NeoLemmix Community Showcase at UKSG

[darkshoxx]

Heya,     

I'm currently considering submitting a showcase for UKSG Blue in October 2026
UKSG is a speedruning event, held three times a year in Glasgow. They fundraise money for CRISIS to help people out of homelessness.
But not every submission must be strictly speedruns that appear on leaderboards. I often submit retro games (though mostly point and click/puzzle adventures, see Here for examples).
I consider NeoLemmix at least TAS-adjacent, as you have control over every input on every frame, even if the goal isn't necessarily to get the fastest time.

My current plan is to showcase three things:
1. Speedruns of the vanilla Lemmings Mayhem    category but with NeoLemmix solutions (where I want to showcase fast solutions as loaded replays to these, played back at fast speed and provide some commentary).
2. Crazy  levels solvable with the original 10 jobs, but requiring NeoLemmix for the inputs. So if you have (or have seen) some crazy levels with crazy solutions that only rely on the original 10 jobs, please show them off here.
3. Anything goes. NeoLemmix  + Lix    , Custom music, terrain, contraptions, solutions, skins, show off what you loved to create or loved someone else create.

Now to be absolutely clear, this is not a level creation contest.
There is for a submission, there is no guarantee that it will be accepted, so please do not put any additional effort into this.
If you have or have seen
1. A fast solution for an original Mayhem level,
2. A level showcasing interesting interactions with vanilla jobs,
3. Your favourite levels or solutions,
I'd be delighted to collect them here. Obviously I'll give proper credit to every creator should the submission be successful.

Don't worry too much about part 1, I'm aware not everyone likes optimising solutions for time, I'm happy to take care of that myself, if nothing in particular comes to mind.
I want to include this part to keep the theme of speedrunning in the submission.

Basically what I'm asking is, what are your favourite levels that you'd like to see in a showcase like this?

[IchoTolot]

I am not a Speedrun junkie, but for point 2 and 3 of your list my initial thought is: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=6062.0

Just take a look at the top 3 levels from the all the previuos "Level of the Year" contests and pick your favorites!

There you should get a better overview than just one or two people telling you some favorites! 

If you need replays for those levels, look at YouTube or ask the authors directly.

If you want levels directly tuned for difficulty I would hint at the last ranks of Lemmings Uncharted, Lemmings Destination, NepsterLems and Lemmings United.

[WillLem]

Other players than myself are probably better off picking levels as my taste in levels is not the most popular!

All I would request is that you consider using NeoLemmix Community Edition for your showcase, as this would be a great opportunity to present/test some of the upgraded UI features (many of which I imagine would be particularly useful for speedrunning*), and potentially expand the player base.

Best of luck with the showcase, I look forward to watching your runs!

Will

*Some examples:

• Mouse wheel framestepping
• Panel button specific hotkeys
• Nudge viewport hotkeys

[darkshoxx]

Thanks for the input so far!

I wanted to avoid pre-existing collections since the always come with the cutoff of the time they were created in.
Also, it's going to be difficult to find things that specifically fit into the categories I'm looking for.
Unless there's a collection for "best levels with only the 10 vanilla jobs", that's going to be tough to fill, so I was hoping for individual responses here of things that were memorable.
I'll check them out for the third category though.

@WillLem happy to give the CE a try, but can't guarantee that I'll present the fork.
I saw your run of the Mayhem levels, do you still have the replays for that?

[Simon]

Physics are exactly identical between vanilla NL and CE (NeoLemmix Community Edition). The point of CE is purely UI fixes. It is a drop-in replacement.

Vanilla NL still has the egregious zoom bug: Instead of zooming into where the cursor is, the map jumps away from the cursor position into unrelated areas. This kills the mood in livestreaming and live showcasing. Reason: You'll often zoom deep into local areas, explain something to the audience, then zoom out for the big picture. CE zooms into the cursor as you expect, i.e., it preserves both mouse-on-land and mouse-on-screen.

