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Topics - Simon

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256
Level Design / Time limits
« on: November 17, 2011, 09:23:33 AM »
Every topic must start with a geoo quote. -- Simon
Yeah, because I'm so awesome. -- geoo

We have discussed time limits several times on IRC with Clam Spammer. Looking through the level review game, several comments are "The level gives way too much time."

There are levels similar to "It's Hero Time" or "Just a minute", where a short time limit is part of the puzzle. It rules out many backroutes there, and it's the most elegant enforcement in that case. Time limits are fine there, and I will not consider these levels further in this post.

Both geoo and me think that time limits absolutely suck in most levels. They annoy the player, and never lead to more interesting solutions. Here's why:
  • It doesn't lead to more beautiful solutions. If a lemming shall to do something, a player will assign the relevant skill to him as early as possible anyway. If he forgets, with a time limit, he must boringly restart and replay everything, but without a limit, he can usually wait arbitrarily long for the lemming to return. What feels better?
  • If the player fails due time, he usually just has to do the very same thing again, just execute it faster. This is extremely boring and frustrating. Even action replay doesn't help much here.
  • The time limit doesn't add to the core ideas of a rather pure puzzle game like Lemmings. It's an arbitrary, genre-untypical restriction.
  • It's not obvious whether a solution will fit into a time limit. It must be fully played out first. Compare this with wrong skill assignments: Those can often be ruled out just by looking.
  • The player may feel clamped and will pause way more often, solely to not waste time, whether it matters or not.
  • A strict time limit doesn't allow better speedruns or comparision of solutions in terms of duration. This is still possible if the time limit is set to the maximum, or, should the game allow so, if the time limit is disabled and the game just computes the time used.
Conclusion: If you're a level designer and your time limit doesn't rule out backroutes, consider scrapping the time limit altogether. If the game requires one, the game is badly designed, and the level designer should give as much time as possible.

Unlike Lemmings, some games have lives, and the player loses a life when he runs out of time. This is absolutely horrible. Most of these games have some kind of score, and have it reset when the player has to enter the password for the level again to resume play. However, nobody ever cares about the score.

Stoneage is a DOS puzzle game which has this severe problem, i.e., unnecessary time limits, lives, and useless scorekeeping, despite being an excellent puzzle game otherwise. It's possible to set the mode to easy; this mode will just give a lot more time for the same puzzles. Even in easy mode, the countdown unnerves and irritates the player, since it's not possible to pause.

A counterexample is Avish, this is a well-designed discrete puzzle game lacking time limits, lives, and scorekeeping.

-- Simon

257
Tech & Research / L1 update order & walker physics
« on: November 11, 2011, 03:46:21 AM »
Very nice. I want to move trigger areas. Imagine my jam glass here is a trigger area, and I will move the jam onto the bun. -- geoo

Hey all!

This is an essay about the L1 update order and walker physics. Part of the information is from ccexplore's emails to EricLang, other info is from my own experimentation.

We will begin with the main update loop. Each logic update, all lemmings perform their activity. (activity = action = currently performed skill) One important subtlety is the order in which the activities are performed. We shall number the lemmings with 0, 1, 2, ... in the order they spawn from the hatch. In a logic update, lemming 0 is updated first, then lemming 1, then lemming 2, and so on. Performing an activity may write or erase terrain pixels immediately. If lemming n changes the terrain during his update, lemming m will use the updated terrain if m > n, but will have already been updated based on the previous terrain if m < n.



We shall demonstrate this effect with a peaceful scene from Fun 1 (Just Dig). In the first slide above, lemming 0 is the digger, and lemming 1 is a walker inside the same pit. The digger has just taken out a row of pixels. Since the walker was updated after the digger, he has already moved down to the lower ground in the same frame. It's the other way around in the second slide above, where lemming 0 is the walker, and lemming 1 is the digger. Here, the walker appears to float for a single frame. He had already been updated when the digger took out the terrain, and will move down to the lower row in the next frame.

If you try to replicate these slides in Lemmix, you will note that the terrain image takes an additional frame to update there, but the lemmings images and (most importantly) the physics are the same as in DOS L1. This means that the digger's row of removed pixels remains visible for one frame after it's gone, and in the first slide above, both the digger and the walker would appear to stand inside the floor.

The lemmings are drawn onto the screen in the same order they're updated. Lemming 0 is drawn first, then 1, then 2, and so on, with later drawn lemmings overwriting the earlier ones on the screen.


Our next topic is the walker.

