On top of all this, the nuke is already too complicated.

The exact rules in 0.9 and 0.10 are: A team induces the global overtime to start running iff {{ that team has at least one point } and {{ one of the team's players has nuked by doubleclicking/double-hotkeying the nukebutton } or { that team has run out of lix }}. Global overtime runs iff at least one team has induced it to run. Lix start to explode once global overtime has run out, or if { all teams have pressed nuke or have no lix left }.

In short:
Iff exists T such that Score(T) and { Nuke(T) or Done(T) }, then Overtime.
Iff Overtime expired or { all T have Nuke(T) or Done(T) }, then exits shut and lix exploding.

-- Simon

The usual problem is: We're playing with 6 teams, each a single player, and only 4 or 5 of the teams nuke. The remaining few teams have no stake, but play on.

First hunch: Whenever an un-nuked team cannot improve its place anymore even by saving/stealing all remaining lix from all teams, Lix forces that team to nuke. Downside: This will surprise-cancel 1v1 when both players would like to play it out. Maybe apply this new rule ("Whenever an un-nuked team cannot improve ... Lix forces that team to nuke.") only after at least one team has nuked?

Related: Github #408: Nuke by Majority Vote, which wants the majority of players on the same team to nuke.

-- Simon

Edit Simon: Split off topic: Some ideas.

DanielOakfield wrote:

Visual alert on a match when one of the players has mathematically won, i.e. when the total number of lix still out is not large enough to make win whoever is losing (Team A 100 in, Team B 50 in, and only 49 total lix still out), sometimes we keep playing because we are too focused without realizing the match is actually finished. Maybe it's a matter of changing the color of the winner to green.

Flopsy then wrote:

While it seems like a great idea in games with more than 2 players, I think largely enough we only resign on a map in 2 player mode where it is clear there is not enough Lixes left on the map to overtake the leading team.
I think this feature probably never existed because a lot of the current community are very advanced in Mathematics and we usually know when we are beat and don't need the Lix engine to tell us we are beat.
Usually when we play maps with more than 2 players, we play the map to the end regardless of whether it is clear someone has won. We only leave the match early if someone has disconnected and the overtime timer is too long to wait for the nuke to trigger.

-- Simon

Yep, it's a regression. These extra sounds came with allowing to hover over other players' lix to view their skills in the panel.

It's bad and annoying. Instead, only the current player (whose skills you see in the panel) should play his assignment sounds.

Thanks!

-- Simon

Flopsy wrote:

This is an interesting case for the high end of graphical capabilities running Lix. Does the Software or Hardware fullscreen options not help alleviate this at all?
When you say text, is it all text? Or is it just the level names or just the information outside the boxes in the main menus?

I then wrote:

Thanks, these screenshots overthrow some assumptions about the text width. In 2023, I've widened a few fields, but it looks like they're still too small overall. Or the text width doesn't scale linearly with the field size; it looks like the text width grows faster.

What is your exact resolution in these screenshots? You mentioned that you play in hardware fullscreen on a 4K monitor. I've never properly tested these enormous resolutions, I thought people would prefer windowed on large monitors.

I'll reply to the other things these days!

-- Simon

Right, the feet should bonk at the metal bar from below, and the feet should stay below at all times.

Over the years, I've grown wary of allowing any motion into solid terrain at all. Avoiding such motion will make for easy mental models and it also prevents bugs. There's still a lot of such moving into terrain in Lix. E.g., too many parts of the code move the lix first and then test for terrain, when instead we should test first, then move, then test again.

QuoteWould she bonk and fall down if the gap was a bit larger?

Yes.

She bonks when the gap is 4 pixels (2 lo-res) high. She ascends when it's 2 pixels (1 lo-res) high, even without any permanent skills. Looks like this ascending has been a result of the code for over 10 years and we never found it.

I wonder if Silken (the green player in the gif) has found this himself before the session, then wanted to trigger this behavior knowingly here.

-- Simon

Lix 0.10.26

The green lix (player ID 0) is already a runner-jumper-floater. Here, she becomes a jumper:
! 828 0 ASSIGN_RIGHT=JUMPER 0
Besides this jumper, green assigns no other skills near this time.

Expected: The green lix should not clip through the steel bar because there is at least one full horizontal row of air below the bar. She should bonk against the bar and fall down onto to the big triangle.

Observed: The green lix clips on top of the steel bar.

Replay: 2024-08-18-205947-Simon-6p.txt

This bug on github: Jumper Clips Through Horizontal Bar #491

-- Simon

Lix 0.10.26 released.

Download for Windows 64-bit -- recommended
Download for Windows 32-bit -- fallback for ancient machines
Download for Linux 64-bit
Source code
Changelog
Issue tracker

How to update

Quick and dirty: Extract over your old installation. Level moves will then result in duplicate levels that remain in your level tree.

Clean method: Extract to new directory, then copy these directories from old Lix into new Lix:
user/
replays/
...and any levels that you've built yourself or added manually.

• In multiplayer, when you've selected a spawn delay handicap, the in-game panel shows you the remaining time until your first lix spawns.
  
