[DISC][PLAYER] The final new object types

[Kingshadow3]

This might be a little late and I'm not sure if you're accepting any more ideas but I've got an object idea:

Explosion proof terrain

This is like the One-way arrows but but instead of nullifying Bashing, Mining, Fencing, Digging in a specific direction, this is terrain that cannot be bombed or nuked as Bombers are non-directional and no one-way arrow resists it.

However, you can still Bash, Mine, Dig and Fence through it(and Laser if it is accepted) as right now the only thing that resists bombers is Steel.

This also makes more sense if the Grenadier is accepted into the game as it would prevent a lot of backroute exploits with it.

[Strato Incendus]

Yes, that would be useful indeed!

Some people might think of this as a corner case, similar to when I requested diagonal one-way arrows. But indeed, now that it looks like we're going to have two explosive skills, it would be less of a fringe object.

I'm just wondering how this could be established flavour-wise. What can't be bombed but still dug into? Perhaps some mine shaft that would collapse if you were to use dynamite, but controlled digging would keep it stable. I don't know, just one spontaneous idea.

[namida]

After some more thought about the remaining options - giving weight to the experiences around the new skills - I have made some decisions around the contenders at this point. One factor I've taken into account here is to be much firmer on cutting things that don't really show promise - there's little point keeping something around if it's probably going to get cut eventually anyway, just cut it now.

Rejected
Toggle buttons - This is likely to run into similar issues as the Grenader / Spearer did, in that they complicate things too much on the coding side.
Downdraft - There's too much room for this to get fiddly, as well as questions of what exactly it should do.
No-Assignment Field - This would need to cover huge areas and for destructive skills, may need to extend well inside terrain, which would make it difficult to have a fair visual. The physics aren't all that unreasonable but yeah, it's not practical on the visual side.


As far as the rest go:

No-effect animations - Will be implemented. These will be considered "background" in the sense that the "disable backgrounds" option will hide them. (I'm open to having seperate options instead of a combined one here if there's sufficient demand.)
Paint - Purely cosmetic, so won't be subject to any usefulness evaluation. Instead, some further discussion around if / how this can be kept fair (keeping in mind only-on-terrain sees very little abuse) or whether draw-on-terrain should be cut altogether is needed.

This leaves portals and the adders / removes for permanent skills and zombie / neutral states. These will go through a similar discussion / evaluation / refinement procedure as the new skill candidates, with decisions to be made based on how that goes.

[Dullstar]

I thought we already had no effect animations? I think it is reasonable to have them react to the backgrounds setting (or a separate setting that's not just "play the level in CPM"), although I wouldn't mind them being possible to draw on top of terrain as well (somewhere, I have an example screenshot of a level that uses cloud objects in a fair manner to depict a high-altitude scene, but getting them to show up on the terrain required some inelegant workarounds).

[namida]

After giving some thought to the technical side of things re: objects that turn lemmings into, or back from, neutrals or zombies, I have decided to rule out one such object on technical grounds - the Zombie-to-Normal variant is ruled out. The other three variations (normal to neutral, normal to zombie, neutral to normal) remain on the table.

In short, this is because the ability to revert zombies to normal would require changes beyond just "flip the lemming back to normal" - just to give one example, it would mean gameplay should no longer auto-terminate once only zombies remain. It'd also raise questions of if (and how) zombies should be included in the lemming count on the skill panel, etc. The simplest way around this is to just rule out this variant of the object.

By comparison, normal to zombie can already happen of course, all that would happen here is that this transition can now happen on levels that don't begin with any zombies - this is not hard to make happen, because the code that can trigger this transition is always there, it just never gets used if the level has no zombies. Changes (in either direction) with neutrals don't currently exist, but there aren't really any special considerations that need to be taken into account to make it happen - in all static counts (eg. the "how many lemmings on this level?" count used for calculating postview texts) neutrals are treated the same way as normals anyway, and the dynamic counts already support neutrals, it's just a matter of making sure they get refreshed when a conversion happens. In particular, there are no cases like "gameplay terminates when only neutrals remain" or "neutrals aren't expected to be saveable" etc.

