The Jumper is no doubt one of the main distinctive features of Lix and Lemmings 2: The Tribes compared to other engines. This distinctiveness may lead me to overestimate the frequency of its usage in those games, though.
Now while working on Lemmings Open Air, I notice that a lot of my levels feature the Shimmier - the newest skill as of now, obivously. There are barely any new levels I create where it isn't present, and I need to somewhat force myself occasionally not to include it, to prevent that skill from being completely overrepresented in the pack. That said, there were quite a few levels I created for that pack before the introduction of the Shimmier, and since those naturally couldn't include it (eycept for one or two where I pre-designed Shimmier-friendly terrain in advance), those levels reduce the overrepresentation of the Shimmier skill in the pack.
Since I don't want the Jumper to be overrepresented in Lemmings Hall of Fame, I'm considering creating some levels for that pack in advance of the introduction of the Jumper to "protect them"
from too much Jumper influence.
So to the Lix creators (and also kieranmillar and other people who have created levels for L2):
How often (just a rough estimate) do you use the Jumper in your custom levels for those engines?I suspect it's a little more frequent in L2, because most styles don't feature the Blocker, but the Attractor, and the Jumper is one of the main ways to release an Attractor again (although pretty much any other skill would also work).
Lix, on the other hand, has no skill-type restriction - you could have a level include one of every skill type, and the level would still work. So there's less of a cost to including a single Jumper in a level than in L2, which at this point has a tighter skill-type number restriction than NeoLemmix. So a Jumper in L2, if only required at one specific spot, reduces the number of other skills available for the rest of the solution to seven. Maybe that makes it more inviting to base more of the remaining solution on the Jumper as well, once again increasing Jumper usage in L2 compared to Lix.
What's your stance on this?