I will use the term "effective coordinate" to mean the position of a lemming inside the level -- more exactly, the coordinates at which the game considers a lemming to be. The effective coordinate is inside the floor, directly below the foot of a lemming. To determine its horizontal position, you probably have to learn it for each skill.

For a right-facing walker, it's always under the lemming's back, i.e. one pixel to the left of the two stacked white pixels of the head. For a left-facing walker, it's always under the lemming's belly, i.e. directly under the two stacked white head pixels. See this image for examples of effective coordinates, marked with crosses:



This assymetry is caused by the walker sprite. The right-facing walker is offset towards the right. If you watch a right-facing faller turning into a walker, the lemming's body seems to advance ahead immediately by one pixel on landing. If you watch a left-facing faller turn into a walker, it doesn't advance.

The faller and splatter are some of the few sprites which look symmetrical in relation to the effective coordinate. Actually, most right-facing sprites are offset horizontally like the walker sprite. The builder and terrain remover masks have also been fit to this behavior. This is the reason why you can stretch (milk) successive bridges further when going towards the right.

When a walker is updated, it does in this order:

0. Move ahead horizontally by one pixel, no matter how the terrain looks like.
1. Check the new effective coordinate for solidness, along with pixels exactly above and below it.
2. Move vertically and/or turn/climb/ascend/fall depending on the results (and maybe additional checks).

None of these checks are about pixels to the side of the updated effective coordinate. Thus, lemmings will actually move into walls. I call a lemming to be inside a wall when the pixel(s) above the effective coordinate are solid. The details of turning around are as follows. Imagine a perfectly even landscape without humps, but with one straight vertical wall. Walkers approaching this wall will continue forward until they are inside. On the update during which they move into the wall, they turn, but don't move out of the wall yet. They'll do that only on the next frame.



The above image demonstrates this behavior. This scene is taken from Fun 30, Lock up your Lemmings. There is a one-pixel gap between the walls. A walker in this gap takes 4 frames to complete an oscillation cycle in there. Take the visible frame (facing left, inside the wall) to be frame 0. On the upcoming frame 1, he'll be in the free space, facing left. On frame 2, he'll be inside the left wall, facing right. On frame 3, he'll be in the free space, facing right. Frame 4 is like frame 0.

Instead of turning when inside a wall, they can also ascend (Lemmix calls this jumping), move down, start to fall, or climb. A climber will not move horizontally when starting to climb, so it'll actually climb with the effective coordinate inside the wall. If you assign exploder to a climber, it won't fall during oh-noing, because it is standing on a solid pixel inside the wall.

You might have noted that a walker will always walk ahead horizontally first upon getting updated, no matter what his surroundings are. There's a solution of Crazy 1 (Quote: That's a good level) by ccexplore which takes advantage of this. The only skills used are 1 blocker and 1 exploder. Block with the first lemming under the hatch. Adjust the rate to cluster everyone into the same place, except the last lemming. Explode that lemming to pave the way. This must be done with absolute pixel precision. Here's ccexplore's replay of Crazy 1, and here are screenshots of it:



The lower part of the image shows the very first frame featuring the bomb crater. The exploder had been the last lemming, so the walkers have all been updated before the crater has been generated. Thus, they're still walkers. Their effective coordinate is shown by the square. They haven't turned, since they still haven't reached the horizontal position where the wall was.

When the next update happens, their effective coordinate moves ahead unconditionally (shown by the crooked arrow that starts off towards the right), and they immediately realize they have no floor, so they start to fall in the same update.

Thanks for your attention! Corrections are welcome, as always.

-- Simon

258
Fan Corner / Stuff you did/thought when you first played Lemmings
« on: October 06, 2011, 09:25:49 PM »
Nostalgia topic, share your stories. :)

I first played the game at age 6 or 7, and most of these episodes are indeed from about that age.

I got stuck in Fun 11 (Keep your hair on Mr. Lemming). I didn't even guess what one-way arrows meant. The friend who first showed me the game saw I got stuck there, and claimed "You got stuck in that world? That's one I consider really easy...", proceeding to solve the level for me.



I got some kind of retaliation though. When the same friend played Tame 18 (Lemmings for Presidents), I told him the green crystal pieces (see above screenshot) in the ground were rockets, and you could have your lemmings shot high into the air if you went into them. He dug into the crystals -- nothing happened, of course -- and continued to dig out of the level, having to restart.

We weren't sure what the minus/plus buttons on the left of the skill panel did at first. Our dads initially suggested these buttons had some effect on worker lemmings. It took a while to see how they changed the release rate.

