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Messages - Simon

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61
It looks as if we have 3 different behaviors here.
  • Silken's open-close-open-close-... at unknown resolution, 10 times bigger than native.
  • Forestidia's white window that won't close, and that you only see in the taskbar, at 10,000 x 10,000.
  • Forestidia's flickering window that eventually closed, and that you only see in the taskbar, at 20,000 x 20,000. After it closed, Lix produced a window at 640 x 480.
If Allegro 5 succeeds in creating the display, it gives me a valid pointer to it, otherwise I get null.

More investigation/problem detection is hard. E.g., we can try to catch case 1 (Silken's case) by looking at the time until the window self-closes, and force 640 x 480 if it closes too quickly. But I have no good ideas yet to prevent the strange windows in cases 2 and 3.

-- Simon

62
Contests / Re: Level Design Contest #29
« on: February 21, 2024, 09:35:09 PM »
I'm late to the party with playing.

Since you don't allow public discussion of levels in the running: See attachment for replays without comments. See twitch stream 1, see twitch stream 2.

Where should I post feedback/replays after the polls? Will you unlock the discussion topic?

-- Simon

63


All we should need is one simple stick/line.

My first reaction: I caveman, I only understand simple stick.

Second reaction: This is far deeper insight than it looks. Whenever you put 1-pixel thick lines anywhere on the ruler, you produce those inclusive/exclusive questions. Shall you stick the marking into the ground? Shall you put it on top of the ground?

Clearly wrongMaybe correct?Maybe correct?Clearly wrong
(but still wrong)(indeed correct)

Compare this with WillLem's previous post (reply #9, which is 2 posts above this). Only one positioning looks correct there: Put the ruler's triangular base onto the ground, but not into the ground.

Thus: Let's ditch all 1-pixel thick markings. You can still have a complex ruler, e.g., by making the climber extension thinner (across its entire extra length) than the main ruler. But no 1-pixel thick markings.

Thanks, mobius! I knew that the ruler had inclusivity/exclusivity issues, but without your comment, I wouldn't have connected the issues to the 1-pixel thick lines.

Now, WillLem's lo-res ruler stumbles into the same pitfall: The ends are 1-pixel thick rods. Please either replace those with thicker ends, or make the entire ruler as thick as the ends.



I've attached one possible lo-res ruler.

-- Simon

64
General Discussion / Re: Simon blogs
« on: February 21, 2024, 02:02:22 AM »


Docking Hell

Gimp (the drawing program) has dockable subwindows. Those dockable windows are a serious contender for the prize for the most unintuitive UI. They offer the following nasty trap:

How do you re-dock a dialog that you undocked by accident?

Quote
this is maddening. i can't get any help elsewhere so hopefully someone here can get me out of this hell.
Source

Yes! Hell it is!

Quote
try as I might I cannot manage to redock it
It just refuses to be fixed like the dialogue in "Layers/Brushes" on the right.
P.S. My awkward workaroung so far is to close gimp, delete the ".gimp-2.8" folder and restart gimp again; and loose the previous settings Sad
Source

Resign, close the program, and nuke your settings.

That's a whole level worse than anything we complain about in our own software. Sure, we had the occasional NeoLemmix user cancel the replay by closing NL, then reopening NL. But never anybody had to erase the settings or reinstall the program into a fresh directory. Maybe Lix's resolution options have more lock-out potential than anything in NL. I don't even know if it's possible; it might be possible to willfully enter garbage and still somehow avoid the automatic fallback of 640x480.

Anyway, back to Gimp. When your settings directory on hard disk is more discoverable than your drag-and-drop GUI ... you've written quite some drag-and-drop UI.

You can right-click the subwindow and you'll find a checkbox option "Lock tab to dock". It's unchecked. Can you check it? Yes. Does that re-dock the subwindow? No, that would be too easy. This option prevents accidental undocking, but that's only useful before you've undocked your tab. Now it's too late, and the option won't do anything until you've re-docked, which you don't know how to do.

Solution: Drag-and-drop the tab, not the window. The window (which your system's window manager manages), called, e.g., Tool Options: You can drag this around, too, for sure, but it will never dock. You must drag the single tab from inside the window, and the tab is also called Tool Options.

When you drag the tab (not the window), suddenly, Gimp plays ball, rolls out the red carpet, and offers you nice grid previews for docking your fine dialog. Now it looks easy and well-implemented. It feels so nice that, certainly, nobody on the internet will now understand how this comfortable UI can be terrible.

-- Simon

65
Lemmings Main / Re: Inquiry about "Lemmings for Windows" Big Box Edition
« on: February 20, 2024, 02:53:39 PM »
On German Ebay, I found two auctions with a big box release:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/226011365265 with an opened box, 300 euros,
https://www.ebay.de/itm/285128162441 still in shrink, 450 euros.

I can't tell if these are international releases, or a German-only releases. They're also different boxes: Look at the text on the back of the box. On the opened box, it's is English-only; on the shrinkwrapped box, it's multilingual. I haven't found anything like these two by searching ebay.com for big-box Lemmings for Windows.

