"Try to do that" would then mean: You select 6 for the intended number of players, you'll have seats ABCDEF available for assigning seats to hatches/exits. In the editor, you must assign exactly one seat to each exit. When you place an exit, editor will preassign a seat to that exit; you can always change the seat assignment for that exit, but you can't leave the exit without a seat assignment. Now you place only 2 exits. You can assign A, A to the two exits and keep 5 players without exit. Or you assign D, E and keep 4 players (ABCF) without exit.

I don't know if/how Lix should reject such a map when it's selected in the multiplayer browser. Even now, it's legal to play a map without exits. Interesting design problem. In a pinch, it's okay to allow no exits, that's simplest, and it assumes that authors will see it and fix it.

Existing maps should remain loadable in that future Lix. They are in the 0.10 level file format which doesn't feature exit-to-seat assignment, therefore we need a rule for importing these levels into the new system where each exit has exactly one seat assigned to it. The obvious choice is: When we load a level, we look at the intended number of players, and we distribute the seats round-robin at level load time.

-- Simon

Thank you simon for creating this thread following my off-topic question in the other thread.

To precise my experience with NL on Ubuntu with Wine 10 : splat ruler stutters each time, no matter how long you've been running the game for and which level you are playing.

It just appears where it is supposed to, then follows the mouse with many many frames of delay, or does not follow at all if you move mouse too fast.
This is amplified if the level happens to have many Lemmings on screen and animated object. Things go a bit better if you pause the game prior to display ruler ; but not good enough to make it actually usable like it is supposed to.

Reading simon's experience with it, I'd guess this is all related to running the game via Wine on a Linux OS. It would be nice if some native Windows users could share their experience with the performance of splat ruler.

To preface this, I'm sorry if I say something wrong, as I'm not exactly sure how entrances/exists/seats/player counts work in Lix, but I've tried to look it up the best I can.

Quote from: Simon on June 02, 2025, 04:32:45 PMVery few maps use, e.g., 2 exits for 6 players, and rely on how ACE use one exit and BDF use the second exit. I want to remove this. It's not a big loss and the gain in simplicity will be worth it. This example map can easily become a 2-team map (it already has 2 exits) instead of a 6-team map.

So, if you remove this, then what will happen if you try to do to that after you remove it? Will it just give an error message?

NL 12.14 on Ubuntu in Wine 10.0
CE 1.0.1 on Arch Linux in Wine 10.6

The splat ruler lags the entire engine as long as it's active.

Repro:

• Play different levels in NeoLemmix for 2 hours. (I believe? Some preparatory step here is necessary because I can't repro it here on a fresh program run. Or do I have to screenrecord NL? I doubt it.)
  
• Play Turrican's level Space Program 10,000 BC v1.01, it's attached. It's large and it contains many special tiles. The file alone is 400 KB.
  
• Scroll around (with right-click scrolling) to get a feel for performance without the splat ruler.
  
• Tap the key for the splat ruler.
  
• Scroll around (with right-click scrolling) to get a feel for performance with the splat ruler.
  

CE froze for several seconds. If I hold (not merely tap) the key for the splat ruler in step 4, CE froze for 10 seconds, then stuttered at 1 frame per second. It was severe in my livestream from 2025-05-28:

Video: Splat ruler freezes CE for 5-10 seconds (70 seconds long, 4.4 MB)

NL/CE return to regular performance (= less lag) after we release the key. And if we play more/different levels afterward, the ruler doesn't dent the performance anymore there, even after it had dented performance on Space Program 10,000 BC.

Backgrounds on/off seems to make no difference. Can't test again now because step 1 is hard to guess/repro. So strange that it doesen't reproduce immediately after a fresh game run. So hard to guess what's going on internally ... it's such lag, and only on Turrican's level. And why do other levels run fine afterward even with the ruler?

Quote from: Guigui on June 02, 2025, 11:43:07 PMon my machine, the ruler is a bit laggy. When I press the key it appears correctly, but it stutters when I try to move it accross the screen. To move it, I better make it disappear, then reappear again elsewhere, not very handy.
Is it just me (running NeoLemmix on Ubuntu + Wine) or all NeoLemmix users ?

-- Simon

You're right that the ruler can also be used to see if terrains are really vertically aligned.

Some designers did one pixel shift between terrains, almost invisible to the eye, so your mind is set to : "Lem will fall here" when the truth is "Lem can build, or not splat, from here". This is rather evil, and had me tear my hair out a lot of time. Usually I discover it by mistake when I let a lemming fall unwillingly.

For sure the ruler can help check this, though only for its own height when sometimes you may need it for longer falls.
Anyway here is a version without the faller in the middle. It was just here for decorative and fun purpose, I love this sprite !

Also asking a quite off-topic question her : on my machine, the ruler is a bit laggy. When I press the key it appears correctly, but it stutters when I try to move it accross the screen. To move it, I better make it disappear, then reappear again elsewhere, not very handy.
Is it just me (running NeoLemmix on Ubuntu + Wine) or all NeoLemmix users ?

