Quick update.

We currently have this:



It seems to work nicely. I'd be happy to expand the functionality to support levels.nxmi if we later think it's necessary.

İf you want to edit by levels.nxmi, you can currently use the player itself(edit level).
By the way, if you use  "Edit Level" the editor shall open and you make the necessary changes. Save .... Exit
When you return to the player the changes will not show. You have to exit the player and run it again.

Quote from: WillLem on June 16, 2026, 09:00:00 PMWhat about lemmings with permanent abilities? Keep it the same as it is now?

Yes, I think you can keep permanent-ability lemmings as they are, light cyan (0, 0xFF, 0xFF). The idea behind the medium blue for plain lemmings was: Medium blue is noticeabley darker than light cyan, but both colors still contrast well with anything really dark for the gadget silhouettes.

If you happen to release CE with static physics colors by Sunday morning, I'll playtest it on the planned livestream (Sunday, June 21, 13:00 UTC) and I'll prompt the chatters for opinions. But you do you. If you ship other bugfixes, I'll playtest those fixes instead. And I'll have a few more topics to post anyway, based on handwritten notes. These topics will trickle in at a slow rate. When I write a topic, I want to present an argument and be able to react to your questions.

Quote from: WillLem on June 16, 2026, 09:00:00 PM3 reasons:

Thanks for the reasons, at least I don't have to write long essays about human perception then. At most, I might eventually argue to make the static setting the default. But that's for after the user testing.

-- Simon

Quote from: Simon on June 15, 2026, 01:15:07 PMYou can print the filename next to these buttons. Or you can caption the buttons with "Level <<" or "Previous Level" or similar.

There isn't enough room to print the filename next to the buttons (the status bar uses this space), but we can certainly label the buttons with "Previous Level" and "Next Level", or [<<] Level [>>] where the word 'Level' is a simple label between the two buttons, to save space.

Quote from: Simon on June 15, 2026, 01:15:07 PMWith this implementation, there are now three meanings of "next level" in the NL ecosystem:
...
The concern for the editor: Do you really want a third way #1? Which of #2 and #3 makes more sense?

For the Editor, there will always be scenarios where a level is opened from within a folder of levels which may not yet have been compiled into a pack. In this scenario, the user may still want to navigate between all of the levels in that folder.

Even after ordering them (using the levels.nxmi), the Editor should arguably still order the levels by their appearance in the directory. Reason: Grabbing the order from levels.nxmi - which could at any point be incorrect/incomplete - introduces unnecessary complexity to a feature which, at its core, should simply be 'grab the previous/next available level and load it'. For instance, an author may be working on 11 or more levels with the intention of compiling the best 10 into a pack. They may have already made a levels.nxmi, but still require access to all levels for editing. The feature shouldn't need to care about this sort of nuance.

Perhaps avoiding the words 'Previous' and 'Next' on the controls themselves is necessary, then. We'll prefer [<<] Level [>>] instead. We also have the status bar control hints, which can explicitly say 'open the previous/next available level in the current directory' to clarify the feature's purpose.

If someone wants to make a strong case for supporting levels.nxmi, I'm not ruling out by any means. I just think that we should try and live with directory-only ordering and see if it suffices.

SIDE NOTE: You can navigate between groups/ranks (as well as levels) from the Preview screen, but levels will always wrap around per-group. If this should be different, we can address it in a separate topic.

I'd say that this era of Lemmings (the Team17 era) is exactly what the franchise needed at that time, but it could have been a lot better as Giga has already said.

The execution was so close: visually excellent, easy to control (it had to be slower to make it easier to play with a controller on consoles), a very nice remake of the original game, and a built-in level editor.

What let it down: sub-par music, not enough new levels, no PS2 mouse support, no PC port (with mouse support), very few options (the speed of the game could have been optional, for example), no controller config, no replay saving, no additional challenges/trophies/etc.

A reboot on PS5 with more of the modern features we've come to expect from games would be welcome, but the right team of people would have to be at the helm.

Quote from: Simon on June 16, 2026, 06:39:09 PMI still recommend dark green (0, 0x80, 0) for the shapes of the gadgets and a medium blue (0x80, 0x80, 0xFF) for lemmings without permanent abilities.

What about lemmings with permanent abilities? Keep it the same as it is now?

Quote from: Simon on June 16, 2026, 06:39:09 PMI don't know what you like about the color cycling ... Are you sure that you like it and why you like it?

3 reasons:

1) It guarantees visibility at some point in the cycle, regardless of any other factors (40%)
2) It's already there. I don't have to do anything (30%)
3) It looks kinda cool IMHO  (30%)

But OK, let's make it optional in 1.1.2, with your suggested colours as the static alternatives.