Language in international Lemmings releases has always been a toss-up. I remember that Lemmings 2 on CD was sold in Germany with a 4-language Lemmings 1 manual and an English-only Lemmings 2 manual. Lemmings 3 had a translated German-only manual.

Welcome to the forums!

-- Simon

66
Feedback from yesterday's V1 testing on levels from Contest 29: No problems on large maps either. If NL never released again, I could imagine always playing this V1 in the future without raging over surprise quits. My settings are: When no lemmings remain, exit if level is solved; otherwise, pause.

Those small elegance questions remain (does it look like a hack, do people like it, are people confused by lack of fast-forward or held-down skip buttons, etc.). They don't need answers yet because you'll have more testing first, and namida isn't yet going to pull V1 into the mainline.

I'll see when I find time to test the experimental V2.

Quote from: WillLem
I can overlay the panel (no good for reasons already discussed), plonk it somewhere on the playable area (no good, because it might be off-screen) or replace the cursor in a similar fashion to the splat ruler (yikes!).

All of these ideas: I agree that printing into the minimap is better than those ideas.

I don't see any big downsides for printing into the minimap. The minimap is always there, regardless of user options. Minor design questions arise, e.g., can you still scroll with it during the message?

To stick the message into a side/corner of the camera where it can't scroll away: This was my hunch, but it sounds like it's too hard to fit on top of existing drawing. In Lix, after Dave4's replay-cancelling confusion, I bit the bullet and invested all the extra work to print occasional text into a corner of the camera.

-- Simon

67
Lix Main / Re: Lix 0.10.20 released
« on: February 18, 2024, 08:13:05 PM »
Lix 0.10.20 released.


  • New in-game panel button: Rewind your previous skill assignment. You can then click air to erase the assignment, or unpause to let it replay. If there are no earlier skill assignments, the level restarts from the beginning. This button has no default hotkey; you can assign one in the user options.
  • Rename the options tab "Replay" to "Game Controls". Moved the splat ruler, tooltip, builder queuing, and batter priority options into this tab.
  • Eye of the Needle (lemforum Hopeless): Fix my backroute. Now, the exit platform is thin, you can't mine and then platform to turn there. Eye of the Needle is also shorter horizontally.
  • Fix #479: Fix a crash in the editor. The crash required five ingredients: You had to run a debugging version of Lix, the map was cylindrical or toroidal, you had many tiles on both sides of the the torus seam, you grouped the tiles, and you used the editor's undo feature to undo the grouping across the seam.
  • Fix #481: In the main menu, print the version of the Allegro DLLs detected at runtime.
  • Change the tree structure of internal images: Now each scalable image has a directory, which contains the different scalings (1.png, 1.5.png, 2.png, ...) of that image.


-- Simon

68
Lix Main / Re: Implement Rewind to Last Assignment Like NL?
« on: February 18, 2024, 07:34:58 PM »
Lix 0.10.20 will have the button with above idea #4: Button always shows. Framesteps to immediately before the previous skill assignment and pauses. If no earlier skill assignments, restart from the beginning, then unpause (you can then watch the hatch open at normal speed) because the restart-from-beginning button normally unpauses, and the rewind behaved like the restart-from-beginning.

There will be no default hotkey. You can bind one in the options menu.

-- Simon

69
Lix Levels / Re: Eye of the Needle
« on: February 18, 2024, 07:24:14 PM »
For 0.10.20, I'll use the version with the thin horizontal exit platform. It's horizontally shorter than the 0.10.19 Eye of the Needle. Forestidia covered the fix with Proxima's 2017 solution.

Reason: geoo worries about ease of execution for 8/10, and mobius approved this thinner platform.

Proxima, if you eventually disagree, we can change it later.

-- Simon

70
Test put the pause behaviour and see if it's adequate.

The first observation of it: The pause allows stepping into dead state, but turns even a 10-second skip into a 1-tick advance. This limits the overshooting. If I hold the 10-second skip and am 3 real-time seconds late with realizing the dead state, I've stepped ~180 ticks into the dead state, not 3*10*17 ticks. That's reasonably quick to undo with 1-second rewind.

This is solid anti-rage already, nice.

I'll play some contest levels tonight. Will see how it holds on big levels that have worse framestepping performance than the small test level. More feedback tomorrow.

Whether it's good for a release, I can't advise; I don't mind much that the 10-second skip eventually turns into a 1-tick advance, but it obviously breaks the 10-second skip's (unimportant?) promise.

-- Simon

71
Thanks for the mockup!

When this message appears, will the main map (where we play the level) jump up by the height of the message? Or do you overlay it onto the main map? Map resizing can be nasty (when to do it, lots of corner cases, violates assumptions in existing code, ...) but we aren't actively playing here, nor aiming the cursor at anything.

I agree that such extra text is better than cramming it into the panel, where it would complicate the code only to hide panel stats.

I still believe that the full freeze is the best, and I accept the inability to view future zombie behavior here. Regarding zombies, you don't worsen in comparison to existing NL, which quits here. Technically, you still accept lots of player input, e.g., skill changes, load savestate, load replays, ..., but you're right that the only useful reactions are rewind, restart, or manual quit.