The remaining levels fell, the lesson from them is : laserers alone suck, laserers+cancel is great.
This makes DéjàLems cleared with all talismans. I'm attaching my replays if anyone interested.

All in all a nice time revisiting those levels ; I particularly enjoy seeing those holes left by blockers that have been nuked after clearing the level. When you want to clear again with the same settings, those holes are certainly a nuisance !

Playing this pack currently following kaywhyn's advice of it being of "moderate" difficulty.

I could clear all the levels, except Vexing 10 - Evacuation Procedure.

Out of the 4 lemmings to be saved, I can save 3 : upper left, upper right and bottom right ; in the time limit and with different solutions using more or less skills.

Though I am completely stumped for bottom left lemming : no matter how I do it, I always end up running short on time and/or on skills. Even if I use all my other lemmings to try to save just him, he just never reached any exit in any way.

I'd rather not watch replay, but would appreciate if someone coud give a little clue as to how save this bottom left lemming ? I think if I figure him, then the rest of the level will fall into place by itself.

Your lemmings make it clear where you should stick the ruler (onto or into the floor), even though you've introduced 1-pixel-thick horizontal green lines. Yes, interesting take, a new angle of attack against the ambiguity problem.

I still want to write about a second application for a splat ruler that we haven't touched in this topic yet: The ruler is not only for measuring fall distance. The ruler is also excellent for inspecting horizontal offset between two terrain pieces, i.e.: Is terrain X exactly vertically above/under terrain Y? Or, instead, is X a few pixels horizontally offset from Y, so that lemmings can fall from X and land on Y? It's easy to test that when the ruler is a featureless vertical stick.

This will be an argument against horizontally protruding triangles (in my white ruler) or lemmings (in yours). The hunch is to minimize/remove protrusions.

If I had to use one of your rulers immediately, I'd pick your ruler with long green vertical lines, but I'd remove the falling lemmings in the center, or at least slice the fallers vertically and show only 2 halved fallers. The goal is to preserve a long green vertical line without protruding features, for measuring horizontal offset of terrain.

I have a weak preference for a white stick with a triangle, but now I want the triangle smaller than what I've shown before. Haven't slept over it. Must still post feedback from stream playtesting. And I haven't tried your ruler yet.

-- Simon

Players don't remember the exact rules of overtime and nuke. People ask why the overtime doesn't start, or why the nuke doesn't work. I'll treat these questions as bug reports against the nuke/overtime design.

In 0.10, if you nuke, you lose all remaining skills immediately, and overtime starts once you have 1 or more points. This is too complicated. The original design goal in 2010 was (a) to prevent people from nuking before anybody can score, and (b) to challenge other players to beat your score. Yes, the 0.10 nuke solves this, but pays too high a complexity cost (it has too much if-then).

In a 4v4 team game (of 2 teams), if the newbie nukes on your team, all players on that team lose their skills. That must become impossible. The obvious answer -- changing the nuke button into a majority vote, i.e., more than 50 % of the players on your team must push nuke for the nuke to activate -- would pile even more if-then rules onto the existing unrememberable nuking system. We can do better.

But the whole nuke-overtime system is a hard design problem to solve.

I'm contemplating to ditch the loss of skills altogether when you press nuke. Your nuke still triggers overtime, but you keep your skills and continue playing. In 0.10, it's strange that the loss of skills doesn't always go hand-in-hand with the start of overtime: When you nuke and have 0 points, you lose the skills, but overtime doesn't start.

It feels correct to keep the nuke as a game element. It allows you to force the remaining players to bring an almost-over game to a timely conclusion. I don't want to ditch it altogether.

None of this solves the confusing overtime, i.e., when exactly the overtime starts. This is still too confusing to explain to new players. The first hunch is to start overtime immediately when somebody scores 1 point from his own lix (to prevent accidental triggering by others who start near your exit), but that, again, wouldn't be elegant to explain. I have no good answer.

-- Simon

I'm unhappy with both the multi-team exit scoring (see "answers to Q1 and Q2") and with the overtime system.

One team. Exits should belong to one team, not to multiple teams. When a lix (of any team) enters, the exit's owning team should get a point, period. You should match exits to seats (A, B, C, ...) in the editor. If you play a 7-player map with 3 players, the four exits for seats DEFG should be removed. (In 0.10 physics, only the 7th exit gets removed, and the intended ABCDEFG becomes ABCABC.)

Goal flags. Exits with multiple players are predominant in race maps, i.e., in maps with an overtime of 0 seconds. It's common to have a single exit that all players use. I want to replace this kind of exit with a goal flag. The goal flag should belong to all teams, you can't assign it to any single team. And it should be a new type of tile (like hatch, goal, triggered trap, ...) so that it is obviously different from an exit. If one of your lixes touches the goal flag, you win, and there will be no overtime.

Very few maps use, e.g., 2 exits for 6 players, and rely on how ACE use one exit and BDF use the second exit. I want to remove this. It's not a big loss and the gain in simplicity will be worth it. This example map can easily become a 2-team map (it already has 2 exits) instead of a 6-team map.

-- Simon