Submit NeoLemmix and play with CE (not with vanilla NL).

-- Simon

[darkshoxx]

Just gave it a go and I'm really interested in the playback mode feature. I can't quite get it to work sadly. EDIT: Got it to work. Will be very helpful for a showcase.
@Simon @WillLem @IchoTolot
Any levels you particularly liked that you've seen or made?

[darkshoxx]

@IchoTolot
The topic you linked only has a list of the names of those on 1st, 2nd and 3rd for all the contests. While that is interesting information it doesn't actually contain links to the levels, so therefore is information I'd get from manually searching through these constests.
So I tried doing that, and for 2015 for example all I got was dead dropbox links.
I then tried to continue searching and hit the sites max search spam protection limit.

So even if I wanted to go through the individual years, I couldn't
Quick note outside of the planned showcase, maybe these old ones should be uploaded somewhere for sake of preservation.

[IchoTolot]

Any levels you particularly liked that you've seen or made?

In terms of contests here are some of my favorites:

- Simon's "Rhizome" (Lix)
- Nessy's "A Rock And A Hard Place"
- 92Dexter11's "Lem Ninja
- Dodochacalo's "Honey, I Shrunk the Lems"
- Pieuw's "A tad mad, a tad rad!"
- Armani's "Insert Coin, Choose Lemming"
- IchoTolot's "Revenants"
- DireKrow's "Shoestring Operation"
- tan x dx's "Measure once, build twice"

These contest entries should also count towards the difficulty category:

- Armani's "The Good, The Bad and The Weird"
- IchoTolot's "Violent Changes"

In terms of difficulty these are some of my favorites:

- Lemmings Uncharted [Aquarius 06]: RefleXion  (This took me months!)
- Lemmings Uncharted [Aquarius 19]: Immoral Society
- Lemmings Uncharted [Aquarius 15]: Simulation: FARO

- NepsterLems [Black Hole 01]: Thin Layers
- NepsterLems [Black Hole 20]: The Deadly Rooms of Lem
- NepsterLems [Black Hole 21]: Final Frustration

- Deceit's Lemmings [Mayhem 21]: Enter at your own risk...

- Lemmings United [Genocide 28]: It's All About The Pentiums!
- Lemmings United [Genocide 35]: Kiwi Knight's Keep
- Lemmings United [Genocide 37]: Gate To The Inner Sanctum


Of course these are just some of my personal favorites or levels which I am quite proud of.

To gain access to the contest levels I would suggest checking the nomination list topic for the LOTY. There is usually an description from where the level originated.

[IchoTolot]

This should also help:

https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=6138.0

Armani made a compilation pack for all the contests! 

[WillLem]

Just gave it a go and I'm really interested in the playback mode feature. I can't quite get it to work sadly. EDIT: Got it to work.

Glad to know that you got it working. What issues did you encounter at first? Maybe it's something that needs fixing engine-side.

@Simon @WillLem @IchoTolot
Any levels you particularly liked that you've seen or made?

I'm probably not the best person to ask about levels, but for speedrunning I'd posit that the more skills a level has available the better, because there are more possibilities to carve out the most optimal route.

So, look for levels which provide X-of-each where X is at least 5. Those are likely to be good for speedrunning. I'll aim to find you some examples later, and will see if I can find the replays you requested. I'm afk at the moment (on mobile).

[darkshoxx]

What issues did you encounter at first? Maybe it's something that needs fixing engine-side.

I have tested this with a folder that has 3 replay files, 2 for the same level. If I choose Playback Order by Replay, the levels are started, I see a purple "R" but no skills are selected, all the lemmings die 
Instead if I choose "By Level", everything works just fine.
Additional notes:
- There is no default Playback Cancel Hotkey, and no easy way for me to set one, so there's just this field that remains empty.
- It says "choose a folder" but it only lets me choose a replay file within that folder (but then correctly identifies the parent folder).
Would you like me to raise a github issue?

