The previous post left a trivia question about topographic prominence. I have added the solution to that post.
Simon rants about all the enginesLemmini ate your files.
Superlemmini (SL), because it's more super, creates files instead: SL generates lots of empty directories. Nepster is going to file an issue tomorrow. There is never a reason to create empty directories if you won't put anything inside. When you create a file in a nonexistant dir, create all parent directories along with the file.
NL and SL fade between screens, but don't load anything during this time. Bad, remove the fading. Fading is for music that runs alongside, not for the main content which should pop in ASAP. I wrote about this in a post above already.
Depends on the JVM.
NL has the disarmer that is full of corner cases and makes traps depend on the terrain. The disarmer is a boring key skill: Like a key for a door, it allows access to an area for you, and alters the landscape without flexibility in application. It's not an exciting swiss-army knife, like builders that can fulfil 3 objectives at once. Unlike most key skills such as the floater, the disarmer brings inconsistency and lots of arbitrary design decisions. The worst of all worlds.
The obvious cure is to cull the disarmer, then bomb or bash underneath the trap. Awesome disabled trap, and the idea fits 100 % into what the game is about: Alter the terrain to do things.
The NL editor doesn't fetch Lemmini styles and doesn't open Arty's levels. Arty is confused and "Nothing's working and I have to meet with my lab partner now" even when Nepster was there all the time for tech support. Good luck convincing Prince Jamie to develop for NL with this user experience.
Arty should put his levels under version control. Everybody should put their levels under version control! If it's creative work, version-control.
Here is my problem: teaching regular people to use version control is impossible. It just can’t be done in this universe. There is just no possible way a regular Joe can be convinced to start using Git. You know how I know? Because it is fucking near impossible to teach programmers to use it. --
Terminally IncoherentLix has too many skills and is intimidating. The imploder is boring, but seems necessary, it's exciting to sacrifice lems in a level design. Too many movement skills. Singleplayer shouldn't have runner, walker, or floater. Multiplayer needs the walker and jumper, but the only reason is "I tried both and this is more fun." I would still remove the runner and the floater, if people let me. :> mobius likes the runner, he likes the movement skills in general, but I don't.
Maybe the blocker should only block your own lems, and we remove the walker. Blocking other people's lems is annoying and not exciting. But we get an inconsistency: Blockers ignore enemy lems, batters bat enemy lems.
Walker skill assignments turn, or don't turn, depends on the previous activity. Bad! Skills should do similar things all the time! I want to cull the walker skill. Help me support this idea and barge forward into the sky of prisine design! L3's direct control sucks when your game isn't about skill pickups.
I haven't worked on D Lix in two weeks, I've been a lazy bum. The necessary work until the first networking tests is forseeable. Now that it's obvious how to do it, I don't need to do it, everybody could do it. >_>
Levels should be small. Or the interface should allow replay rebasing, where you insert skills into a running replay and modify the replay's tail accordingly, without cutting off the tail. Probably both, small levels and rebasing. Rebasing for replays is dangerous, the computer could easily try to be smarter than the user. And the UI that this needs. X-(
Nuke in singleplayer should not be part of the puzzle. The
planned multiplayer concede-nuke closes exits in multiplayer when overtime runs out, then everybody explodes. Singleplayer nuke, therefore, should close exits, then everybody explodes. We can consider this to be a single rule for the nuke, because all singleplayer levels and selected multiplayer levels have no overtime.
Screw the 3rd-person-singular-s, it be obvious what the verb belong to, it introduce maintenance in part of the sentence that didn't change.
-- Simon