I think just the ones I've listed as backroutes – Square Dancing and Wrap your head around this one. Again I'm not sure how these can be fixed but I'm sure we can think of something

Hey folks,

Firstly can I just say that you all are amazing solvers and I'm really impressed that you've found pretty much all of my intended solutions in my absence

Between the replays I've watched (Simon's replay collection on GitHub, and the new zip file), these are the levels I haven't seen intended solutions to:

Backroutes:
Square Dancing: I have various alternate solutions but none involve blocking in the starting platform. That was quite an oversight and I'm not sure how to fix it
Urban Ledge-End: My solution attached, and yes it does involve [trick mentioned in spoilers]. This can probably be enforced by adding steel to prevent the other solutions, though those are nice in their own right and not too dissimilar to mine.
Wrap your head around this one: Jumping into the ceiling is not intended. (This doesn't work in the old version with the trampoline - the lix lands in the wrong place.)

Not intended but not backroutes:
Beaten into shape: Not what I had in mind but arguably fits the title even better!
Builders without borders: All my solutions involve some kind of holding pen; good job completing the level without one! Earlier versions had more lix so this was required (not enough walkers).
Over and under and out: Uses the same trick as my solution but seems more complicated and more precision required.
Send in the square squad: My solution is a bit simpler (and doesn't use flinging!)
Turning the screws: I didn't realise you could free the blocker with a falling bomber. Essentially the same solution though.
Dig This: Interesting placement of the digger – thanks to this I found a way to solve this with a digger spare! (attached)
Lix Recycling Plant: Neither is the same as mine, but they use all the skills so it's ok.
Just Drop In: I had no idea you could go over the top. This is great! My solution is more true to the title.
Lost? - It never occurred to me that the umbrella might come into play . I'm sure if you took the umbrella away you'd find another solution quickly enough
Polar Pop: It didn't occur to me that you can get the lix to cross over to the other side (or rather, that doing so would be productive). If you change the pole to steel you might get a solution closer to mine. The skills used and number saved are the same so it's not really a backroute.

Other notes/comments
The replay to Shelf Life desyncs – but due to the nature of the level still solves with 20/40 saved.
Chaos Theory is a nuke level (therefore no longer works) and is completely luck-based

I'll post intended solutions to more levels when I get a moment.

MUMS puzzle hunt starts May 9th. I'm preparing* by doing lots of crosswords!


*I'm really just doing these to kill time during my lunch break. But preparing for puzzlehunt sounds far more noble :]

The mossy-steel issue raises an interesting conundrum. Intuition says there's a steel block underneath the moss and you shouldn't be able to break through it. But by adding the moss you've actually erased the steel, because the physics map is two-dimensional and doesn't support a layer of steel under terrain.

With simple autosteel and manual steel, the player can't determine their extent without experimenting. This applies even if the options are available but not used. The simplest thing is for the moss to always be breakable - what you see is what you get. (As a side benefit, it's easy to create arbitrary steel shapes by erasing (or covering) with terrain .) Yes, this limits decorations a little - but IMHO it's worth it for consistency.



Regarding entrances, I recently had a (brief) discussion with Simon (near bottom of page) about overlaying info on the entrances. There's information hidden from the player currently:

• Entrance order (as mentioned above), though this quickly becomes apparent.
• Which way the lemmings face when spawned (Lix has left-facing entrances, not sure if NL does too); again quickly becomes apparent.
• Time until next spawn; this remains an issue until the last lemming is out, but it's probably more of an issue because of variable spawn interval.

Showing these things gets you closer to "solve the level by merely looking at it". But writing on the map is really ugly . Entrance info is critical at the beginning, but quickly becomes redundant. So I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it's surely worth thinking about. Maybe there are better ways to handle this?

Icho was with me yesterday. He strongly suggests to keep the manual setting. A sloppy screen start can kill an otherwise splendit first impression of levels. He readily agrees that in 95 % of levels, the automatic setting would suffice, which is not enough.

I like this point. But can level authors do any better with a manual setting, given that they now have to contend with arbitrary resolutions, some of which they can't even test themselves? I suspect the answer is yes, but it's far from trivial to put into practice. Even now, looking over my levels in the default windowed resolution, I'm not convinced I've set the screen starts correctly – though whether the algorithm would do any better is another matter.

Anyway, regardless of which gives the "better" result (if you can even measure that), perhaps manual setting wins on principle:

The computer shall not try to be smarter than the user.

---

Related issues that have come up on IRC since this topic was started:

• Default zoom level: If the level fits twice over on your resolution, should the view be zoomed in by default? (Initial thought: no, for the sake of consistency – though it does look really odd having such wide borders around the level.)
• Wrap: Should sections of the level appear more than once? If not, how do you tell the player that the map wraps around at the edge? (Initial thought: no, and maybe you don't need to do anything special?)

• Clam: Is that bug fixed? Misalignment of physics/graphics in Leaky Building Syndrome

-- Simon

It's fixed . The level now looks exactly like it did before.

Previewing and loading levels is noticeably faster compared to 0.2.9 (the last one I downloaded). A reasonably large level took half a second to load, now it's less than half that (though it's hard to measure times on this scale).

It's not mentioned here, but Simon and I had a chat about this shortly before he started the topic. And when I first saw the topic, it already had a page full of replies, which I'll admit put me off posting, especailly since I'd given my views on IRC already. But it's more visible here, and I've thought of new things since. So:

I'm firmly in favour of culling variable spawn interval. And this is coming from a level designer .

My main problems with VSI:

• Tedious micromanagement. I'd rather not put the player through that, or let them do it to themselves when they don't need to.
• The "red-herring" factor. Is this one of the few levels where you actually have to fiddle with SI? Maybe not, but it's always nagging in the back of the mind.
• Too much freedom at no cost. How many skills is that worth?
• Inconsistency in the minimum SI. Is it 1, 4, same as max, or something else?
• You're controlling the hatches as well as the rodents. IMHO that's not supporting the core idea of the game.

Against culling VSI:

• Loss of control compared to what we're used to. That takes some adjustment.
• Upsetting level designers. My hunch is this isn't so bad when culling one feature, but gets increasingly worse with the number of culls.

Effect on my levels if VSI is culled:
(Henceforth: FSI = fixed spawn interval, applied to a single level.)

• Two have VSI as their core idea and would be lost.
• One needed VSI but I've recently adapted it to FSI.
• The rest (about 90) either already have FSI or (IMHO) lose nothing if changed to FSI.

I can definitely live with that. But in my case, the damage is spread thinner over more levels – I have roughy a "pack" worth anyway. I empathise with designers who lose a larger proportion of their levels to this.

Agree with Simon about the trampolines. It's too unpredictable where the lix will land after falling on one, which means you have to send a lix to test it before you can formulate a solution around it. Other flinger objects can suffer from this too (tractor beams not so much), though trampolines are the worst offender because the result depends on how the lix approaches it. They end up being more frustrating than fun – especially for the backroute-conscious level designer

My one objection to culling trampolines would be that two of my favourite levels use them – but I've just now edited them out (pending backroutes of course!). Trampoline-less versions of Inside The Fourth Wall and Wrap Your Head Around This One! are attached.