Quote from: WillLem on August 23, 2026, 06:25:19 PMFramestepping, on the other hand, is tantamount to cheating in a game like Lemmings.

There is no such thing as cheating in a single-player game, unless it has some form of player-player interactivity (such as achievements, online leaderboards, etc).

QuoteWe all agree that the ability to framestep backwards immediately renders most of the original levels (which is what many players come to the Forums looking for) obsolete.

Out of 120 levels, there are five timed bomber levels in the entire game. ONML has only two out of 100.

QuoteHm. Maybe I disagree that it doesn't make for a good game. If that's true, why are we all here? The vast majority of original Lemmings ports don't even have a replay system, let alone per-frame control over the gameplay. It can't be that bad a game if there's an entire Forum dedicated to it...

I'm here for the custom levels (making, solving and discussing), the challenges, and the community most of all. I haven't played original Lemmings for years.

Of course, I loved it when I played it as a kid. I loved saving the cute creatures, the music, the graphics... but most of all, the feeling of being challenged to work out how on earth it was possible to solve these levels, and feeling great when I got those moments of insight that made everything fall into place at last.

It's true that the original game didn't have any kind of replay system, whether because it would have been too tricky to code given the limitations of the time, or because it wasn't a common feature in games, or because the developers simply didn't think of it. Still, if it had had replays from the beginning, I can't see that anything I liked about the game would have been changed or diminished.

But I finished the original games decades ago (not counting ones like L2 and L3 that didn't interest me enough to look into them), so the only reason I'm interested in modern clones at all is their ability to support creating and playing new levels.

I know that maybe it's not my place to say these things. I haven't played any Lemmings content for a long time now, and when I do come back to it, it'll be NL for sure. So my opinions shouldn't have much weight in the direction RL takes. I'm mostly contributing because I hope this discussion can help you reason out the decision, so that whatever decision you end up making, it's done for good reasons.

QuoteConversely - when I'm playing in NeoLemmix/Lix, I use backwards framestepping, of course - why wouldn't I. But, it makes the game feel totally different. Specifically: there are no real-time stakes at all. Nothing I do really matters because I can just skip back and redo it immediately. It feels like I'm editing a video clip rather than playing a video game. This is fundamentally a different way to play, and it matters.

This reminds me a lot of things that were said before the decision to add unlimited undo to Deadly Rooms of Death. Specifically, I remember one poster who was vehemently against UU because he wanted moves to feel "consequential". And then UU got added, nothing really changed, and it was still the same game, just easier to play.

It might surprise you, after the things I've said, that I actually don't use UU in DROD myself. But it does have single undo and checkpoints; if the choice were between enabling UU and having to restart the room every time I made a mistake, then I would have enabled it from the moment it was possible to do so 

But anyway. In a game like Lemmings or DROD where levels (or rooms) are distinct units of play, there are no "stakes" in any case. The only possible consequence for failure is loss of time. And that matters a lot more to me now that half of my life is behind me, and so much of my time is lost through feeling exhausted. I want the games I play to respect my time, and if I feel a game doesn't, I'm much more likely to close it and find one that does.

And while I appreciate that you prefer to play without replay features, that in itself isn't an argument for not adding them. If those features are there, people who prefer to play without them can still do so, while if they're not, everyone is forced to play without them regardless of what they prefer.

Quote from: Simon on August 23, 2026, 11:38:59 PMDebugging idea

Thanks for the ideas

For now, I've guarded against re-entrancy for treeview and preview loading, both of which are relatively expensive tasks. They've already been fairly well optimized, but I realised that there's nothing actually preventing them from being called multiple times. Multiple quick-succession clicks would be a problem, then.

The re-entrancy guard should hopefully do it. Flopsy is testing now.

Caching is a very good idea, but... it would need to perform a cache every time it opens/closes to keep it up to date (potentially?).

Quote from: Simon on August 23, 2026, 09:42:29 PMIn DOS Lemmings 1's We All Fall Down, I now believe that digger-digger cancelling isn't possible in a way to produce a permanent staircase. Your 2-digger solution is thus NeoLemmix-only.

Those are not the only two platforms! Digger cancelling is possible on Amiga, Mac, Genesis and SNES (although Genesis doesn't allow RR changes while paused, and I believe that means WAFD requires 3 diggers minimum).

Flopsy filed this after a discussion that his level loading was slow. He said that some Lix levels took 5 seconds to load on cold disk cache, and similarly NL levels took a while to load. This can be mere coincidence, or it can point at a real connection.

