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Messages - Strato Incendus

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841
Closed / Re: [DISC][PLAYER] Slider physics (potential)
« on: March 21, 2020, 05:05:41 PM »
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Btw just curious, in NeoLemmix, if a shimmying climber reaches the end of a platform (i.e. a corner with a wall facing up like below), does it climb up the wall? I assume not?

Just to quickly clarify this: No, it does not. The Shimmier stops as soon as it detects an altitude increase of 2 pixels or more over just 1 pixels in width. It also doesn't turn around.

The shape of terrain you describe, though very common, can't even be handled by a Rock Climber in Lemmings 2. A Rock Climber could only handle a 45 ° slope followed by a straight wall (something the Shimmier can't do, since it can only do the reverse option, i.e. first a wall, then a slope or ceiling).

The only L2 skill that would be able to go from a ceiling around a corner and up a wall (rather than down like a Slider) would be the Magno Booter. But namida has already ruled out that one for complexity of coding.

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If a wall the lemming jumps to tops out in a ceiling, it will still slide down afterwards. The reverse wouldn't work.)

Since all level edges are deadly in New Formats, we would have to assume a solid ceiling of terrain at the top of that climb, therefore also solid ground at the bottom for this comparison.

And in that case, once the Slider touches solid ground, he will look towards the wall, i.e. immediately start climbing up again. So the reverse would indeed work, wouldn't it? ;)

This is precisely what I meant about a permanent Climber-Slider trapping himself in a loop where he repeatedly goes up and down the same wall without ever turning around.

A regular Slider would of course turn around on the wall he slid down immediately after completing his slide, but a Climber-Slider wouldn't.

842
Closed / Re: [DISC][PLAYER] The final new skill
« on: March 21, 2020, 08:57:24 AM »
I think the issue of permanent vs. non-permanent can be discussed separately again if we decide that the Slider, in one form or another, is indeed going to be the 20th and final skill.

That said, most talk in this thread indeed seems to be about the Slider.

Are there still any strong competitors? New suggestions?

Or could namida already set up a poll? ;)

843
And here are two more: English and Arab! (Also, I'm using high-res mode this time...)

The Arab lemmings are my first attempt at recolouring the X-Mas sprites. I tried to create some Star Wars Jawas with it (with brown robes and black faces), only to find out you can't actually recolour the seam of the robes (it always remains white).

Notice how the regular Arab lemmings are in white (sheikhs), the neutral Arab lemmings are in black (women in Nikabs). :P Athletes still wear green, because... well, that's just the colour of Islam.

Yet, for some strange reason, the Digger still gets recoloured to standard x-mas red (see below, the picture with the pyramid)? :D

I can't see where to specify that, unfortunately... after all, it's not a permanent skill...

844
I remember the Old-Formats pack toolkit had an option to select sprites on a per-pack basis vs. on a per-style-used-in-level basis. I always went with the latter one, but technically, it would have been possible to have your entire pack just feature default sprites or just x-mas sprites. The latter option was probably chosen by people who made distinctive custom Holiday packs back in the day?

But of course, in Old Formats, you could basically just choose between default and x-mas anyway; the only exception I know is GigaLem's Millas, and I think he just outright replaced the default sprites with his custom ones in the context of Old-Formats Millas.

In short: I don't know if per-pack choice of a fixed sprite type is even possible anymore in New Formats, because it seems like more flexibility was what people wanted more ;) . What would of course work is simply setting the theme of each of those levels to "Lemminas", or whatever sprite type you want to use, no matter which graphic sets the individual levels are using. But of course, that would change the colour of Builder staircases, umbrellas, pickup skills etc. as well, rather than having those continue to go along with whatever theme would fit the graphic set of a level. And of course, it would be quite tedious to do manually for every single level.

But I guess namida can clarify this.

In the meantime, here's another popular character turned Lemming!
With umbrellas, bridges, and Builder sacks made of web!

Note that there is no recolouring of Athletes compared to normal lemmings with these sprites! :) So this is another case of "aesthetics over strict mechanical fairness". But it simply would not look right if the lemmings sticking to a wall (=Climbers), of all skills possible, were the ones looking precisely NOT like Spider-Man! :evil:

Originally, I wanted to use the black symbiont outfit for the athletes. But that's hard to do with such low resolution, plus these sprites would only work with coloured backgrounds then.

And inverting the normal sprites to blue heads and red shirts would also be quite strange, because I'm not aware of any Spider-Man outfit (and there were many!) that looked even remotely close to such a colour scheme.

