Community pack: OK in main Lix download?

[Simon]

Hi folks,

I would like to include the community pack in the main game downloadable on the Lix site.

• What's the current status of the pack? geoo, what do you think as its maintainer?
• What directory name should it get? lixlfpack is the current one, but only the lf carries information. It's obviously for Lix, and it's obviously a levelpack. I have once proposed lemforum.

There has been no activity around the pack for months now. It seems overdue to release it. A pack is never finished anyway, updates will be possible later on. Rubix and Clam have been fixing levels in their packs with many previous releases.

I'm planning a minor Lix update anyway, mainly for ccx's unicode support. I could include the pack with that release.

-- Simon

Edit in late April 2015: The community pack is now included in the main download. If you have further fixes to levels, let me know.

[RubiX]

Yea, would be nice to see it included now.   
A new thread could be created for remaining issue postings that we will hear about in time.

[NaOH]

What directory name should it get? lixlfpack is the current one, but only the lf carries information. It's obviously for Lix, and it's obviously a levelpack. I have once proposed lemforum.

It might be weird to have allusions to lemmings/"lem" forum show up in Lix, seeing as it seems to be distanced from the Lemmings title. Why not community or lfcommunity?

[edit: fixed quoting syntax -- ccexplore]

[Simon]

I don't mind at all naming it after its community. It's neither a legal problem, nor do I hide where most ideas of the game come from.

The pack comes with a directory-describing text (_english.X.txt), that outright refers to www.lemmingsforums.net for credits.

So, I'd rank lemforum over lfcommunity over community.

OTOH, there's probably only one community that designs such a pack, then community will be fine. >_>

-- Simon

[NaOH]

I'd rank lemforum over lfcommunity over community.

I second lemforum, then. It sounds catchier to me anyway. I'm just surprised the word "community" doesn't end up in their anywhere, since I've thought of it as "the community pack."

[RubiX]

lemlixcommunity

[RubiX]

ok that just fails, nevermind.   
lemforum sounds fine.

[Proxima]

Why not simply main or something like that? 

[namida]

If "lixlfpack" is currently being used and there are no problems with using it, I don't really see why it needs to be changed. The whole folder name carries information in that it refers to the name of the pack as a whole; a folder name isn't meant to describe the pack. (And besides, being picky about what "carries information" isn't really worthwhile in the first place...)

[Proxima]

It's ugly, impossible to pronounce and hard to remember, it has no meaning to new players (who wouldn't know what "lf" stands for) and it doesn't scream "this is the main levelset". New players looking for which levels to play would probably look at it last.

[geoo]

I agree that lixlfpack isn't exactly a good name...'lix' is redundant, 'lf' is cryptic, and 'pack' is redundant again in the context of this being the name of a Lix level pack that is contained inside the lix game.

I just looked at my local copy, and the only uncommitted changes I have are for Bipolar Maniac (plus a whole bunch of line ending changes). My latest local commit is from 2014-08-03 05:53:18
While there are still changes to be done, I think it's in a releasable alpha state. Some levels might change and some replays might break, but with the checker now that shouldn't be an issue.
I'm currently in Laos, and I don't think I'll be able to make time to implement changes from my todo-list before I finish travelling SE Asia.

[Proxima]

For reference, here are the posts made after August 2014 in the levelset topic. They include fixed versions of six of my levels, so I certainly hope someone will replace these levels with the fixed versions before release.

I will also try my best to set aside some time to fix Yuki, Muon. As far as I know, that's the only remaining one of my levels that needs fixing.

Another important thing is to look through the hints for the pack -- some existing hints have become redundant with level changes (e.g. the hint to Dividing Three By Two about the 100% challenge now that the level is changed to require 100%) and I think many levels still lack hints.

[geoo]

I might have a go at simple fixes like updating the levels for which you have posted updates, but not sure how soon I can do that. Though I'm happy for someone to do that him/herself and send me a patch/pull request.

As for hints, I think it's best to leave them out for now while the list is still incomplete, otherwise people might be confused as to why some levels have hints while others don't.

[Simon]

Thanks for the feedback.

I'll do the update patching myself, then. Whatever is checked into github is taken as the base tree. The latest commit on github is from 2014-08-03. Therefore, I'll go through the pack's main thread, and fish out all attachments from that date or newer. The release will get the newest attached version of each level, or the github version, whichever is newer.

main is a worthy contender for the pack name. It's a flagship pack. Then again, Rubix and Clam have been polishing their packs too all the time. Calling this main might be slightly unfair. To compensate, I'll describe/advertize for this pack first in the directory description in levels/single/, before the other packs.

If only very few levels have hints, I'll take them all out. Otherwise, even a handful of hints are nice to have around. I haven't browsed the git tree yet, can't judge. Plus, opening the pack with a hint by Steve is an honor. ;-)

-- Simon

[geoo]

I have one local uncommitted change that I can commit and push before you do those additions if you want.
Once I'm in Malaysia (early May) or in Ghana (June) I might find a day trying to process the todo list.

As for hints, I have hints for about 50% of the levels in the contained spreadsheet, and wanted to write a script at some point that just adds them to all the levels. As Proxima said, some of these might not be 100% accurate due to level changes.

[Simon]

Sure, go ahead and push what you have. I'll get on it in a couple days, then.

Larger changes can then go into one of the next releases. I'd defer inserting hints from the spreadsheet to that later time.

-- Simon