• Fix an animation regression from Lix 0.10.25: Amanda's occult-style hatch animated only through its first 25 % of frames, then disappeared. This didn't affect physics, the lix continued to spawn correctly from thin air. Now, all hatches animate correctly through all frames again.
  
• Refactor permutations to be allocation-free.
  

-- Simon

Quote from: DanielOakfield on July 29, 2024, 01:21:01 PM
I stopped hiding parts, some levels are a few years old, but I kept them as they are for their historical value ha!

I recommend to keep everything visible. I can comb through the maps myself and make everything visible, but it will take a while. This combing is too short notice for Lix 0.10.26 which I'll release this weekend. I've kept your levels earmarked for one of the next releases. Ideally, you comb through the maps yourself and make everything visible!

We can still select the maps in the multiplayer session tomorrow even though they won't yet be merged into the main download.

Some maps are too big and they trigger the VRAM warning, and I'd like the merged maps not to trigger the warning. On the other hand, you have a particular style with those big maps, and it's interesting. No decision yet.

-- Simon

Quote from: The64Watchermake an os for the nes, then i said "i wonder if i can do that too!"
i got some progress for it!

How will this run on the NES?

You're announcing an OS for the NES, therefore it would be nice to see something running directly on the NES or in an emulator, or to see some code from you that we can run ourselves on a NES.

Wouldn't it be better if you posted your ideas to the Scratch forums, or to a NES forum? You'll get much better feedback there. Sure, some long-term Lemmings Forums members eventually post about their non-Lemmings hobbies, and we then care because we already know those members well. But you're not a long-established member of Lemmings Forums, you came out of nowhere only recently.

-- Simon

Thanks! This is a wholesome collection of wisdom.

The major hints for new players are indeed: Learn the ropes in your own small group of friends, and start with only 2 or 3 skill hotkeys.

The guide has lots of general strategy, and goes into several maps in detail. You get strategic fundamentals, opening theory even, separately for each of the 5 hatches in Great Lix in the Sky.

Some parts I had not realized until I reviewed your drafts. In Downward Reduction, it's certainly good to counter-mine in your own miner tunnels. (= If you mine rightward generally to your goal, mine leftward occasionally to stop lix from leaving the rightward tunnel-in-progress.) Some players cancel their leftward miners, but I let them continue to conserve my attention. You found that there is some strategic value in letting them continue that I never realized: Other players' lix walk rightward, up my leftward tunnel, and into my main tunnel.

I'm happy that it's even possible to write such an in-depth guide on Lix multiplayer in the first place. When I started writing the networking code in 2008, I had read online how the Lemmings 1 two-player mode "was fun". But some games become dry and uninteresting once players become proficient. It's good fortune that interest in Lix multiplayer hasn't fizzled even after 15 years.

-- Simon

New idea. We don't need to understand anything about the existing code. Instead:

• Remember which land pixel is under mouse.
  
• Zoom in/out with existing routine.
  
• Look at which land pixel is under mouse.
  
• Scroll map by difference of steps 1 and 3.
  

-- Simon

Thank you! This is heartwarming.

All the levels in the finals are magnificent. Lots of classic large-scale puzzles and ingenious small levels. Congratulations to all of you for doing so well.

-- Simon

Split off Simon blogs.

Modern Lemmings

I like to call Lix's/NeoLemmix's predominant playstyle "modern Lemmings" or "contemporary Lemmings". By that, I mean: Solving puzzles in engines that remove execution difficulty and help me turn my imagined solution into level-solving skill assignments with little hassle.

But that name is not precise. It's merely the dominant playstyle these days. There are many more playstyles. Purely by gut feeling, I'd order the playstyles from most popular on Lemmings Forums to least popular:

• Singleplayer puzzle solving with in-game tool* assistance
  
• Real-time competitive multiplayer
  
• Real-time singleplayer: pause-free challenges, RTA speedrunning
  
• Out-of-game tool**-assisted plays: TAS, research
  

(*) In-game tools: Frequent pausing, advancing individual physics updates, rewinding mistakes, asynchronous solving in skill-inserting mode a.k.a. the blue R, and assignment tweaking a.k.a. in-game replay-editing.

(**) Out-of-game tools are the typical TAS emulators with savestating, rewinding of the entire emulated machine, input listings, and RAM investigation.

I haven't mentioned hand-editing replay text files. It feels like it's both in-game tooling (the games take human-readable replay files) and out-of-game tooling (it's done in a text editor). In any case, it's so rare that I'll ignore it here.



There is no clear and precise name for the most popluar playstyle, i.e., for singleplayer puzzle solving with in-game tool assistance. I'm tempted to continue to call it "contemporary Lemmings" at the cost of imprecision. After all, each of the above four wildly different playstyles from the above list is a distillation of 1991 Lemmings's mixture of ideas. Each playstyle relies on more modern and contemporary tech than we had in 1991.

-- Simon

The topic for #nordicbots is still the same (Wed Aug 23, 2023, see my previous post). The Nordicbots homepage still hasn't printed any news since 2013.

Looks like Nordicbots and the logs will be botched forever. I'm 50:50 on whether I'd like a logging bot again.

-- Simon