I drew large versions of the eight L1 skill icons once, one per sheet of paper, and decorated my room with them. My brother tore some of them apart (he was 2 or 3 years old back then) and hung up the floater icon at the top of the wall.

I played many times through the Fun and Tame levels starting from level 1, also many times through Tricky up to From the boundary line. (A huge jump in Tricky difficulty, never solved it as a kid.) I played the higher difficulties whenever I felt like it, and also managed some progress through them. However, I had huge respect of the hardest difficulty in each game. After all, the L1 Mayhem opener level is a huge steel-only level with a death drop from the entrance and massive steel walls to build onto, and the ONML Havoc opener level has a hidden icicle. My dad also solved levels back then, we worked together on our level code lists.

When I read in the L1 manual that there was a two-player mode, I tried to get a second mouse to work, but the PC version doesn't have the two-player mode. The manual was merely written to explain all L1 ports at once. Looking through it years later, I see the English section of the manual actually mentions that there's no two-player mode in the PC version, but the German translation doesn't have this note. MS-Dos/Windows 95 themselves are able to use two mice though, I've played split-screen Settlers 2, an RTS/economics simulation, against a friend.



I played endless hours of practise mode in Lemmings 2, almost always on the medieval map. When I loaded up the game in Dosbox over 10 years later, my mother came by once and stated "I vividly remember that catapult!"



As kids, my brother and me also played the Lemmings 3 practise map several times, mostly throwing grenades into "other people's lawns", i.e. from the bombs/grenades group into the spades/bricks group. Does anyone actually do much other stuff in the L3 practise level besides playing with the grenades? ;) I suppose the L3 practise level doesn't get played much at all nowadays, as the L2 practise mode is so much better with the free skill choice.

I've finished L3 with zero losses a few years ago, but as a kid, I usually just saved one lem. There is a certain L3 level in the last third of Classic, it has two hatches, one must save the other, and the spawn order is second hatch first. I don't think I made it past that as a kid. I reached the end of another tribe, but couldn't understand the subsequent English message telling me to save more lems per tribe. ;-)

I wasn't able to run Lemmings games properly after getting rid of MS-Dos at first, especially L2 is a beast to get to run natively. This added a layer of mysticism onto the fond memories, and I'm sure it has contributed to how I view the games these days.

(Apropos Tame 18 earlier... geoo should deduct a point from his quiz score: He claimed that Tame 19 was Lemmings for Presidents, and answered so quickly and securely that I took it for granted when scoring the answers later. :P)

-- Simon

259
Site Discussion / Custom CSS
« on: August 26, 2011, 03:26:56 PM »
Hi folks,

this thread explains how to override the forum's default CSS to increase the site's usability. I provide screenshots of how the amended CSS looks in my browser, provide the source code, and give instructions of how to use it.

The custom stylesheet here is actually an upgraded version of my work from the RAGE thread, but I cannot edit that post anymore as the thread got locked.

Features of my CSS

All of these features are designed to increase usability.



The zebra strips (alternating blue and white post background) are now light grey and fully white. The purpose of this is contrast. Text and link colors are much better visible on light background.



Links inside posts are underlined and have a very distinct color from the text. Visited links admit a different color than unvisited links. This is a huge gain in usability. (Without such a custom CSS, links in blue posts are extremely hard to read, and links on white posts are hard to see against normal text.) Note that my stylesheet affects only links inside posts. Regular links on the site are kept in their greyish blue, they also won't be underlined.

The site's global font size is increased to the browser default's font size.



The avatar area has only useful information. This is nice for short posts. Otherwise, the avatar area blows up the vertical post size to a large minimum length. This is even more useful if you hide signatures via your user options. If you want to hide different stuff from the avatar area than I do, hack on my CSS source.

(old) (new)

This change is optional: I'll offer two files, you can choose whether to use it or not. This change cuts the front page to minimal size. The site's logo and the flashing news are removed completely. (If you're not logged in, the login area is preserved.) The board descriptions are removed, only the board names are kept. The last-post info is inlined to save vertical space. Everything fits on one screen. (The above screenshots are taken at 1280 x 1024, smaller resolutions will benefit even more.)

Warning: With the trimmed front page, you will not easily see whether you've got new personal messages -- I strongly recommend enabling "Show a popup when I receive new messages" in the message preferences.

(Another change was preventing the forum to change Youtube links into embedded videos, but this behavior has been disabled by the admins in the meantime.)

