3031
Forum Games / Re: Zendo, play by forum
« on: December 09, 2015, 03:01:36 PM »
The joys of debugging.
Y
YR
YRA
WRAPPE
WRAPP
UBBLE
ULE
-- Simon
Y
YR
YRA
WRAPPE
WRAPP
UBBLE
ULE
-- Simon
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3032
Lemmings Main / Re: December 2015 Level Collaboration
« on: December 08, 2015, 07:53:55 AM »ended up with a level that wasn't solvable because people lost interest.
You could make solvability an invariant: Every changeset shall be submitted with a solving replay.
That's good practice anyway in level design, even if it's more effortful.
Quote
rule of "do not tamper with the past additions to the level" should be re-thought.
Yes. I feel that rule was too low-level.
At the highest level, a puzzle is a collection of ideas. The player needs to find the series of correct ideas that lead to a solution. It's nice if the ideas bind together under a common theme, or interleave with each other. You wouldn't want to kill ideas in full from a level. But you can keep ideas mostly intact even under massive restructuring of terrain.
QuotePerhaps we should agree before hand on somethings like: starting with a set of skills?first design the level, then work together to see what kind of challenging stats and skillset we can come up with
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design the terrain first and do not add any objects, change skills or level stats, etc.
For the same reason (puzzle is collection of ideas), skillset and gadgets should be neither fixed beforehand, nor tacked on as an afterthought. They change hand-in-hand with the ideas found in the level.
-- Simon
3033
Site Discussion / Re: IMPORTANT: Forum Software Update
« on: December 04, 2015, 09:23:27 AM »
No regressions so far. All of these bugs are still fixed:
* clicking Javascipt smiley button inserts space after smiley code
* text files attached to PMs are truncated by (number of newlines) chars
-- Simon
* clicking Javascipt smiley button inserts space after smiley code
* text files attached to PMs are truncated by (number of newlines) chars
-- Simon
3034
Lix Main / Re: Lag vs. recalculation in Clones (2011 thread)
« on: December 02, 2015, 02:26:25 PM »
I'll try it with backtracking, because that's the obvious thing from the current design, and it should work.
The challenge is performance. On an idle map, performance of video bitmaps is already miles beyond the memory bitmaps in C++/A4 Lix. I ran the C++/A4 game at 16-bit colors, 640x480, anything else would make noticeable dents in the performance on my 9-year-old machine.
The D port hits 60 FPS on small maps, but bashing/digging is taxing on performance during the terrain-removing frame. Drawing to lookup map (for physics) and to the land (for visuals) is passed through an extra class that collects and dispatches outstanding drawings. The idea is that it's easier to profile, and to allow geoo/anyone to easily try some wizardry later.
Profiling is a little tough. geoo and I believe the graphics card caches lots of outstanding jobs, acting like a side thread, allowing the main program to continue. Measuring a block from beginning to end therefore doesn't profile the graphics card's total work.
The plan is to optimize in case we have immediate good ideas, but not concentrate 100 % on performance. It's more important to get working singleplayer out for people to test.
-- Simon
The challenge is performance. On an idle map, performance of video bitmaps is already miles beyond the memory bitmaps in C++/A4 Lix. I ran the C++/A4 game at 16-bit colors, 640x480, anything else would make noticeable dents in the performance on my 9-year-old machine.
The D port hits 60 FPS on small maps, but bashing/digging is taxing on performance during the terrain-removing frame. Drawing to lookup map (for physics) and to the land (for visuals) is passed through an extra class that collects and dispatches outstanding drawings. The idea is that it's easier to profile, and to allow geoo/anyone to easily try some wizardry later.
Profiling is a little tough. geoo and I believe the graphics card caches lots of outstanding jobs, acting like a side thread, allowing the main program to continue. Measuring a block from beginning to end therefore doesn't profile the graphics card's total work.
The plan is to optimize in case we have immediate good ideas, but not concentrate 100 % on performance. It's more important to get working singleplayer out for people to test.
-- Simon
3035
Lix Main / Lag vs. recalculation in Clones (2011 thread)
« on: November 30, 2015, 11:22:15 AM »
Hi,
Icho was visiting me at my office, and I wanted to show him the thread on clonesgame.com about lag. I didn't find the thread in the private beta testers forum. It turned out to be in a public board. :-]
So, it's linked above. It's for cultural reference mainly. Maybe ideas from there will be interesting for the D/A5 port of Lix.
-- Simon
Icho was visiting me at my office, and I wanted to show him the thread on clonesgame.com about lag. I didn't find the thread in the private beta testers forum. It turned out to be in a public board. :-]
So, it's linked above. It's for cultural reference mainly. Maybe ideas from there will be interesting for the D/A5 port of Lix.
-- Simon
3036
Lix Main / Re: D/A5: Scaling pixel art, opportunity to help
« on: November 30, 2015, 07:39:27 AM »
Excellent -- thanks for this work!
More detailed comments will follow once I'll examine them closer. If you're unsure about tiny details or have skipped a few frames, no problem. This can always be fixed later, or I'll make fixes myself.
