly tested, so there could be issues - and while there shouldn't be any, there could be.

The new ones are not yet ready to be added to the auto-downloader!

Changes:
- Tinted backgrounds of all sets except crystal to 0,0,33.
- Changed darkest color in Crystal from 0,0,0 to 0,0,33 to better match the actual Genesis version of the game. However, to make the terrain more readable, the background was left at 0,0,0.

The screenshots are slightly outdated, but I haven't gotten around to making new ones yet.










(NOTE: These screenshots are mostly modifications of existing levels I had lying around. The versions of them that I've actually publicly released are for the most part different, so don't think you have an outdated version of them just because it doesn't perfectly match the screenshot - NeoLemmix exclusive objects were added to the levels to better show off the sets)

I noticed the dirt set doesn't seem to have one-way down arrows in it.

I assume this to be an oversight, since the auto-downloadable tileset rules state

QuoteOne-way arrows: If the set contains any direction of one-way arrows, it must contain all 3 directions.

Here is proof that they aren't in the object list.


It will not scroll down further than this, so if they're there, then there's something wrong with the object window.

I suppose it's possible I have an outdated version of the set somehow, but I'm not sure how that would have happened.

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I checked the other tilesets from the original games and did not find any others that were missing them, excluding Christmas, which doesn't have one-way arrows at all.

I'd like to make a music pack for Christmas/Holiday Lemmings (as I can't say I like how the Amiga versions of these particular songs sound), and would like to know what the tracks are called in the nxps for this purpose.

TIFU while doing a test of custom music and Flexi so I'd know how it behaves, and ended up deleting some levels. (I think only one of them wasn't backed up in some form somewhere, so not too destructive, as the majority of my levels are saved in a different folder than I was using anyway).  While the tutorial does mention this, it may be a good idea to add a bit of a warning "Are you sure? Other files in this directory will be deleted" message just in case anyone doesn't read the entire tutorial before using the program.

It seems that Havoc 11 has at least some amount of manual steel, considering when I tried to use a basher to stop a builder, the "clink" sound was played.

The replay plays up to the point where I noticed this.

(Top spoiler is temporarily concealed text while I try to fix the link in it because lol I have no idea what I'm doing)

Spoiler

Based on [url = http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2537.15]this discussion of deadly sides[/url],

I get the impression that, while there isn't necessarily agreement on how the sides should behave, there seems to be agreement that it's probably best not to rely on the behavior.

So, getting to the point here - is something like this a problem?


More information (may spoil part of solution):

Spoiler

Part of this level involves using a basher and a miner near the side of the level. This screenshot shows just this part of the solution.

Screenshot of full solution (will definitely spoil almost all of solution)

Spoiler

I tried putting steel on the edge but it didn't look very good.  As you can see from the pictures, the solid sides help.  However, I've provided excess builders (as you can see from the full screenshot of the solution), so if the sides WERE deadly, you could turn the basher around with one of those.

So: is this sort of thing - where the solid side behavior is usable in the solution, but definitely not necessary - something that should be avoided?

In most tilesets from the original games, the exit is actually two objects - one is the actual exit, while the other is just decoration.  However, I'd be hard pressed to think of an example where they are used alone, not counting a level I released a few years back where I just forgot to put the top on the exit.

I suggest doing away with these two-piece exits and combining them into one, complete object.

Regarding compatibility, I think most levels would probably be unaffected practically if the top piece of the exit was just removed completely, and the functional portion replaced with the new complete exit object.

BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/namida42/neolemmixplayer/issues/27/trigger-area-for-updrafts-is-misleading

I found this while designing a level for the contest.

If updrafts are placed such that their edges are touching each other, but there is no overlap between them, lemmings that fall through that space will be unaffected by the updraft.

From a level designer's perspective, this can be fixed by having the updrafts overlap; still, I don't feel like this is the intended behavior.

Attached is a level designed to show this off.

The lemmings from both entrances fall from the same height, both through an updraft, but the lemmings on the left live, while the lemmings on the right splat.  The terrain at the right entrance is aligned with the edge of the updraft directly underneath it; there is no overlap between this updraft object and the one directly next to it (although visually they appear as one continuous object).

This level is designed to show off the issue.  I made it solvable just for the sake of completeness, but it's not intended to be a puzzle at all (in fact you can win by doing absolutely nothing).

This issue has been fixed on own since its posting, but here it is.

Q:  I need a few of the F keys, mainly the ones that change CPU amount, the reason being that my iMac uses these keyes to adjust the volume.  Does anyone know how I can reconfigure DOSBOX to use some of my available keys so I can get back into making custom levels?

A:  I don't know whether remapping them for DOSBOX is possible, but that appears to be what the "fn" key is for...  interesting.

Since the topic already exists, it can be used for issues related to OS X and DosBox.

See thread title.  In case you can't tell, I'm talking about the editor.  It gets so annoying having to change the screenstart to 632 most of the time I make a level.  Oh, and the defualt time would be nice as well.  Actually, would there be a way to change everything to the LemEdit defaults (except level name, of course)

In a nutshell this is what I want to do.
When I create a new level in Lemmix, this is what the default stats should be IMO:
Screenstart:  632 (makes it easy to see exactly where the center of the level is)
Release Rate:  50
Time:  5 minutes
Skills:  10 of each
Lemmings:  40
To save:  20
 

I haven't looked at all the specifics yet, but I think I have a basic idea (but I haven't had a chance to test it yet) on how the levels will be drawn.  But this is confusing me - how can I get it to save the levels into a basic level format?  If anyone is interested in helping, I will release more details.  By then I'll probably have this idea tested.