The CSS source

Download the custom CSS which trims the front page.
Download the custom CSS which doesn't alter the old front page.

I don't want to paste the file's contents into this post. It contains the URL of the forums, but URLs are mangled by the site when posting them, even if they're inside [ code] tags.

If you do not use Firefox, you will have to edit the first line of the CSS file. Search the web about your browser's syntax expectations for custom CSS files.

Usage instructions

If you have Firefox (I use version 3.x, but other versions should do it the same way), download the above CSS source file and save it as:
(profile-path)/chrome/userContent.css

Your profile path is a randomly named subfolder of your Firefox user directory. This user directory is ~/.mozilla/firefox on Unix-like systems and something in User\ or "Documents and Settings"\ on Windows systems.

Firefox must be closed and restarted completely to accept the custom file.

If you do not use Firefox, search the web about how to use custom CSS files. As already said, you will probably have to edit the first line of the CSS file.

Comments?

If you try this out, tell me what you like, what you don't like, whether something became broken, or what your additional ideas are. If you use a different browser and got my CSS to run successfully, please describe how you did it.

If you have problems getting it to run, hunt around the web some more, post a reply, or join IRC:
irc.quakenet.org #lix

-- Simon

260
Site Discussion / Smiley additions/replacements
« on: August 15, 2011, 02:13:52 AM »
Hey dear moderators,
hey everybody else with request for comments,

the current O_O-type smiley :o looks way too timid and bored. He wants to transfer information purely with his eyes, as nothing else separates him from the regular :) smiley. I thus propose the following replacement: or even this: .

Also, *lobby lobby lobby* the forum could use this, at least hidden among the "more smileys":

-- Simon

261
General Discussion / Best quotes from IRC, Mumble and Discord
« on: May 28, 2011, 03:58:45 AM »
This one is from way earlier
Steve: Circus [the L2 graphics set] is just like "whee blocks lol"
geoo: The set isn't only [rectangular] blocks. It has diagonal blocks as well.
Steve: I don't need those screw that blocks

geoo made a <a href="http://www.puzzgrid.com/grid/1399" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">puzzgrid puzzle with 8 out of 16 entries had "clam"</a>, and the Grooved Carpet Shell is a 9th clam.
Steve: How many clams can the Clam Spammer spam if a Clam Spammer could spam clams?

Simon: My mouse moves randomly left and right.
geoo: Fix it in the code.
Simon: It's outside the game, too.
Simon: WTF my laptop keyboard and touchpad are full of water

This one was from October 2010:
Simon: me too. the builder is already female
Simon: You must iron your clothes and do stuff in presence of a female
geoo: Now I'm confused?
geoo: Is the Ironer a new lemmings skill?
Simon: You must not be lazy or the builder will stop building, and instead argue with you about meaningless stuff.
geoo: Does doing building myself count as not being lazy?
Simon: Then she will complain about not being of any value to you.
geoo: oh well...
Simon: The lix is probably more man-minded than the average female.

Go join at once! irc.quakenet.org #lix

-- Simon

262
General Discussion / geoo visiting Simon (a.k.a. Party Time POP) (NSFW)
« on: September 11, 2010, 08:24:25 PM »
Hey folks,

I don't know what to write. geoo has decided that the best way to spend five days of one's semester break is at some random dude's house.

:party: :party: Party Time POP

But those were still a little boring, so we made the following improvement:



I hope it's got something for everyone. There is medium-hard calculus for Insane Steve, a clam for the Clam Spammer, a 16:9 display from the L2 topic for ccexplore, a medieval hatch for the conservative players, a flinging grass trap for game hackers and garden lemmings, and party time POP including an ice machine for us. For Mindless, there is an unsigned char*, but it's copyrighted by GuyPerfect, so we can't show you the image's source code.

We have also failed the first level of Pushover. The time limit appears to be very hard.

We don't know what to have for dinner yet, and the supermarket is open for like 3 hours before we're going to starve. If you have any idea besides popcorn and frozen stocklems, let us know...

Also, we're approaching the late-night phase. Prepare for the worst. Stay tuned!

-- :evil: ???