Debugging idea: Introduce artificial delay in level loading or in tile loading. E.g., every tile loaded freshly from disk should make its loading thread sleep for 100 ms, or do some absurd extra file I/O like logging numbers from 1 through 10,000. Maybe the delay helps with reproducing this bug?

-- Simon

Jingles or other sound effects can help. Fireworks/party streamers/ticker tape/confetti. 'CONGRATULATIONS!' in big green letters. A Lix holding a trophy for a win. A Lix crying for a loss

Quote from: Simon on August 23, 2026, 09:24:47 PMLemmings 3 happens to implement what you're considering. Solutions from an action replay don't count ("learner mode") for progression. Feature is meticulously implemented, but you're not supposed to use it until you've proven your worth. Reaction by Kieran:

Quote from: kieranmillar on July 17, 2023, 10:54:20 PMusing the replay feature makes the solve not count (why oh why did they do this? Idiots)

They did this because using the replay system to solve a level was probably considered cheating (or at least contradictory to the spirit of the game as it was intended to be played) by the developers. Otherwise, of course they wouldn't have implemented it in this way.

Part of the original challenge of Lemmings was to be able to solve the level in one single playthrough. If you could do that, you'd beaten the level good and proper, fair and square. And, of course you could pause the level to take a moment to set up your next action, but all assignments had to be made in real-time: that was a legitimate and enjoyable part of the challenge. I can't be the only player that thinks like this.

Anyway, RetroLemmini has already sacrificed some of this by having a replay system. So did Windows '95 Lemmings (which also allowed assign-whilst-paused). And yet, it never felt like it was getting in the way or completely ruining that aspect of the game because it wasn't used for fine-tweaking.

Most of the time when playing in RetroLemmini (which is currently my preferrd engine for actually playing Lemmings), I click to cancel my previous replay because I want to mostly do the solution over and don't care about sacrificing a few assignments; a fresh start is preferable. Again, I cannot be the only player who thinks like this.

Conversely - when I'm playing in NeoLemmix/Lix, I use backwards framestepping, of course - why wouldn't I. But, it makes the game feel totally different. Specifically: there are no real-time stakes at all. Nothing I do really matters because I can just skip back and redo it immediately. It feels like I'm editing a video clip rather than playing a video game. This is fundamentally a different way to play, and it matters.

Is that closer to the holistic argument you were hoping for? I'd be happy to unpack my thoughts on this further. And make no mistake: I would never want the player assists to be removed from Lix, NeoLemmix or even SuperLemmix. I just want to be very careful about adding them to RetroLemmini.

Flopsy has reported that this bug is still present in NLCE.

Help welcome.

Looking at the video again, this is a repeat of this bug in SuperLemmix. I never did figure out exactly what was causing it because it's impossible to test for. It happens randomly, and there are no definite steps that will cause it to happen. I can click many times in the Level Select menu and not duplicate the reported behaviour.

So, unless anyone has any debugging suggestions, this might be another one we just have to live with.

Lix 0.10.33

I played a singleplayer level with save requirement 20/20. I put one blocker, saved the 19 other lix, then nuked the blocker and announced to the livestream viewers that I had won the level.

No! The end-of-level screen should look sufficiently different after a loss than after a win. Maybe winning needs a big green checkmark that flies into view and smacks onto the table of statistics. This is obviously kitsch, but it shows the degree of difference that we might want. Ideally, I'd show the button for the next level on the end-of-level screen, still. Or should there be an extra button first to click that makes the next level appear as a button on the end-of-level screen?

Or: Nuking a lost level shouldn't end the map. But how should people quit the level with the mouse then ...

Winning looks like losing, what an embarrasing UI fail. The most fundamental aftermath of a game (singleplayer or multiplayer) is immediate clarity of whether you've cut the mustard or not.

-- Simon

In Lix, since version 0.10.12 from June 2023, you can choose to always be in insert mode. (By default, you're only in insert mode when the tweaker is open.)

I configured Lix to always-insert. Then I played Flopsy's yet-unreleased levels (easier ones from SEBLems and Gotta Go Fast) for almost 3 hours on livestream. I got confused at least once, IIRC even a second time. Both times, I didn't have the tweaker open. How exactly did I get confused? I'll have to re-watch the 3-hour vod and tell you in detail. This is the playtest that I promised.

For now, I can't yet fully recommend to make it a single mode. I didn't change the Lix option defauls yet, either. In Lix 0.10.34 from yesterday, the default is still that you're in insert mode if and only if the tweaker is open.

I'll still have more to answer from all your posts.

-- Simon