Green frames: These are displayed when the player has won in singleplayer/is in first place. They could be autogenerated from the grey frames, but they're so few that I didn't write extra code for them.
-- Simon
More detailed comments will follow once I'll examine them closer. If you're unsure about tiny details or have skipped a few frames, no problem. This can always be fixed later, or I'll make fixes myself.
Green frames: These are displayed when the player has won in singleplayer/is in first place. They could be autogenerated from the grey frames, but they're so few that I didn't write extra code for them.
-- Simon
3037
NeoLemmix Main / Re: Player V1.36n Pre-Release
« on: November 30, 2015, 03:06:19 AM »
Re: private test version sent via PM at 02:32 UTC:
I don't have a German keyboard. :-] And the system language is English. But I have most keys mapped around, maybe that's still useful for feedback.
Hardware-Capslock is mapped to Backspace. NL's hotkey dialog, click Find key, press hardware-capslock, the dialog highlights Backspace. Hardware-S is R, I press hardware-S, Find key finds R. This seems good; I expect similar good results on a German layout, as long as the bound function exists in the dialog.
Therefore, no idea what it does for keys that are bound to umlauts; hardware-semicolon is bound to ö on the German layout. Nepster/Icho might test this.
However, click Find key, press Hardware-arrow-left, which is mapped to arrow-left, it doesn't highlight anything and keeps the previously highlit list entry highlit.
The dialog presents , and . instead of < and >, both for hardcoded and non-hardcoded key names. This is good. I assume the non-hardcoded keys come from a Windows/Wine library, and they depend on the system language, which is English, not German.
With non-hardcoded keys, KP_Left is what you call Left Arrow. I can map stuff to that, and it's still triggered by the inverted-T arrows. So, find-key doesn't find the key, but the binding works during the game nonetheless.
The bindings that worked with find-key also work in the game: Find-key, press hardware-D, highlighting S which is correct under my layout, map builder to this. Start game, press hardware-D, it selects builder.
Icho has a German system and a German keyboard, maybe send him the version, too.
-- Simon
I don't have a German keyboard. :-] And the system language is English. But I have most keys mapped around, maybe that's still useful for feedback.
Hardware-Capslock is mapped to Backspace. NL's hotkey dialog, click Find key, press hardware-capslock, the dialog highlights Backspace. Hardware-S is R, I press hardware-S, Find key finds R. This seems good; I expect similar good results on a German layout, as long as the bound function exists in the dialog.
Therefore, no idea what it does for keys that are bound to umlauts; hardware-semicolon is bound to ö on the German layout. Nepster/Icho might test this.
However, click Find key, press Hardware-arrow-left, which is mapped to arrow-left, it doesn't highlight anything and keeps the previously highlit list entry highlit.
The dialog presents , and . instead of < and >, both for hardcoded and non-hardcoded key names. This is good. I assume the non-hardcoded keys come from a Windows/Wine library, and they depend on the system language, which is English, not German.
With non-hardcoded keys, KP_Left is what you call Left Arrow. I can map stuff to that, and it's still triggered by the inverted-T arrows. So, find-key doesn't find the key, but the binding works during the game nonetheless.
The bindings that worked with find-key also work in the game: Find-key, press hardware-D, highlighting S which is correct under my layout, map builder to this. Start game, press hardware-D, it selects builder.
Icho has a German system and a German keyboard, maybe send him the version, too.
-- Simon
3038
Forum Games / Re: Family Feud 2015
« on: November 29, 2015, 05:58:57 AM »
Thanks for the quick clarifications.
The wraparound metric is news for me, can't find it anywhere in Q11.
-- Simon
The wraparound metric is news for me, can't find it anywhere in Q11.
-- Simon
3039
Lix Main / Re: D/A5: Scaling pixel art, opportunity to help
« on: November 29, 2015, 02:21:22 AM »
Minim: In case you've done a few frames already, would you mind sharing some early results?
Some finer points, I haven't pointed them out in detail. I'd like to make sure we're on the same track with them.
E.g., I'd like to retain the original's palette, thus not use antialiasing. (The colors are replaced at runtime by a table lookup.) Shadows should keep their relative thickness, not stay at a thickness of 1 pixel. Adding detail is OK, maybe even appreciated with lix-depicting buttons. There is a second, darker shade of hair (see lix spritesheet) that is also perfectly OK in the skill buttons.
-- Simon
Some finer points, I haven't pointed them out in detail. I'd like to make sure we're on the same track with them.
E.g., I'd like to retain the original's palette, thus not use antialiasing. (The colors are replaced at runtime by a table lookup.) Shadows should keep their relative thickness, not stay at a thickness of 1 pixel. Adding detail is OK, maybe even appreciated with lix-depicting buttons. There is a second, darker shade of hair (see lix spritesheet) that is also perfectly OK in the skill buttons.
-- Simon
3040
Help & Guides / Re: Dovelems..?
« on: November 28, 2015, 02:44:19 AM »
Perfect! What are you doing differently now than you did before?
-- Simon
-- Simon
3041
Help & Guides / Re: Dovelems..?
« on: November 28, 2015, 01:49:19 AM »By 'the program,' are you referring to Lemmini itself or the DoveLems pack?