845
Closed / Re: [DISC][PLAYER] Slider physics (potential)
« on: March 20, 2020, 09:39:21 PM »
I would definitely argue against Climber and Slider being mutually exclusive, simply because of the interesting paths both can create in conjunction: A lemming can climb up a wall on the right, turn into a Shimmier to go to the left, slide down a wall on the left, and then at the bottom of that slide go back around the corner by transitioning back into a Shimmier. Combine this with the 2-way Jumper-Climber interactions and you can easily create paths that "skilled" lemmings can follow but the crowd can't.

And that is basically the point of a lot of levels. While I still get the feeling that "pioneer" is somewhat of a negative term here (because it has the connotation of the entire complexity of a level being reduced down to the actions of a single lemming while everyone else is contained safely), even a lot of the more challenging levels still require 2-4 "worker" lemmings, often in conjunction. And the fact that these workers can often take completely different paths than the crowd is what makes these levels significantly more interesting; because another thing that tends to make "pioneer" levels boring is if they're just carving out the exact same path the crowd will take later on.

One-way arrows, Swimmers, Gliders, Floaters, Shimmiers, all of these are common ways to allow worker lemmings to approach an obstacle from the opposite side, in order to create a path that the crowd couldn't create by themselves, even with enough distance between the lemmings - because the terrain simply isn't shaped in a regular lemming's favour.

Climbers and Sliders would provide many further such interesting interactions with each other, and those would only get extended even further by the combination with Jumpers and Shimmiers.

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As far as L2 goes, if I remember correctly, the transition to sliding only happens at the point the lemming walked past the edge.  Basically instead of transitioning from walking to falling, it would transition to sliding.  Jumping a slider against the wall will not allow it to start sliding.

Ah, okay, thanks a lot for the information! ;)

In other words: It's the "wall-jumping" part that's creating the problem, or, more accurately: The ambition to have Sliders interact with Jumpers as well, not just Climbers. For Climbers, it's pretty much a given at this point that they are going to interact with Jumpers both ways.

Personally, I quite like the idea of having to e.g. jump across a gap in order to reach a wall a lemming can hold on to that allows him to slide down an otherwise lethal drop safely.

That said, if we had to "ban" one interaction and I had to choose between Jumper-Slider and Slider-Climber (the latter by making both of these permanent skills mutually exclusive), I would probably rather stick to the L2 behaviour and sacrifice the Jumper-Slider interaction:
a) For consistency with L2 (for players switching from Kieran et al.'s custom L2 content to NeoLemmix, this can indeed be relevant!), but more importantly
b) because the Slider-Shimmier interaction is more important and revolutionary to me. Since the other main skill that interacts with Shimmiers is the Climber, I don't want to be forced to choose whether I can have only Climber-Shimmier- or Slider-Shimmier interactions with a given lemming.

But I think the case of the Slider being a temporary "movement" skill, like the Jumper and Shimmier as well (and the Walker, technically, counts too), can also be made, and actually only becomes stronger by going through these examples.

Much like the Jumper assigned to a Climber doesn't stop the lemming from being a Climber, but merely tells him "stop doing what your new default state tells you to do, and do this now instead!",
a Slider would tell him "stop climbing for now and slide down instead, but once you reach the next wall, you'll climb up as usual / once you reach the next straight drop, you fall looking forward, like a regular Faller".

In other words, the Slider would become the logical extension to the Jumper, in that both of these skills would be the only non-lethal skills you could assign to a climbing Climber.

As it currently stands, the Jumper is the only non-lethal skill that can be assigned to a Climber. But with that skill already being a precedent, there is nothing stopping other "movement skills" from behaving the same way.

If the Slider became such a non-permanent "movement skill", just like with Shimmiers, I think it should still be possible to have pre-placed Sliders in a level, as well.

846
Closed / Re: [DISC][PLAYER] Slider physics (potential)
« on: March 20, 2020, 06:55:32 PM »
One question we should probably discuss:

What happens if a lemming is simultaneously a Climber and a Slider and jumps towards a wall? Does he climb up or slide down? ;)

If the Slider is not a permanent skill, i.e. other than in L2, it should probably override the Climber for the duration of its assignment. Meaning, if you assign a Slider to a Climber stuck to a wall, that lemming will stop climbing and slide down instead.

However, if the Slider remains a permanent skill, it isn't clear in which direction the lemming should move when hitting a wall neither at the bottom nor the top, but somewhere in the middle. ???

