Something like this...
If the shimmier is also a climber, it turns around and climbs up a wall if the wall is climbable.
Thanks for the picture, but I see a few issues with this:
- It makes the shimmier much more powerful, as already mentoned above.
- With enough shimmiers, one would be able to climb
any wall, regardless of the overhang.
- When transitioning from shimmier to climber, the lemming will have to turn around. Usually lemmings do this only if they meet terrain, not when terrain is missing. Apart from that, the turning is problematic wrt. the animation.
So I prefer not to implement this behaviour.
Climber->Shimmier:
I am actually curios how this is going to be implemented. In 2 the climber hangs a while facing the opposite direction, allowing for a shimmier assign. Here, as a climber immidiately falls opon reaching the ceiling, he would need to jump while still hanging at the wall + do a turn-around. This sounds very weird to me to be honest and I am not really sure if this is going to play out good.
Climbers will never jump, but every lemming remembers a skill assignment for a few frames, if it cannot be acted upon at the moment (e.g. assigning bashers while falling, ...). So a climber would turn into a shimmier, if (and only if) it remembers a shimmier assignment when the climber hits the ceiling.
A shimmier would only jump upon assignment near a ceiling, if not near a ceiling then it'll just be given the skill like normal.
No, the shimmier will always try to jump. This has one simple reason: As one cannot be sure that the ceiling is still there when the lemming reaches it, I will have to implement falling down after a missed jump anyway.
So there is no reason
not to jump in the first place.
Another thing I'd like to ask is which of these will happen if a shimmier is assigned a walker:
1. The lemming stops being a shimmier and falls down from where he currently is.
2. The shimmier turns around.
3. You are unable to assign that lemming as a walker.
Very good question! And it's not clear at all what should happen:
- If one views the shimmier as a moving skill like the swimmer or glider, then one shouldn't be able to assign a walker to it.
- If one views the shimmier as just another non-permanent skill, then one should be able to assign a walker to it and the lemming should drop down. Currently one cannot assign walkers only for permanent skills.
- If one views the shimmier just as walking on the ceiling, then it should turn around. But I feel that this wouldn't be terribly useful.
Personally I prefer letting the shimmier drop down, if one assigns a walker to it, but that's not a strong preference.
Something fun to consider, what if anti-gravity is ever implemented?
This point is moot, because I will not implement anti-gravity due to the terrible amount of work needed for it.
Whether or not the ceiling should be solid isn't the focus of this topic, it's whether or not we should let the Shimmier move across it (if it stays solid). I honestly don't think it would look that awful if the lemming is grabbing the border, as long as the area outside the game window is a different color from the background. Plus, if the ceiling already acts like steel, then this will be consistent with every other ceiling interaction. Then again, not many levels actually ask you to do anything with the ceiling. The fact that it's solid tends to be more important than the fact that it is steel.
Good point. While I myself would prefer to have a non-solid ceiling, I think the consistency point is very convincing:
- If the ceiling is solid, let the shimmier shimmy along it, but heavily discourage this in level design and encourage actually adding some solid pieces there.
- If the ceiling is non-solid, then obviously let it act as air.