That aside, in light of the decision to keep floaters / gliders able to exit, I'd say there's less need for the Vortex - but that doesn't mean I'm ruling it out (whereas the dezombifier thing is an outright "as the dev I'm saying it's not going to happen", this comment about vortexes is just "this is my current input on them as a user, it's not a decision as a dev").

[Dullstar]

My opinion on the vortex is entirely based on the floater/glider case. If we have floaters/gliders allowed to use the normal exit as they are now, I see little value in the vortex, as the only major non-corner case difference I can think of would be fallers.

[Simon]

Hmm, the value of the vortex diminished after the decision that the normal exit catches floaters and gliders.

To justify the vortex, you must argue that replicating (with normal grounded exit, and updraft to catch fallers, or redesign the fall to be survivable) is not enough. Be it for practicality/physics/visuals/something, e.g., argue that updraft above the exit exit now catch fallers, but pushes the gliders away.

With the many gadgets in NeoLemmix, it's certainly often doable to replicate X with Y. Ease of workaround cannot be the only criterion against X. But opportunity cost rises for X.

Also potential design issue: How clearly is a gadget a vortex and not an exit? The sucking behavior is clear for WillLem's designs. Will every vortex designer be this clear?


The portal has a similar design issue as the vortex. How does a portal look clearly different than a teleporter? E.g., teleporters are always machines and portals are always wormholes/vortexes? Fun will happen when you have exiting vortexes and portal vortexes, you'll really have to put green/blue scenery in the exiting vortex.

Does the portal pull its weight? E.g., can you replicate the portal by redesigning the level to shorten the distance that the portal shall cross, or can you trap the lemmings to be portalled in a pit with a slow-consuming teleporter.

I have a hunch that the portal will pull more weight than I see at first glance. Lemmings needs both fire and triggered traps, both are integral design elements, although that has to be relativized; this direct comparison is too extreme: The trigger area of triggerd traps won't fill a large region unless they look ugly and stacked. You'd use fire/water for this. And you can (replicate more portal using the teleporter) than you can (replicate fire using triggered trap) because the player wants to enter the portal/teleporter eventually, but is on a strict limit of losses for the trap.


I'm still waiting for a smash hit: An idea so good that namida reacts with "oooooh" and where I'm envious because I didn't think of it first.

In Lemmings 1, traps guided the player, but were not central to the puzzle. Since then, triggered traps have become iconic, and most gadgets can fix backroutes. Clearly, gadgets have grown some weight in design. How close does it come to the design weight of the terrain, the main concern in level design?

The core idea of Lemmings is to control the many by modifying terrain by assigning to the few. A gadget that modifies the terrain? Remote-controlled bomb? Extendable automatic bridge? The bomb has the typical design problem that once you have 7 triggers in the map and 7 bombs, it becomes messy to display which switch is which. And the switch must look different from the exit-opening button, nan nan nan.

-- Simon

Or does NeoLemmix have too many gadgets and we should have ourselves a nice culling spree! The final new object culls! Burn baby burn!

[namida]

The bomb has the typical design problem that once you have 7 triggers in the map and 7 bombs, it becomes messy to display which switch is which. And the switch must look different from the exit-opening button, nan nan nan.

Regarding unlock buttons - all buttons are connected to all exits. You can have multiple buttons, but the player will just have to push them all. You can have multiple exits, but (not including exits that aren't locked at all) they'll all open when all buttons are pressed. This averts the linking issue, and can work for a bomb / detonator pair too - when all detonators are pushed, all bombs explode. At a stretch, perhaps each bomb could require a different number of detonators to be pushed (so perhaps on a level with 3 bombs and 5 detonators, Bomb A is set to explode when 2 detonators are pushed, Bomb B when 3 are pushed, Bomb C when all 5 are - but it's agnostic as to which detonators, only the quantity matters).

Terrain toggle objects have been ruled out on technical grounds. However, objects that are solely terrain removal avert many of the issues that would arise there. This might be feasible...

I wonder if making them able to destroy steel is useful. The level's creator has full control over where the bombs are placed, so it would not diminish the value of steel in backroute prevention / etc, unlike a steel-destroying skill would. However, it may be that simply giving it the same properties as the bomber, and using one-way arrows, would be powerful enough that steel destroying is not necessary.