One could argue that the Climber moves "forwards" and the Slider "backwards", therefore the default assumption after jumping at the wall would be climbing. If it were possible to assign Walkers and Cloners to Climbers, those could then create Sliders in the opposite direction. However, so far you can't assign either of those two skills to Climbers, and introducing this together with the Slider might result in post-hoc backroutes.

It would of course be possible to say "Assigning Walkers / Cloners to Climbers on walls is only possible if that Climber is also a Slider".

Also, there's the issue that a Climber-Slider can trap himself on a wall that touches the ground: Once the Slider reaches the bottom, he will look towards the wall, i.e. immediately start climbing again, and slide down again when reaching the top (unless you make him a Shimmier there). And since you can't assign a Walker to a Climber, there's no way to get him out of that loop at the bottom. Thus, there would have to be at least one frame of the lemming being a Walker standing on the ground (so that he can be turned around with a Walker / Builder etc.) between him being a Slider and a Climber.

Does anyone know how this is handled in Lemmings 2?

847
Thanks for the explanation. Did any of the other people who downloaded the Trump sprites (as well as the others) experience these problems? So far it says each sprite type has been downloaded 4 times, so I assume by four different people.

848
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Fancy sharing the music?

I already did, those are the tracks for Lemming World Tour ;) (and will also be used for Lemmings Open Air).

In order for them to play on levels using the standard Lemmings tracks, you obviously have to rename my tracks and replace the originals with them. Just make sure to back up the original files.

For playing my own packs, this isn't necessary, because the levels already refer to the custom tracks, rather than to the original ones. ;)

849
Closed / Re: [DISC.][PLAYER] Jumper physics
« on: March 19, 2020, 08:58:32 AM »
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My offer stands, Strato - if you fancy getting on Lemmicks 2 with me, let's do it!

What? I hadn't even heard of that offer! :D Sure, let's do this! :thumbsup: There are still a lot of unexplored Gimmicks left (and some less-popular ones that we could drop this time, like Frenzy / SuperLemming / No Gravity... :P ).

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Haha, to be fair I do like a bit of pixel-precision, but not to the extent of making something that's impossible. Besides - if an impossible element is included in a level, it renders it unsolvable. I'm definitely not into making unsolvable levels, just want to clear that up right now!

Oh, don't worry, I never claimed any of your levels were unsolvable, nor did I experience any of them as such. Just some very pixel-precise ones (I think the epitome of that was your modification of Mayhem 01, "Steel works", with the countless number of hatches). ;)

But as I said in my previous post, I realised that there might indeed be some puzzle applications for Hoist-Jumping, and that it isn't going to be as pixel-precise as I initially feared, because it's not something that just works on a single frame, but the Hoister still takes a couple of frames.

So just to be clear, I don't object to Hoist-Jumping being possible. I just wanted to pose the question whether it would lead to more of a gain for puzzle design, or whether it would rather cause confusion.

850
Closed / Re: [DISC.][PLAYER] Jumper physics
« on: March 18, 2020, 09:07:59 PM »
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Counter-point: You can assign a Jumper, but not a Shimmier, to a climber.

Of course you can assign a Shimmier to a Climber (that was kind of the point of this most important interaction)! :P Just not while he is hoisting...

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However, a Hoister can also come from a non-climber now. I'd rather not make this dependent on "is the lemming a Climber or not"?

With that part I completely agree, since it's not visible to the player whether the lemming is hoisting as a Climber, Shimmier, or Jumper.

Of course, an athlete will have different colours, but those don't necessarily indicate a Climber. And as soon as a lemming as two or more permanent skills, i.e. is no longer just called "Climber" when hovering the mouse over him, the player actively needs to press ALT to see which skills he has.

Sure, usually players know what state a lemming just transitioned from - but I guess it would be technically possible to place a pre-placed Climber or Shimmier in such a position that he hoists right at the start of the level... and then the player wouldn't know... :D

Maybe now I'm being more puristic about the "everything-needs-to-be-visible-from-the-start puzzle philosophy" than anyone who's actually endorsing that philosophy... so feel free to accuse me of straw-manning this time :P ...

But consistency of behaviour is of course something we always strive for in general, so any type of Hoister should behave the same way in this regard, as you said.

851
Closed / Re: [DISC.][PLAYER] Jumper physics
« on: March 18, 2020, 06:28:37 PM »
Thanks for the overview! ;) In other words: You can't assign a Shimmier to a Hoister.

Based on that, would it be reasonable for the player to assume that they can assign a Jumper to a Hoister?