263
Challenges / [Lemmings 2] Minimum skills for gold
« on: March 10, 2010, 08:15:24 AM »
Hi folks,

the forum is lacking action these days, so geoo and I had the idea for this. How many skills are required in <strong>Lemmings 2</strong>? We use the <strong>PC version</strong> of the game, and are interested in the <strong>minimum number of skill usages to achieve gold</strong> for each level. I'll update the post when new info is available.
<pre>
Level     I   II  III   IV    V   VI  VII VIII   IX    X  total
Classic   5    7    9    8    9   10    5    6   11    5     75
Beach     4    3    4    4    3    6   10    5    9    4     52
Cavelems  1    6    1    4    2    2    4    7    7    7     41
Circus    4    2    5    3    4    4    5    8    4    8     47
Egyptian  4    8    4    1    9    2    3    8    8    7     50
Highland  1    5    2   10    6    6    1    4    7    3     45
Medieval  6    6    3    7    5    5    4   10    3    5     54
Outdoor   1    1    4    4    3    4    5    9    6    3     40
Polar     6    3    3    3    8    3    4    5    5    4     44
Shadow   10    2    6    7    4    3    5    5    3    8     53
Space     2    5    7    5    3    6    8    4    5    8     53
Sports    4    2    5    5    5    2    4   10    2   11     50
</pre>
-- Simon

264
Lix Main / L++: Networked multiplayer Lemmings
« on: October 19, 2009, 03:25:18 AM »
Hi folks,

L++ Lix is a game similar to Lemmings that features networked multiplayer games. I've deleoped it during the past years in my free time, and did a lot of bugfixing for it in the past weeks. It is free software and cross-platform.

Download for Windows
Source on github (should build on Windows, Linux, Mac, others)

I'm eager to play it with you here. :-D I believe it's most fun with four players at once.

To play a multiplayer game, try to connect to the central game server via the top button in the multiplayer menu.

Contact/IRC: irc.quakenet.org #lix, chat in your browser. Or post on this board. Or send email to eiderdaus at the gmail.com.

-- Simon

265
Site Discussion / RSS feed
« on: August 02, 2009, 09:56:43 AM »
Hi,

the forum's RSS feed provides the last 5 posts.

I think that this is too little, as they often get cluttered with posts from n word stories threads or the like. The interesting posts from the general discussion topics aren't shown there completely, even if one checks the feed daily.

Could the number of posts in the RSS feed be set higher? 20 or 25 would be very nice, as the bandwith required for such feeds is very little.

-- Simon

266
Lemmings Main / Control features that make a lemmings game good
« on: July 06, 2009, 08:40:16 PM »
Hi people,

I brainstormed about what simple, yet effective features a good lemmings game should have. Many of these are implemented by the original lemmings games or by today's players like Lemmix, Lemmini etc.

I'd like to know about which of these features are something you'd miss if they aren't there, what features would see little or no use, or what features would be strictly against the spirit of the game. :-D

How to select skills:

  • Click on the skill buttons
  • Hit a per-skill hotkey (F1 through F10 in DOS times. Nowadays in 2012, Lix and Clones bind skills to letter keys of the left hand, and allow free remapping in addition. This has proven to be the most comfortable method.)
  • Go left/right through available skills (Z/X keys)

The last method is probably useful on a handheld console because of its lack of F-keys. Does anyone use the last method primarily when playing on a computer?

If the game features a release rate selection, one can:

  • Click and hold the rate buttons.
  • Hold keys on the keyboard.
  • Adjust the rate even while the game is paused. (Thanks to ccexplore for mentioning this. Quote from his first reply:) This feature is actually absent in many ports of Lemmings.  Even in DOS, its availability might be more an accident than intentional, since when the game is paused, you can only change the release rate using the keyboard, not the mouse. (End quote)
  • Double click the Plus/Minus button to set the rate instantly to its max/min. I came up with the need for this some years ago, but IIRC some Lemmings programs use this already. ccexplore's comment should be considered for this as well.

Scrolling the level around!

  • Move mouse to screen edge.
  • Speed up the screen edge scrolling if the right mouse button is held.
  • Hold right mouse button to scroll just as the mouse is moved. This is a very user-friendly way. It can still exist without problems even if the right mouse button is heavily used for enhancing the player's lemming selection. The game should allow the player to toggle the way of scrolling if he doesn't like it.
  • If there's a mini map, clicking at any position on it scrolls there.

How to determine what lemming receives a skill if the player clicks on a bunch of lemmings?