I'm probably not the best person to ask about levels, but for speedrunning I'd posit that the more skills a level has available the better, because there are more possibilities to carve out the most optimal route.

I may have phrased that poorly. 3 sections: Section 1: Speedrunnning the Mayhem levels
Section 2: Showcase of vanilla skills in unexpected ways.
Section 3: Showcase of crazy stuffs.
Sections 2 and 3 are unrelated to speedrunning, this is purely about levels you like. And yes your opinion and taste matters as much as everyone else's.

This should also help:

https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=6138.0

Armani made a compilation pack for all the contests! 

Thanks so much! I'll take a deep dive into that later today!

[darkshoxx]

Can a sitemod please maybe lower the restrictions on my search limit? I'm trying to find things spread around forums and I get blacklisted every 5 minutes 

[Simon]

There is "Time required between searches from same user". I've now changed it from 5 seconds to 1 second.

I don't see any other settings, but I'll keep looking. Let me know if you run into limits again.

-- Simon

[Simon]

If you decide to show Lix:

• Introducing Miners by Nepster, in single/nepster/Moon/
  
• Just Mine by geoo, in single/geoo/wrappy/
  
• Rhizome by me, in single/misc/contests/2023/
  
• Merge Sort by geoo, in single/lemforum/Daunting/

All of them ship with Lix. Replays for them are in the replay proof collection. I use this collection to ensure that I ship only solvable levels.

Other than Rhizome, they're all miner puzzles. It's no coincidence, the miner is awesome. But if you want to cut, I recommend to keep at least Just Mine (novelty solution because of the wrapping geometry) and Rhizome (it's the only Lix level to win a Level of the Year).

If you have a lot of time:

• You Only Get One Bash at It! by Proxima, in single/lemforum/Hopeless/. This is hard and the solution is well hidden, but it's such a surprise. Don't force yourself to solve it, it's the 3rd-latest map in the main 240-level pack. Consider to watch the replay.
  
• Minimalism by geoo, in single/lemforum/Lovely/, to see an easy but nontrivial batter level.
  
• Flying Squirrels by me, in single/misc/contests/ for more of the forest tileset.
  
• Parking Garage by Geoffster, in single/lemforum/Hopeless/
  

-- Simon

[WillLem]

I've replied to the reported issues with Playback Mode in NLCE here.

[darkshoxx]

I've gone through all the levels, they're really cool! If there's any others, do let me know.
Quick clarification, I'm not necessarily looking for difficulty (which is probably more impressive for people who already know neolemmix) but things that are visually interesting or unexpected gameplaywise, like trapping lems at spawn in "It's All About The Pentiums!". Wasn't there also a trick that made them rise vertically through a solid wall?
Basically things that vanilla players would think impossible or illegal.
Or just visually non-vanilla tilesets and sprites to show off.

[Simon]

In DOS physics (not NeoLemmix, not Lix), climbers trapped inside solid terrain will ascend. A good showcase is geoo's challenge solution Youtube: Tame 13 (Thunder-Lemmings are go!) 100 % with one builder. The video was shot with the solution executed in Lemmix, which replicates DOS physics.

DOS also has the giant leap, a.k.a. y-slide. When a walker ascends a step height of 3-6 pixels, the walker doesn't instantly warp to the new height (unlike what he does for 1-2 pixels). Instead, he becomes an ... I call it ascender, Lemmix calls it jumper. He rises by 2 pixels per physics update until he arrives at the top. The bug arises from how the ascender/jumper doesn't memorize upfront the target height. Instead, every physics update, he tests anew for air at his current height. Wedge a builder brick into the top, and the ascender/jumper will rise until he finds a new top of the wall. I don't have a showcase.

-- Simon

[IchoTolot]

Basically things that vanilla players would think impossible or illegal.

