Which pieces? If you mean the white pillars in the top area and the piece named "pillar_top", I avoided that because it has the same width as the pillar body, and I wanted to use a wide top.
What I actually meant was that you could use the piece named pillar_top_shaded directly below the piece pillar_base (which you put at the top). I put the shaded piece in for that purpose (similarly in the sandstone set), but of course it's your choice whether you want to use it.
(I put the levels on the list already, but I can add these shaded pieces if you want; or if you still want to change something else at some point, just attach a new version of the respective level for me to update).
Oddly, when I select the level from the menu it still says 4:16 as my time achieved, even though I've now twice done better. Why is this?
What's displayed are actually the stats of the best solution, where best means fewest skills and lowest time is only the tiebreaker criterion. So probably all your solutions faster than 4:16 used strictly more skills than it.
I put Roundabout, Transmigration, Elixir and Nortaneous' variant of it on the list. Did some minor changes like fixing overlapping steel pieces, hope you don't mind. Also 50 lix instead of 10 in the sequel now, so it's consistent.
Transmigration has a ceiling route, though it's a bit tricky due to the steel piece in the middle.
Also attached my solutions for the two (unmodified) versions of Elixir, a few notes:
I used a faller instead of a climber bomb in Elixir.
For the sequel, I found a slightly different solution from Proxima that ensures no-one falls off the platform: I used the blocker at the platform, held the crowd in a digger pit, and used a bomber to turn the second climber around.
Ensuring everyone walks to the right right out of the digger pit should be possible as well by setting the correct release rate depending on the exact blocker placement.
"Four Easy Pieces", as Proxima already mentioned, still looks somewhat plain, but is a nice level apart from that. Not having anything above the underworld entrances also makes them look even more odd than they already do.
I really like Nortaneous' "bluh" level, only thing is that perhaps you could make the central section a little shorter so that the level doesn't need scrolling. And perhaps the triangular extensions at the side could be made a little wider, so you got a bit more flexibility with the cuber placement.
I also solved the ComeOnDown/Edge pairs. I actually found the second ComeOnDown level easier than the first one, two solutions of it are attached. Edge gave me a whole lot of trouble until I solved it. I also attached a previous attempt which only saves 45. Not sure about backroutes, I didn't read your solution description yet because I want to try it again in case you add a backroute fix. Really great levels, these four. Just a few remarks on Edge: The water should be moved down a little as its top parts are visible above the steel blocks, the pier the exit stands on a slight to the left as right now it looks like the lix could walk down below it, and the goldmine exit has a top piece that you could add, it's included as decoration (top right button in the editor).
btw, knowing the fall height and being able to measure them in brick/block sizes really helped me here. I guess you already found out by now, but in Lix the safe fall height is 126px (a little less than 4 32px blocks, or 8 16px bricks). A bomber takes 75 frames before exploding, which 15x5 frames. When walking, 15 frames is a little less than a 32px block, and when falling it is a little less than 4 32px blocks.
Just some notes:
When putting the levels in the list, I choose the file name to be the level name, all in lowercase, without spaces or special characters, and truncated if too long. The reason for this is so the levels appear in the level list in lix in alphabetical order (in Lix, all uppercase letters are sorted to come before the lowercase letters. Thinking of it, having each word in the level name start with a capital might have improved readability, but now I've gone with all lowercase).
I'll usually remove time limits, unless they are really important for the level, e.g. as backroute fix or if they make a notable portion of the challenge in the level (like in Just a Minute). There was some topic on the matter where Simon explained the rationale behind this.
Current list is here:
http://geoo89.github.com/lixlfpack/Again, if you find some levels where you think the difficulty is majorly off, e.g. you feel from two levels rated the same one is significantly harder, or two similarly rated ones are of notable different difficulty, tell me. Especially for my own level it's very hard to get an estimate. We don't want to end up with with a difficulty curve like in ONML.
Whereas with most of your blocks, creating a custom block size from them is more like trying to create a custom-size steel block in the Lemmings styles. It's not impossible per se, but certainly would take a bit of work, to the point where level designers are not likely to do it unless absolutely necessary [...]
Hahaha, you of all people have to say this.
(Though I see you're referring to all level designers here).
That's what the busy beaver and the reference to Top Gear was intended for in my previous post, you made yourself a lot more work than necessary by not using the grid, so sure you'd also be willing to take up the work to make custom-sized blocks?
As for Tricky 19, my style also contains 4x8 and 8x4 blocks (low-res) like the walls in Tricky 19 are comprised of.
Though there are easier ways to make steps of arbitrary multiples of 4 (low-res) than recreating this pattern with individual blocks...
Apart from that, you seem to be reading quite a bit into that line I wrote referencing Top Gear. Cropping the black shadows of the blocks by overlaying them with other blocks is a design choice I respect (as I demonstrated by keeping it and putting up with the chore of having to position everything precisely without a grid when I showed off the fine-grained 7x7 block grid to aid miner placement), and nowhere did I imply you should hurry updating your level. Sorry if you somehow thought I did.
Basically, the main reason I'm so reluctant adding such blocks is that it means work for me, where I don't see how the gain makes up for that, if there is any at all. In the dozens of single and multiplayer levels I've designed in Lix, I've never come across a situation where I felt "Damn, I'd really love to have a 12n x 12m block now" for some integers n and m.
Out of curiosity, next time you stumble across a situation where you just long for one, tell me.
That said, I'll try to have the 24x12 block for Proxima and 12x12/24x24 blocks done for the next lix update. Think I have to do them manually, as it's only the concrete blocks that I did by processing the texture through eidblot.
A candy/desert style sounds interesting, best thing is chocolate pieces come in blocks! Though if I'll do something like this, it'll be at the bottom of my list, as I first want to get some objects (like some of Proxima's traps) done, extend the abstract and shadow style, then I got another pretty unique style in the workings (that even allows you to make blocks of any size you want easily
), and add some minor things.