  • A normal left-click on a bunch of lemmings gives the skill to the lemming with the hightest priority. This is the basic mechanism, but one can think about how the priority is actually determined.
  • Workers have higher priority than non-workers, i.e. lemmings doing something that they still could do if they got never clicked upon or nuked.
  • If two lemmings are both workers or non-workers, maybe the one with more permanent abilities (climber, floater, swimmer, ...)  could have higher priority.
  • One could further think about whether the exploder's countdown counts as a permanent ability or not for calculating the priority.
  • If two lemmings are still equal under these criteria, the one that entered the level earlier should have higher priority. L1, ONML and Xmaslems treated the one that entered later with the higher priority, but I think that's usually the wrong one.
  • Some lemmings can't be clicked at, even if they're the only lemmings under the cursor. It might be in the interest of the player to give the climber skill to a blocker at some time, but not allowing this saves more damage than allowing it provides use. (Edit: ClamSpammer likes the idea to just give blockers low priorities better, especially if there are more ways to release blockers than in L1.)
  • One could supersede any of these rules with arbitrary exceptions, like that blockers always have top priority, even over other workers that entered the level earlier, if the skill to be given is exploder.

There are several ways to enhance the controls for selecting a certain lemming.

  • Hold the right mouse button to give the skill to the lemming with the lowest priority under the curser instead. L1 and the like had a similar feature that simply caused workers to never be selected at all. However, inverting the priorities seems to make more sense than the L1 right mouse button feature.
  • Directional selection: Holding the left/right arrow key on the keyboard will take only those lemmings into consideration that are looking in the held direction. L1 doesn't offer this, although its physics allow the blinking cursor trick. (Clicking on the far left of a dense lemmings bunch will select someone that looks right.)
  • L3 used the right mouse button to highlight lemmings. Right-clicking in the air cycled the highlighter through the lemmings that were carrying a tool at the moment. L3D had highlighting as well, but didn't use the right mouse button for it. Assuming that holding the right button inverts the priority as above, does one still need lemming highlight when playing on a computer, not on a handheld? It would then work just like in L3D. For a handheld, highlighting should be the main feature because one can't right click.

The following points are ways to enhance the clicking precision.

  • Clicking lemmings during the pause gives skills to the lemmings. It usually unpauses the game as well.
  • Instead of just having fast-forward, a slow-motion feature allows pixel-perfect precision. The lemmings could advance 1 or 2 frames per second instead of the usual 17 like in L1. Paired with the ability to pause the game at any point, one has as much time as one would like to have during any frame.
  • Zoom: Twice or even four times the size for even more pixel perfection, especially if this is combined with frame-by-frame advancement or slowmotion.

Are these good ideas? Or do you think that pixel-perfect clicking at 17 FPS is an important part of the game that should remain at all costs? Unlike the scrolling controls, this has an effect on the the game mechanics for a human, after all.

These points go in the same direction. They make a lemmings game more like a designer's tool to draw/enhance a solution for a level until it is correct. This is how a good lemmings game should present itself IMHO, because I think of the game as a pure brain teaser, not of something that punishes slightly incorrect clicking. Point out if you disagree with me here, please, as this part shows the players' philosophies like nothing else. :-)

  • Action replay: Have all the actions automatically played again when you restart, jump in right before the error, and play on from there.
  • Rewind: Go backwarts through time to correct an error, by a single frame or by seconds. If you go too far, you can go forward again, which will be the same as action replay, i.e. if a player action is undone by rewinding, it's redone by this.
  • Saving and loading complete game states, this saves time if one would be action-replaying a long part of a solution just to correct an error at a rather late point.
  • If a replay is saved to the hard disk in a human readable form, one could edit it with a text editor to insert critical moves at an early time of the solution. This way, all the correct stuff at the later time could be kept, unlike it would be if if one uses action replay. This isn't cheating at all, because the game itself should offer as many tools as it can to enhance creating a level solution.
  • Or is there a good way to implement an in-game way to achieve this so it's as intuitive for the user as action replay? Maybe as a special menu that's usually not visible.

Thanks for feed-back in advance. Maybe some features are just plain overkill, but I'd love to play a game that sports all this. :-)

-- Simon

267
Lemmings Main / Name these two skills/activities
« on: February 19, 2008, 05:13:25 PM »
Hi there,

I'm programming a lemmings variant as a hobby using C++ and the Allegro graphics/game library. I'm not attempting to make an exact replica of the original mechanics, we already have Lemmix for that and I haven't bothered yet with reading the DOS level format. I redrew a lot of the skills as well. ;-)

Recently, I've inlcuded the Jumper skill from Lemmings 2. After that one, I've come across two other L2 activities that don't seem to have a name. I've attached pictures of each. Does anyone know how they're ususally called, or does anyone simply have a nice idea?

-- Simon

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