Puzzle-wise, I think the most important gain of this mechanic would be allowing the Climber to turn around before looking forward again as a Walker.

Additionally, and easy to overlook, is the fact that Shimmiers and Jumpers can also become Hoisters now; iit would thus allow a Shimmier arriving on a platform slightly higher than his feet (causing him to hoist) to immediately jump into the other direction (same for a Jumper).

It would probably not be possible for a Shimmier traveling along a thin platform to immediately turn around through Hoist-Jumping after his arrival and jump on top of the platform he shimmied along before. He would most likely just bump his head on the ceiling he shimmied along and fall down looking in the opposite direction.

Unless you clone the Shimmier shortly before the original arrives, then bomb the clone to make space, so that the original can arrive, hoist-jump to turn around and jump over the Bomber gap created by the Shimmier clone, to then land on top of the platform he shimmied along before.

Do you understand what I mean? ;) It's probably hard to explain without a RC build allowing hoist-jumping to demonstrate.

852
Closed / Re: [DISC.][PLAYER] Jumper physics
« on: March 18, 2020, 06:15:37 PM »
I'm sorry, I didn't mean that to be an accusation - just something that would fit the level design philosophy he actively stated he enjoys personally, and thus, this would be completely fine in my book ;) . I am aware he's actively trying to create levels that go along with the majority opinion in the NeoLemmix community.

I do think this might result in some pixel-precise levels - because otherwise it might rarely make a notable difference whether a regular Climber vs. a Hoister jumps, unless the level designer actively enforces it.

But fortunatly, the Hoister animation takes a couple of frames, so it should still be comparatively reasonable to assign any skill to a Hoister in general.

I just don't remember any particular other skill that you can assign to a Hoister?

853
Thanks a lot for converting these, Arty! :thumbsup: I've been looking for an excuse to replay all the original Lemmings levels with my custom recordings of the original Lemmings tracks... without boring myself to death due to already knowing all of the solutions.

Now I have something that will look, sound, and feel like original Lemmings, but still give me some new nuts to crack! :D

854
Ah, okay. Well, thanks for making the effort to specify two colours each for the Lara Croft sprites - as well as for the manual recolouring - but so far, it doesn't seem necessary to do so: ;) All of my "just-recoloured" sprites also turn to two different shades of their respective colour when I switch to High-Res mode.

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Side note: I can't get the Donald Trump and other sprites to work btw, in either resolution. I choose them as the theme but I'm only getting default colourings...

Thanks for reporting the error; how exactly did you go about this? Did you import the entire folder into "styles", and then the theme inside that folder?

They all work perfectly fine for me, and since all of these theme files just refer to and then recolour the default Lemming sprites, for which everyone needs the pngs, I don't see which files I could possibly have on my PC that you don't have. ???

855
Closed / Re: [DISC.][PLAYER] Jumper physics
« on: March 18, 2020, 11:59:57 AM »
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Ascender - Jumper and Ascender never directly transition to each other.

Haha, the "old" Jumper to the "new" one! :thumbsup: So I guess this means it's not possible to assign a Jumper to an Ascender (just like it's not possible to assign most other skills to Ascenders).

But couldn't a Jumper theoretically land on such a spot of terrain that he would have to ascend right away after landing (without ever being a regular Walker in between)? Or would he just "bump" against a "6-pixel wall" and turn around instead? What about altitudes lower than 6 pixels but higher than 1?

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Hoister - A jumper hitting a wall very slightly further than the distance he can just step on to it, will become a Hoister. Jumper cannot be assigned to a Hoister (maybe it should be possible, as a "last-second wall jump"?).

Thanks, the first part answers what I was asking! :thumbsup: So it will act just like the Shimmier in that case.

Regarding Hoister-to-Jumper transitions: If those are possible, I can already see WillLem create a pixel-precise level with a trap right at the top of a Climber's path, and a platform behind the Climber that you have to jump to, but the platform is placed at such a height that you can only reach it from the top of the wall (=where the trap is). :evil: In that case, you couldn't assign the Jumper while the lemming is still climbing (because he'd jump too low and miss the platform behind him), but you couldn't wait until he had finished climbing either, because then he'd go into the trap.

Or, alternatively, there wouldn't be a trap, but since the lemming would jump forward again once he is a Walker again, the Hoister state would be the last chance for him to turn around as part of the jump.

So I think, the main question should really be: If Jumpers can be assigned to Hoisters, do they jump forward (as soon-to-be-Walkers), or backwards (as still-Climbers)? ;)

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