I love the splitters.

OK, fair enough. We'll keep things as they are for now - teleporters and splitters can stay.

I'd still like to look into merging Paint & Background into a single object; this can be done with a minimum of fuss/effort.

And, animations & one-shots could be merged into traps by allowing traps to specify whether or not to actually remove the lemming; we'd look for the line "NO_REMOVE" in a trap's .nxmo, and then it would essentially become an animation object. There are currently only 51 objects in the entire styles collection which use ANIMATION/ANIMATIONONCE, and they're all Flopsy's. I'll ask him if he doesn't mind me making the change; it can be done in about 30 seconds in a text editor.

I feel object removal is gonna require telling that you can't convert levels from NLX to SLX, Since a few of those objects were in Neolemmix for years already, and I feel if you wanted to keep NLX to SLX conversion, you're gonna have to keep those objects. If you want to remove any of those, just say that NLX conversion will no longer be supported due to many factors breaking levels.

This. I can understand the thought process on a theoretical level — but in practice, it reminds me of the discussion we had about culling the Fencer, due to the Laserer supposedly being able to replace it.

But I’m glad to hear you, WillLem, immediately accepted GigaLem’s comment and Splitters and Teleporters appear to be safe now.

If player criticism had always been heard this readily, perhaps Radiation and Slowfreeze would never have been culled from NeoLemmix in the first place — which would have saved everyone the effort of re-implementing them (you on the programming side, and level designers from adjusting their levels again during conversion from NL to SLX). Especially now that WillLem has also taken over some responsibility for NeoLemmix, as far as I’ve understood it?



WillLem wasn’t here during the Culling Frenzy, but that memory is a reason why I continue to be this allergic against any proposition of culls. To relate this to GigaLem’s comment, back during the Culling Frenzy, the developer literally said: “Existing levels are unimportant”.

One of the statements which got the strongest backlash. Because at least when it comes to changes from NeoLemmix to SuperLemmix, they would only hinder conversion, but the NeoLemmix levels would remain intact.
 
Within NeoLemmix itself, however, culls would render existing levels unplayable — unless the pack creator stuck to Old Formats. Which is precisely what I did for a long time, and presumably also why quite a few other NeoLemmix packs, including highlights like Lemmings Stampede, remain unconverted to this day. (Unless somebody has taken it upon them to convert these packs recently, without me being aware of it… )

Not necessarily because of Radiation and Slowfreeze themselves — rather, I assume it was because of the uncertainty about what would happen to NeoLemmix. And now, with several versions of New Formats in between, and conversion of Old Formats levels being difficult to impossible without going through multiple interim versions of New Formats, the likelihood of seeing some of these Old-Formats packs converted seems to decrease by the day.

In short: I’m glad I converted Lemmings World Tour to New Formats when I did — and saved all the levels required for Pit Lems Remastered when I did. Even though I still haven’t had the time to adapt the latter into a releasable state.


As for backgrounds, I hope these remain available as they are - I haven't experimented with "paint" or any other such features yet. The thing about backgrounds is that not only do some packs rely on them for aesthetics; some tilesets actually rely on backgrounds to be functional. For example, L2 Shadow (which is a nightmare to use in Very-Old Formats 1.43, where the background was the standard black, rather than the dark blue from L2) or Arty's Silhouette tileset.

The latter I intentionally put against a black background for a somewhat troll-y tutorial level in Lemmings, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll, which is supposed to teach you about clear-physics mode and thus, much like the levels for Highlight Lemming or Virtual Lemming in Lemmings 3D, forces you to use clear-physics mode by making the terrain invisible against the background.

If player criticism had always been heard this readily, perhaps Radiation and Slowfreeze would never have been culled from NeoLemmix in the first place

You seem to forget that these culls were decided on by forum discussion. Sure, Nepster as (then) project leader was the one who actually made the decision, but that was after opening the decisions to public criticism -- which is why the disarmer was kept, for example. For slowfreeze, there were a couple of dissenting voices, but not enough to outweigh the arguments in favour of culling and the number of people who contributed to the discussion and supported it.

And believe me, those of us who supported the cull haven't disappeared; we just don't keep posting about it now that it's long since decided. But now that NL has moved into new-formats with its much better quality-of-life features, I've completed several packs and look forward to playing more when I have time. And every time I select a pack with the intention of playing all the way through it, I'm glad that I won't have to suffer through radiation and slowfreeze levels.

As for backgrounds, I hope these remain available as they are

I think there is a confusion here. WillLem is talking about the "background" object type, not backgrounds!

So, my current stance is still to prioritise ideas and development, but take each idea on its own merit in terms of how much it might impact existing content. With something like culling an existing feature, if I get even a small amount of pushback I won't go ahead with it.

Sounds reasonable. The primary thing that will take time when converting any pack from NeoLemmix to SuperLemmix is checking any instaces of Stoners in the NL version, and recreating the solution with Freezers.

The Freezer is a perfect example - because while I ultimately agree it's the superior skill to the Stoner, it's specifically a challenge for pack conversion from NL to SLX (especially for levels involving Stoner-Stacker interactions, which are not possible with the Freezer - rather than the more "standard" application of using a Stoner/Freezer to break a fall, which works pretty much the same way).

The intent behind Paint was to eventually cull only on terrain as a setting, with objects intended to be used this way made into paint objects. Given that never went ahead, and SLX presumably wants to go the other direction on how only on terrain is used, it's probably not worth keeping in SLX. It may be worth flagging such objects in some way so that when NL levels using them are imported, the only on terrain attribute is applied.