Thanks for the reply and the detailed explanations, Nepster!
Sorry for being somewhat late to the party...
No problem, we all know you've been busy with a lot of other stuff lately
!
As far as I can see, the "levels for V10" subboard is not locked at all. Has someone opened it in the meantime? I am totally ok with it being open.
It looks like that, since the description has just been changed, too, only containing the line that content creation for v10 and older is discouraged.
Great that this has been dealt with quickly, and to know that you're on board with it!
Just to be clear, I was not even arguing out of self-interest here
; my next pack is going to be for New Formats anyway, since I'm quite sure the shimmier will be available by that time. I just think if I had the chance to release Lemmings World Tour for Old Formats, so should other content creators, especially those who have been working on their packs for quite a while (because I'm not certain that ArtLems, Lemmings Evolution, GemLems etc. are all entirely New Formats already).
If ghost would be implemented as a (permanent) skill, then you would get lots of weird interactions, because currently no lemming can use two skills at the same time.
Good point, I hadn't thought of that!
I only considered that it's obviously possible for one lemming to
have several skills at a time (like an X-Athlete, who can still additionally go on to build / platform / bash / mine / fence / dig etc.)., but not that it's impossible to
perform two skills at a time.
So the question would be whether a ghost is always performing his skill, or if he only switches to ghost form whenever he encounters an object he has to slip by. If so, many of the tricks I mentioned, like mining at the bottom of a water pit or building out of fire, would not be possible, because the ghost would be busy... well, "ghosting"
.
Of course, the main counter argument here would be that a walker is also a skill; yet, Lemmings are being walkers constantly, and walkers can also be assigned other skills.
The same is true for the cloner.
The main issue with the ghost is that it would have to be a
permanent skill, and the trademark of all permanent skills to date is that you cannot assign anything to them while they are being performed - apart from bombers and stoners.
- Overwrite a lot of the lemming counting code, e.g. to determine when there are still enough lemmings around to complete the level, when to quit a level as there are no more living lemmings, ...
Yes, in that regard, ghosts indeed would have to be treated like zombies again: Lemmings that are around, but do not count. Other lethal skills obviously don't have this problem, because bombers and stoners remove the lemming from the map entirely.
- If you code the "fear" aspect (which was in my opinion the major point in favor of keeping ghosts in the first place, because it was something really unique), you would have to write a lot of completely new code to handle this, or you would have to copy all the zombie trigger area map and adapt to to the fear aspect. But this would mean copying a lot of code, which is distributed among a lot of different methods and is not at all in one place.
Even then you will have to make sure this code is bug-free. And given all the problems and glitches we had with getting static force fields working correctly, I really don't want to deal with moving ones...
The fear aspect really has me thinking now; I'm beginning to realise that I used it in more of my own ghost levels than I was consciously aware of. This is also the strongest argument for ghost being a type of lemming, like zombie, rather than a skill, because the "ignore objects" and "intimidate lemmings" parts are to completely different things.
I'd say the only other skill that really does two different things is the
glider, considering it's regular behaviour vs. how that behaviour is altered considerably when they come into contact with updrafts (and then again, only if they open up their gliding sail at the correct height to still be inside the trigger area, and not even just with the sail, but with their feet, etc.). At the same time, gliders are what I repeatedly called the most versatile skill in NeoLemmix, for precisely the same reason, thereby also offering a lot of "design space" for level creators. This means you can create level ideas involving gliders going in totally different directions, and the same is likely true for ghosts. This is what I want to explore in the "Ghost level sharing thread"
.
because ghosts will not drown when falling into water and will not splat when hitting from high above assuming they land in water.
I know this was just meant to be an example, so I don't want to be overly nit-picky, but the latter part is not correct: Since ghosts ignore water like any other objects, they will indeed splat at the bottom of a water pit if there's ground underneath, and fall out of the screen if there is none, i.e. if the water is the last piece before the edge of the level.
What you are describing there is the behaviour of swimmers
. Since ghosts can't ever interact with water at all, in theory one wouldn't even need swimmer sprites for ghosts. That said, ghosts still can be assigned the swimmer skill, if the player choses to, it's just pointless. Just like making a ghost a disarmer
.
Ghosts also don't interact with updrafts, however, the glider isn't completely wasted on them, because they can still move in the regular glider-like fashion, i.e. to cross downward-trending gaps that haven't been sealed yet with builders or platformers.
All right, changed v10 level board from (No New Topics) to (Default) and moved the Ghost level sharing topic to 10 levels.
Thanks, Simon! That topic is for "v10
and older", after all (because ghosts aren't available in v10 either).
TL;DR: GigaLem, me, and whoever else wants to join the spooky party
are going to keep running ghosts through all their gears in the ghost level sharing topic, and just see what we can come up with for fun. No one of us is expecting this matter to be settled for New Formats anytime soon. There are other skills that the majority of the forum has voted on, and they obviously should be focused on first
. In the meantime, ghosts are just one of many possible ways to add skills or "lemming types" in the future; adding new lemming types, after all, isn't a completely foreign idea in New Formats, harking back to the discussion of "neutral lemmings" (=non-assignable, but saveable, i.e. the opposite of ghosts).
So if one day it comes down to whether we should rather add neutral lemmings or bring back ghosts, I'd always go with ghosts first!