Next clue:

table.huge
{
    width:              100%;
}
table.huge td.main
{
    background-color:   #403422;
    padding:            20px;
    vertical-align:     top;
}
table.huge td.main h4
{
    line-height:        140%;
}

-- Simon

I completely lack the necessary English pop culture knowledge, but Wikipedia -> Baldrick -> Ctrl+F "catchphrase" = I have a cunning plan. :]

-- Simon

Last one out is a rotten egg? H2S sounds smelly enough?

-- Simon

State of the art for DOS L2 is that two lems are lost in the entire game, one is the blocker in Magnificent Severn, and one in Snowed In (Polar tribe).

So Close But So Far Away (gold is lose-4) uses vertical crawling for lose-0, whereas crawling doesn't exist in L1 and very likely not in the PSP version either. Tension Sheet, which you've already seen, uses the overlap of miner and basher, which is already hard to time in DOS L2, and I don't know the exact PSP physics either to tell whether it's possible there.

Secret of Nimh has a lose-0 method in DOS which I don't recall exactly, but cc was among those who discovered it. The fundamental idea is to eschew the blocker, and instead send lots of climbers over the wall to dig it away AT-style, generating a walkable slope when running out of climbers. DOS L2 has horrible selection priority, so execution was a hassle in DOS.

Keep in mind that all of the better-than-gold solutions in DOS L2 are probably oversights of the developers, and the intended routes do not allow anything better than the gold requirement.

-- Simon

The Lemmings in the PSP walk slower, making DOS time limits more deadly, but I disagree with raising the time. That will make the level too easy. As long as the level can be beaten under DOS's time, I don't see the point.

The point is less frustration.

As I said, the levels will not get easier at all. The solution is always the same. With harsh time limits, the player merely has to execute it twice instead of once, after getting frustrated by the limit during his first execution of the correct idea. I assume you remember the time limit thread, so I don't want to warm up the matter here. Also -- it's your own remake, if you want a harsher time limit for some reason, then use it.

Do you mean the steel in Tension Sheet? I have a better picture quality of it here: http://www.lemmingsforums.com/index.php?topic=563.0 You can download it and zoom in or I can make a bigger one.

I meant the quotient of the steel block's horizontal length and the horizontal distance of two freshly spawned walkers. The idea was to judge whether the RR feels the same as in DOS L2.

-- Simon

On time limits: Your solution of Tension Sheet, which can't be sped up further by much, uses over 4:30 of 5 minutes on the PSP. In DOS, a normal solution takes around 3:30. Lengthening the time by a factor of 4/3 seems OK as a rule of thumb.

Even better -- scrap the time limits altogether (if the PSP enforces a limit, use highest possible limit). None of the 10 levels requires the time limit to rule out backroutes. You raise the quality of the levels, and you couldn't have gone with the original limit anyway due to the version difference.

BTW, a block in DOS L2 has a width of 16 pixels, and the spawn interval is 21, as stated by cc. I can't judge 100-percent accurately from the video due to blur, but your choice matches this proportion rather well.

-- Simon

Another thing you might adapt is the initial number of 60 lems on the first level; then for each subsequent level, set the initial number to the previous level's save requirement.

-- Simon

Thanks for accolade, I've striven to use as few nonstandard libs as possible to minimize hassle. ;-) Will add libpng and related libs to the instructions, they're fairly recent additions. The makefile usually grows from working ideas copied over from other makefiles, I wouldn't know how to write this exact makefile from scratch.

When I'll do the mouse workaround, I'll see whether the release key is still necessary. Maybe Alt+Tab or similar key combinations work in order to switch away from the window.

(Still really busy in real life. I'm also rarely on IRC.)

-- Simon

I do some workarounds with Allegro's (the library I use for graphics and input) mouse code, to allow for infinite mouse movement. Next version (currently busy with real life) will have a switch to use the simplest possible mouse code, at the cost of right-click scrolling.

Plain ESC should quit the game during language selection and name entry, will note that down and add that. Currently, there is the combination Shift+ESC, which exits the game unconditionally from absolutely anywhere (including the editor, where you can lose data), but this is not explained in the game.

Sound issue on 32-bit Linux: I ssh onto a 32-bit text-only machine and compile the game there, and I can't test it anywhere. Should you happen to be a programmer, you can try to compile the game from source on your machine, you will probably get sound then.  doc/linux.txt has the build instructions. Maybe this will fix the mouse issue as well, but that seems a more prevalent problem, e.g. also on Win 7.

-- Simon

Hi!

Good find. The comic has actually been posted in http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikedailly/sets/72157602069790419/" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">Mike Dailly's picture collection before, but we never discussed it in the forum, and it doesn't seem to be talked about on the net much either.

The images seem to be the same as from the linked blog, so the second part is still not on the net. Do you own that second part on paper?

-- Simon

I have found this variant of the 15-puzzle: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/oriscript4.html" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/oriscript4.html and you need to enable Javascript.

Rules: You are the white box, and in each step, you can switch places with a neighboring piece (use cursor keys). Purple pieces may only be entered/switched vertically, and the green pieces, horizontally. The object is to move the labelled green piece to the left column.

-- Simon

I'd do it with a Markoff chain, which is easy for the square, but gets large for the other shapes. Is there a trick that saves work? (Except just identifying equivalent states in the chain.)

-- Simon

The example looks like the attachment for me (Firefox 3.5)... in the CSS, I didn't touch anything for the related tags, I just increased the overall font size.

Even if there were an existing workaround with physical markup, a logical markup would really help.

-- Simon

I believe post background colors aren't universal when people select a different number of posts per page, but I haven't tested.

geoo and I use a custom stylesheet that colors the post backgrounds lighter than usual for legibility, which I value over inlined spoilers. >_> I didn't alter the layout of quote boxes, so the existing spoiler method still works.

Another drawback is that you have to explicitly tell people that there exists hidden text in the post, otherwise they won't highlight it.

You'd also have to remember the exact color number and tag syntax, although it allows inlining.

-- Simon

The notation from the PM was merely binomial coefficients, with (n k) as shorthand for binom(n, k) = n! / ( k! * (n-k)! ). I still used brackets for grouping all over the place, so a space between two numbers was actually important. The usual notation in plaintext seems to be binom(n, k), which I will use in the future for clarity.

-- Simon