Still, I, too, am interested in others' opinions. I'm biased: Lix is the only Lemmings-like that doesn't quit, and I designed the freeze for Lix, and I play it often, and I like it, and I've developed playing patterns (aggressive fast-forwarding) that rely on the freeze and take it for granted. I talked with geoo about it, and he understands how NL's quit annoys me, but the quit annoys me more than the quit annoys him. Darkshoxx played NL and was surprised (in a bad way) from the quit. Looks like he didn't expect the powerful NL to still quit here like ancient L1. But that's not an argument for the freeze in particular, only against the quit.

I'll playtest your experimental today.

-- Simon

72
Clicking the R in status bar: Yes, promising idea. The R is the visible UI element for replaying, it makes a sense to click that to cut the replay. If you animate it -- it doesn't even have to be glaring -- it will pop in the panel area. E.g., a play arrow ▶ that moves through it. It's clearer and less glaring than cheap color-changing the entire R. Let me know if you want me to draw such an animation.

The status panel has been a safe zone for clicks. If you click the panel, you don't misclick buttons yet, and neither you mis-cancel the replay (as clicking into the main map would). Now, we'll sacrifice this safe zone for newbie-friendly UI. Hard to give a final verdict. My hunch: If you want to try this, let's do it. Saving a few newbies' sanity is worth it. Or leave the bottom 10 % of the status panel as safe zone. >_>

Lemmini R: Adding the pulsating R in the main map is similar. Because you'll put it on the map (not in the panel), when we click that R, we have clicked the map, and NL will cancel the replay even if you don't write extra clicking code. It's the same in Lix: The wobbling R is in the corner of the map, and clicks go to what's on the map behind the R -- air, usually, and that cancels the replay.

Here, I'd only warn about making it too big, because it will appear constantly in pepole's solution videos on youtube. Big enough to attract new players' clicks, but no bigger.

I'm happy to try either idea: Moderate animation to the existing NL panel R, or your Lemmini R in the main map.

Indeed, Saxdude's first guesses in the panel are: Restart, pause, and then button with the R (which loads replay and doesn't solve his problem). This is promising. Only afterwards, he tries clear-physics and force-direction. He also clicks the status bar (lemmings out, goal flag), even though I haven't seen him explicitly click the red R in the status bar.



Dialogs: Let's try other ideas than dialogs first. Dialogs break the game flow (you accept this), but people still won't read them, and even if they read a one-shot dialog, they'll have forgotten it when they return in half a year after 10 minutes with a distraction. Don't put important info only in a one-shot dialog.

Option to disable replay: No strong opinion. I'd wait. We have seen people want this, e.g., Dave4 wanted this, but only after he failed to cut the replay. We'll have to see if people still want this after cutting the replay has become obvious for new players.

Cursor: Bug #400 on Lix: Scissors mouse cursor while replaying is an unrealized feature idea. I'd like the ingame cursor (crosshairs) to show scissors. The idea is that you can now click to cut the replay. It's more feedback, but untested. In NL, I'd only try this together with our other ideas.

-- Simon

73
Session is over! Recording will remain for 14 days at: https://www.twitch.tv/simonnaar

-- Simon

74
SuperLemmix Bugs & Suggestions / Re: [SUG][EDITOR] Cross Compatible Editor
« on: February 17, 2024, 01:35:33 PM »
I'll guess: The grid-based piece viewer is a tile browser with a large two-dimensional area that displays many tiles at once, laid out two-dimensionally instead of tiles all in a line. Ideally, you have the full tileset on the screen at the same time.

Pop-out is GUI speak for showing some parts of the editor's functionality in a separate window from the main program window. You can resize the windows independently. The deluxe variant is when the popping-out is optional and you can dock the pop-outs back into the main window.

For the search bar, I won't guess. Certainly, searching across tilesets is strictly more powerful, but I don't know if Giga needs an in-tileset search or an across-tileset search.

-- Simon

75
Interesting approach to move some tasks away from the overloaded ruler.

The hatch drop is 100 % local and doesn't need a mobile ruler. You can stick the splat marker for a hatch into the hatch's hover-during-clear-physics information, i.e., it appears whenever the red-yellow nub appears.

Climber ceilings are mostly local, too. From only a gut feeling, ∫tan x dx's annotated trajectory sounds like it's enough, that's cool. Still, you have to fetch a climber first. Can we add more clarity than the red color, for accessibility?

For the walker part, the movable ruler sounds like largely forced design. When you want to measure, you don't necessarily have all three of (1) the high ground, (2) the low ground, or (3) the walker nearby. Often 1-2 of these are missing. Sometimes all 3 of them are missing. The case when both grounds are missing is an argument against aggressive snap.

Downside to all this: You scatter the information across 3 unrelated features.

An argument for snap: Snap removes your need to remember whether you have to stick the red bar (D) in the ground (correct), or whether you have to put it on top of the ground (wrong), or, likewise, the top end for walkers.

But the red marker (D) is itself the source of inclusivity/exclusivity questions. Cut off the red marker, and keep only the white above. Obviously (I hope?) you must place the wite area on top of the low ground then, and you've reached the design of mobius's simple stick/line.

-- Simon

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