Here I would maybe point towards levels where you need to know a bit more about a certain often overlooked mechanic involving the "lemming_id":

- Deceit's Lemmings [Mayhem 21]: Enter at your own risk...
- Lemmings Uncharted [Aquarius 15]: Simulation: FARO - Especially here it is extra devious!
- Lemmings United [Genocide 40]: Photo Finish

Maybe something with using the terrain of a constructive skill to extend a destructive skill.
Or even bouncing around other skills/lemmings with the help of blockers.

But in genereal I would say, here you are the best judge!
You know the crowd best and maybe looking a bit more around in a couple of packs the the most efficient method here.
My (and maybe kaywhyn's) YouTube channel could help in speeding up further search attempts.

[darkshoxx]

But in genereal I would say, here you are the best judge!

Yeah but I've played like 2 level packs and levels from 3 contests. I've seen more levels from your youtube channel than from playing myself

- Deceit's Lemmings [Mayhem 21]: Enter at your own risk...
- Lemmings Uncharted [Aquarius 15]: Simulation: FARO - Especially here it is extra devious!
- Lemmings United [Genocide 40]: Photo Finish

thanks I'll check these out, appreciate it.

A good showcase is geoo's challenge solution Youtube: Tame 13 (Thunder-Lemmings are go!) 100 % with one builder

LMAO wth

Wedge a builder brick into the top, and the ascender/jumper will rise until he finds a new top of the wal

This might be the thing I was looking for.

Again thanks for all your feedback! 

[darkshoxx]

Okay, I've submitted the Showcase. Here's the announcement video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8ImSdL-oGA
and here are the three parts:

Part 1: Mayhem https://youtu.be/dzBPmVkd83A
Part 2: Vanilla https://youtu.be/I6quaYio47o
Part 3: Speedrun https://youtu.be/usUrlFYFs7w

If you see anything that needs fact-checked or corrected, please let me know. Big thanks to everyone who participated

[darkshoxx]

I'm going to keep the Lix Levels as a backup/bonus incentive, sorry for not including them directly

[IchoTolot]

I watched all the videos and great job on trying to speedrun the levels and also explaining as much as humanly possible, that is no easy task! 

I think you got a good variety of of levels as well! Some more focussed on certain mechanics and other more pure gameplay wise. 

In the nuke+lem-id part I would've highlighted out the details a bit more, but while also playing the level I think that's extremely difficult and most people will get what happens here.

My own step-by-step explanation would be:

- The nuke assigns the timers frame after frame starting with the lemming that spawned first out of the hatch and continues in order.
- Therefore we want the first lemming's bomb to go off to create the passage to the exit as this is the very first nuke explosion.
- The large climber crowd can exit while their timers are still running.
- This creates a window of around ~25-30 frames where no lemming explodes from the nuke after the first lemming explodes.
- In this timeframe the main crowd needs to drop through the hole from the nuked first lemming into the exit to avoid further casualties.

This method in general turns the nuke into a legitimate skill to use in some levels!

[WillLem]

Brilliant job with the showcase, darkshoxx! Your detailed explanations provide excellent insight into the strats, and it's great to see NLCE in use.

Your previous comments have helped to improve Playback Mode for the next version (which will hopefully be ready in the next few weeks). Did you encounter any other UI-related issues whilst making these videos?

[darkshoxx]

Thanks for the kind words, both!

My own step-by-step explanation would be

Thanks for spelling these out.
I only noticed in the like last few seconds of the level that there's SO MUCH to explain about how this works, I should have started explaining earlier. I'll do it justice if it gets accepted 

Did you encounter any other UI-related issues whilst making these videos

Actually yes! There was one more thing, related to the key assignments. Lemme try to find what it was.

[darkshoxx]

ah yes, if you want to assign a key to "Select Skill Button", you can select which number skill button to assign it to, but there's no way to then "confirm" that number.
Neither choosing "Save & Close" nor selecting a different key will actually save the selection you made, my workaround was to swap to a different effect on the same key and then going back to "Select Skill Button". That worked for me.