Quote from: Simon on March 09, 2026, 08:08:15 PMWhen you hover over a lix with 7 future assignments, say "Click to replace 7 future assignments."

WillLem implemented this for NeoLemmix Community Edition, and I should follow in Lix.

It's possible to user-test always-insert even in existing Lix 0.10.32 and 0.10.33; you must select this style in the Game Controls tab of the options menu. Later in summer, after Level of the Year 2025, I should solve some levels on stream with always-insert.

-- Simon

This is still annoying. We are in Clear physics Mode often enough, and we zoom into the levels because we are interested in finnicky details. The glaring cycling colors cover huge parts of the screen. So hard on the eyes. All while it's hard to see lemmings.

For the record, Proxima agrees that this is annoying and distracting.

I still recommend dark green (0, 0x80, 0) for the shapes of the gadgets and a medium blue (0x80, 0x80, 0xFF) for lemmings without permanent abilities.

I don't know what you like about the color cycling. If it weren't for you, I'd recommend to rip the entire color-cycling code from the codebase. Good riddance. Are you sure that you like it and why you like it? E.g., I understand {your preference for the never-deleting insert mode} more than I can get behind {your like of this color-cycling in light of all these visibility problems}.

-- Simon

Guigui, thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, execution with our suboptimal way was still bearable enough that we nailed it after a few tries. I assume that, had we not solved it like that, we would have tried things similar to your spoiler.

---

The next stream will be Sunday, June 21, starting 13:00 UTC (= 15:00 CEST). https://www.twitch.tv/simonnaar

The levels yet unsolved are 1 by Giga (Palace of Ice), 3 by kaywhyn, and 6 by Dexter. Guigui backroute-fixed his So Many Spikes, we'll see if we have time to return to that.

-- Simon

Your examples have fixed saturation boundaries of 999 or 1, and that is common indeed. For the dynamic boundaries, I haven't found other examples within the year.

I'll see if I ever the dynamic boundary for something. It fails to conserve physical energy, which grows quadratically, i.e., speed of 2 + speed of 2 = speed of sqrt(8) = speed of 2.82842... And it doesn't compensate with over-the-top cartoon physics, unlike Lix's current plain addition. But saturated addition is probably reasonable nonetheless. You shouldn't stack 3 steam blowers, it's hard to see the stacking anyway.

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Link dump: daniel.games, tips for board game designers by designer Daniel Piechnick. Many things apply to video game design equally well. Such as these chapters:

Chapter 3 on the Depth-Complexity ratio:

QuoteThink of complexity as a kind of money you can spend. When you spend it, you want to add as much good stuff to your game as possible. Also, you want to "sell" (remove) parts of your game that are complex, but don't add much to the game. That complexity can then be re-spent elsewhere, to add something that adds great gameplay.

Yes! Cut cut cut, and then you can fill the void with something better and smaller.

The wording with "sell" is wonderful.

Chapter 82 on Terminology:

QuoteIf anyone is failing to understand something [in your game], it's your problem.

Happy Simon indeed. Yes, you must make your users guess right. When users have a problem with X and come to you, it's not enough to tell them how X works by describing it in the report/chat/forum. You must redesign X, or replace it.

As I still joke: "Design" comes from "de" and "sign", i.e., it's the removal of signs. When you don't have to explain something, it's well de-signed.

Mobius asked in Twitch chat: What does the red cursor mean in NeoLemmix CE? I told him: Please guess, this is user testing for WillLem. Mobius guessed: I don't know at all, maybe it's that we are in replay mode. I said: Yes, you are correct, but we should tell WillLem that you felt unsure.

QuoteDo not cater to rules pedants, by adding extra text to your cards to make them exactly accurate. Cater to the 99% of reasonable people.

On this, I disagree. Okay, you can't make everything 100 % rock-solid, but you want to make stuff more solid than he makes it sound. He also overestimates (he says 99 %) how many players will enjoy ambiguity.

It's especially important with the kind of cards of his paragraph's concern: Cards that you hold in your hand, hidden from other players, until you decide to use them. You must understand what your cards do, and you can't ask the other players because the information (that you hold this card) is supposed to remain hidden.

Many board games suffer from this. The only reasonable antidote that I found: Memorize the entire deck of bullshit cards by heart. Then harvest and memorize all the information on the internet about relevant corner case rulings and interaction technicalities. Extra fun is due when your game got reprinted 3 times, each with subtle wording changes because the publisher didn't notice the ambiguity and confused it more. Then have the right judgment about when and how much to explain this to other players (who will certainly not have done this) before/during play, so that it doesn't feel ad-hoc.

-- Simon