Lemmini.
Quote
I have Lemmini
Do you have Lemmini as a JAR file, or as a JLNP? Icho has linked to the JAR in reply #8. You get the JLNP at the big, fat download link on lemmini.de, but that is not what you want. You want the JAR.
Quote
If I just click on the Lemmini application, it is launching Lemmini with the standard starting screen.
Has it always done that? When you were running it for the first time, did it ask for the location of Windows Lemmings?
Quote
When I click to extract Lemmini, I find all of the folders I have previously mentioned, but not the 'Levels' folder.
Don't do that, as namida and Icho have explained already.
-- Simon
3042
Lix Main / Re: D/A5: Scaling pixel art, opportunity to help
« on: November 27, 2015, 07:14:09 AM »Have you got nicely upscaled Lix?
No. The pixelled version with most details for lix is the 1x version of skillico.
Are you concerned with how the character should look like ideally? It may well happen that smoothening out the nearest-neighbor upscaling throws up such questions.
There's already-built binaries for the project it's forked from
"There exists on the internet" => link to the goodness. >_>
Haven't installed Mono here, so it doesn't run in Wine for me, but might be super useful for Minim.
Quote
and to be quite honest, I'd quite like to do so if not too difficult.
If you're okay with implementing large lookup tables, go for it. Sounds very useful if you want to target terrain, not only a finite number of GUI elements.
-- Simon
3043
Lix Main / Re: D/A5: Scaling pixel art, opportunity to help
« on: November 27, 2015, 06:08:44 AM »
namida: Looking forward to your experiments. If you build from source, post Windows binaries. 
-- Simon
-- Simon
3044
Lix Main / Re: D/A5: Scaling pixel art, opportunity to help
« on: November 26, 2015, 10:20:44 AM »there's one I'm not sure about. Has this image below been neatly upscaled already?
This has been used for a big, fat button, and is not upscaled. (Occurs in the editor's terrain-adding menu, as a paging button in a directory with many tiles.) Especially in the editor, I don't know if I'll use all the existing graphics as they are, or do things differently.
If you'd like to concentrate on images with immediate effect in the already-programmed portion, skillico and game_pan might be the most interesting ones. The user interface here will likely stay very similar to the familiar one in C++ Lix.
My half-hearted attempts at manual rescaling, maybe there's something reusable there. But scale200/skillico, for example, is a pure nearest-neighbor upscaling, and could be scrapped immediately when something smooth exists.
-- Simon
3045
Lix Main / Re: D/A5: Scaling pixel art, opportunity to help
« on: November 26, 2015, 09:05:48 AM »
[09:47] <geoo> SimonN: isn't it enough to just have a 4x scaled image, and then scale it down accordingly?
No, not enough. (Smartly upscaling too much, then automatically downscaling by a simple algorithm) is worse than (smartly upscaling to the wanted size), especially if the downscaling is not a division by an integer.
[09:48] <geoo> btw, the magnifying glass in your latest screenshot is missing its shadow in the middle
Yes, bug, and it annoys me every time I look at it. :-] It's in a file that needs work anyway, so I haven't filed an issue in the tracker.
[09:49] <geoo> and then there's the question about the paws, they are cute but completely unintuitive
[09:50] <geoo> two bars are the usual symbol for Pause, which changes to a triangle when the game (or music track, more commonly) is paused
Yeah, cuteness never excuses sloppiness. Two vertical bars on such a large button are boring, but a universally known symbol.
The counter-argument is that >= 95 % of Lix users have played Lemmings. For these, the paws are way more idiomatic and recognizable than the vertical bars. The counter-counter-argument is that only Lemmings fanatics have stumbled onto the game so far, because it's nowhere advertized.
[09:51] <geoo> hmm what about vector graphics, actually? but that's probably to complicated
Yeah, I consider it too complicated -- for now. I'm mostly satisfied with the existing pixel art, and smart scaling algos are worth a shot.
-- Simon
No, not enough. (Smartly upscaling too much, then automatically downscaling by a simple algorithm) is worse than (smartly upscaling to the wanted size), especially if the downscaling is not a division by an integer.
[09:48] <geoo> btw, the magnifying glass in your latest screenshot is missing its shadow in the middle
Yes, bug, and it annoys me every time I look at it. :-] It's in a file that needs work anyway, so I haven't filed an issue in the tracker.
[09:49] <geoo> and then there's the question about the paws, they are cute but completely unintuitive
[09:50] <geoo> two bars are the usual symbol for Pause, which changes to a triangle when the game (or music track, more commonly) is paused
Yeah, cuteness never excuses sloppiness. Two vertical bars on such a large button are boring, but a universally known symbol.
The counter-argument is that >= 95 % of Lix users have played Lemmings. For these, the paws are way more idiomatic and recognizable than the vertical bars. The counter-counter-argument is that only Lemmings fanatics have stumbled onto the game so far, because it's nowhere advertized.
[09:51] <geoo> hmm what about vector graphics, actually? but that's probably to complicated
Yeah, I consider it too complicated -- for now. I'm mostly satisfied with the existing pixel art, and smart scaling algos are worth a shot.
-- Simon