That makes it extremely difficult for me to make everyone happy. I really don't know what the best solution is. Whatever I decide, it's going to make people unhappy. 
The elephant in the room is that I still don't see the benefit of culling stuff, especially not since you dismissed the argument I would have shown most understanding for - complexity of code - as irrelevant.
I still don't understand what people supporting the cull of feature X actually get from this measure as a benefit. A lot of arguments I've seen so far which are at least not opposing culls are more along the lines of "eh, I never used it, so I don't care". Which is understandable, but also quite reckless. I in contrast even defend features I haven't used so far, like the turning teleporters, a) because I know other people have used them, and b) because their ideas might inspire me to use this feature in the future.
I don't really bother about namida having
added stuff single-handedly - if no one uses certain features, they don't do any harm. Where's the problem with the fencer existing? No one forces you to include it in your levels.
If people
remove features single-handedly or based on a tiny majority, that's an entirely different issue. Because then you're forced to not include certain things in a level anymore, and either modify or throw away the level completely.
I certainly regard the Karoshi gimmick as one of the best, possibly even better than zombies, because in both cases lemmings have to be killed, but with regular lemmings, as you have to kill them for Karoshi, you can interact with them, whereas with zombies you can't. If namida did indeed remove that single-handedly against a majority for keeping it, that's quite sad.
However the main problem is that there are greatly differing opinions how to weight the costs and benefits. For me the cost of a few levels less is negleglible, but the gain in reducing the complexity for players (not of levels, but regarding game mechanics) is tremendous.
If a player wants less complexity, meaning less objects and less skills to choose from, they should probably play original Lemmings or ONML first. Custom packs aren't for beginners, as has been pointed out again in the recent thread about introductory levels. And if a player has tackled the DMA-based packs in NeoLemmix, there are still plenty of more restrictive packs to choose from, as you and Nessy and many other people have created them, packs which e.g. stick to classic skills only.
I do however highly doubt that a reduced number of features equals reduced complexity. Unless you consider Nepster Lems non-complex. It doesn't use a lot of skills, tilesets, or objects, which is probably also due to the time it was first created, but it's complex simply by the size of its levels and the design of its terrain.
Paralems, on the other hand, employs nearly every feature NeoLemmix has to offer - but I doubt anyone here found it particularly complex to play through
. It simply has a lot of variety, but it is not a very challenging pack.
Bottom line is:
Players who look for challenges will actively seek out complexity of some kind, out of their own - be it complexity of terrain design, complexity of skills (those are the people playing Lemmings 2, I guess
), or objects. Players who want something reduced can be pointed specifically to packs offering this, and they should probably start with the official levels, or a comprehensive collection of these, like Lemmings Redux.
And I am sorry that you found very precise solutions to my levels "Ninjas in the attic" and "Jump in the ring", but neither actually requires framestepping. I am still waiting for your feedback on NepsterLems, and without feedback, I cannot improve my levels! You yourself (correctly) criticized me for using non-backroute fixed examples of levels made by yourself, so please don't make the same mistake yourself.
I know it's easy to bring pixel precision on oneself
. And on some levels I did indeed feel I might still have found a backroute. I just considered it very unlikely, since this pack has existed for quite some time now, and both IchoTolot and namida have done LPs of it, that any backroutes could still be remaining in there.
I admire the genius stuff you have come up with on many of these levels, but the fact that they are so challenging is simultaneously their downfall:
I just can't play a lot of these in succession to each other. Each level is a mystery to solve on its own; however, the only thing which happens once you do succeed is unveiling another mindf*ck riddle.
IchoTolot once talked about himself wanting to "
beat the player", and doing so fair and square, and cited your levels as prime examples. And it's true, they certainly aim for beating the player, as if each single one of them asked "Am I the level where you're finally going to quit?"
This is great for providing challenges, but comes at the cost of easily killing the player's motivation.
So I find it somewhat strange that from all forum members, you are the one to push for reduced complexity and more player-friendliness
. Because to me your puzzles are the epitome of complex, positively and negatively. The only way in which they are non-complex is that they stick to classic skills.
Imagine if a significant portion of the forum decided that they don't like huge levels, because they take a lot of time to execute and are mainly just about conservative skill use rather than a specific solution. And therefore, they'd decide to limit the maximum width a level can have to, lets say, 720 pixels. Suddenly a lot of your levels would meet the axe for being "too complex" in other people's eyes.
See the picture now?
The amplifying factor of all of this is the experience that to this day, no feature which has been removed once ever got added back in again. Someone told me this with regard to timed bombers, but it also holds true for all of the gimmicks as well as ghosts. So people fight hard for keeping the stuff they have, because
for any things we lose it feels certain that we are going to lose them forever.
The old formats has one huge problem: I don't know anything about how the data is stored in the .lvl, .dat and .nxp files. So it's basically impossible for me to add any new features to the old formats, or to improve the existing editor.
Is namida the only one with any knowledge about the old format code?
If it's written in an entirely different language, I know this kind of knowledge can't just easily be transferred from one person to another (I just experienced that because some fellow students basically hoped for me to quickly explain half a year worth of Python stuff to them last week
). But if this is mainly a case of "namida understands format A, I understand format B", then a "NepsterNeoLemmix" would make even more sense. Because it's two entirely different people with entirely different philosophies designing two entirely different engines.