[Simon]

Right, now I remember that mobius suggesting the toggling terrain from Lemming Revolution. There, too, it was always steel that appeared or disappeared.

Removing steel would work like remote-controlled doors. It can even be a new type of terrain tile, steel-that-erases-itself-when-all-key-buttons-are-pressed a.k.a. door terrain. Then it can get its own color in CPM and it's obvious down to the pixel what the effect of the detonator will be.

I don't have strong opinions for or against such terrain-changing. On one hand, they support the idea that we steer lemmings with terrain, on the other hand, they violate that we modify terrain by assigning.

Doors and keys are constrictive to the player. To compare: Normal terrain, you can tackle it in any number of ways, and the puzzling fun comes from weighing the advantages of using this skill here over that skill here, or taking different routes altogether. But doors and keys, if you conclude that you need to open the door to solve the level, there is only a single way to do it, get the key. The key blatantly rubs in the face of the player the need to go to a very specific place.

One can even argue that we already have keys to open exits, and doors with keys would be more of the same in a different flavor, like vortex/exit and teleporter/portal.

-- Simon

[Strato Incendus]

I just want to bring the idea of explosion-proof terrain (proposed by Kingshadow3) to attention again. As far as I can tell, namida neither listed this under "rejected", nor under those ideas that are still under consideration - so he might just have forgotten about it, but it's still at the top of this page.

Even though the Grenader didn't make, I still think having something that Bombers can't go through but digging skills can, that would be essential to preventing Bomber backroutes.

1) Especially when it comes to thin terrain stripes that are supposed to be removed by Diggers - bombing through them from the side is a common way to bypass those obstacles, and one-way-down arrows don't do anything to stop that.

2) Similarly, one-way up arrows can stop Diggers, but you can still bomb through them if the terrain they're covering is thin enough.

[namida]

For technical and visual clarity reasons, if I were to go with that, it'd essentially work as a 5th type of one-way wall. In particular, this means it could not overlap other one-way walls, which would mean that in your examples, #1 would now easily fall to a (any destructive skill that's not a bomber), and #2 would now become vulnerable to diggers again.

This greatly reduces the usefulness of such a feature, but if we do accept this limitation, and find it to still be worthwhile anyway, it's definitely something that's feasible to implement - the trickiest question is actually "what should it look like?"

[WillLem]

doors with keys would be more of the same in a different flavor, like vortex/exit and teleporter/portal.

Lockable teleporters are a great idea, +1 for this if it's been suggested somewhere. Since buttons already open exits though, what could be used to unlock teleporters?

Even though the Grenader didn't make, I still think having something that Bombers can't go through but digging skills can, that would be essential to preventing Bomber backroutes

-1 for this, especially because Grenaders didn't make the cut. Bombers need to be as powerful as possible in as many situations as possible, since they are sacrificial skills.

And, again with wanting to modify physics/add stuff to NL specifically to prevent backroutes. Grrr!

[namida]

I'm going to rule out the vortex. Given that it was decided to continue allowing Floaters and Gliders to exit, this pretty much means the only difference is when it comes to Fallers. While I'm sure it's possible to construct a scenario where a vortex would be necessary (ie: it wouldn't be possible to create the same effect using only terrain + objects that already exist), the scope of such would be so narrow at this point that it's simply not worth the effort of implementing such an object type, keeping in mind that an animation for lemmings using it would be necessary too (which in turn puts a new animation - and a very obscure one at that - that custom spriteset designers have to account for).

[WillLem]

Given that it was decided to continue allowing Floaters and Gliders to exit

Can Floaters and Gliders still exit? Or rather, is the plan to continue to allow this? I can't remember what the outcome of that discussion was (or where it is...!) Just asking for clarification more than anything.

[namida]

an Floaters and Gliders still exit? Or rather, is the plan to continue to allow this?

Yes - the ultimate decision was to simply leave things as-is (with the footnote that, were it a new engine being made from scratch, rather than there being any concern for existing content, Floaters / Gliders would not be allowed to exit).