I'm still around; if there's anything I can change to get the things to work better with other tilesets, let me know!

Oh man, so this is something my American Philosophy professor would have a field day with, because my instinct as an American is to say "It doesn't matter since the practical effect is the same", which fits in with the idea of American Pragmatism described in the late 1800s.

https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/william-james-and-squirrel-example

If you were to engage the troll and non-troll in conversation and observe the non-troll having a different and more sensible reaction to challenges than the real troll, then I suppose the difference would matter, but if we assume their behavior is consistent in the face of replies, then it's immaterial.

However, I don't know what American Philosophy has to say about the case where the person posing that question is, themselves, trolling in a way, lol.

Derp. My mistake! Good lord, this was a whole year ago?

QuoteLiebatron made his Chicago train tileset, I promised to look over the trap design, tile naming, etc., and I'll focus on that these 1-2 weeks. There are still ambitious coding projects around the corner, but Liebatron's set, I promised to look over it, and haven't done anything over the holidays yet. This must come first.

I'll set a reminder to myself to check out the forum at least once a week for the next couple weeks then! Or heck, I might just set a weekly reminder and leave it on indefinitely. This thread aside, I do want to check in here more often just in general too.

Thanks for trying them out!

I took a look at the replays, and I've gotta say, the Extrawurst replay took me by surprise
It did not at all occur to me that you could just platform right over the hitbox for the 'customer'... I'll have to find a way to prevent that.

Your solution to "For Crying Out Loud" is cool, also! It uses most of the same mechanics as my solution, but uses up a couple more skills on the left, while using significantly fewer on the right side of the level. Mine saves 18, but it uses up all the skills

Lixylvania - There is quite a bit of fire! I'm curious though, what do you mean by omitting by squeezing?

Also, I have some ideas for the exits... When I've got time, my plan is to fiddle with the lights around the door and see if I can't make the exits more obvious that way!

Quote from: mobius on December 13, 2020, 03:23:50 AM
I think this one speaks for itself...

https://youtu.be/D30r0iRH73Q?t=2737

in a recent example; how about in Breath of the Wild the dark forest area? [Typhlo ruins]

That place was cool! Creepy for sure, but I thought it was a cool idea. Super Dark Land. I couldn't really get very far carrying a torch, and I couldn't see the lanterns, so eventually I just started running around everywhere with the move-metal-objects ability ready to use so it would draw little lines all over the terrain. It's not the same as having things lit up, but it was enough for me to navigate.

Everything scared me when I was a little kid,. There was one particular game that got to me; I think it was "Castlevania" for N64. It wasn't any particular thing that scared me, it was looking at this world and thinking "Is the whole world like this?" Imagining a world where *everything* is just spikes and evil and blood and junk. I was fine with Gauntlet Legends because I felt like the world had some cool areas still, and I had this sense that we were slowly fixing it. In Castlevania though, a lot of the gameplay is centered around getting through places, rather than fighting. From what I saw, there weren't even any enemies, it just felt like a big hollow world full of death and evil without a face or an identifiable form that you could fight back against.

As far as more immediate, concrete types of 'scary' go, the moment that comes to mind is a level in the N64 Star Wars game "Shadows of the Empire". There's a level with a former Imperial base and a bunch of catwalks, and those probes from Empire Strikes Back are one of the enemies. Unless they're firing, they're mostly silent, but they do occasionally make that weird 'comms' sound effect from the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ML-X0r9Jg

I heard one in the distance, but I couldn't find it. So I keep going through the level, and a minute later I'm pretty sure I'm past it. Then I'm on this catwalk, and I see something out of the corner of my eye, and I turn to the right, and there's... Nothing. So I turn to go ahead again, and to my *left*, one of these things is just silently floating *up* from below the catwalk, and its horrifying eye thing is staring into my soul, and it makes that creepy noise super loud right as I'm turning towards it, and it just scares the heck out of me. I think I just panicked and died

I'm sure I could think of others, but that's the one that comes to mind first.

Revisiting:

How could I possibly forget?

ReDeads!

Being 6'ish and thinking "Oh hey, Zelda" at cousin's house; you turn on the N64 and hit play, open a game, not realizing your cousin is much farther ahead than you. Your cousin is no longer in Happy Tree Land, and you go into Hyrule Castle Town thinking "This place seems scarier than usual, I'm going into town", and everyone you know is dead, and a horrible moaning creature made of rags jumps on you and starts biting the life out of you. That one got me.

And uhhh... In Wind Waker, they seem to have made it their goal to make the things as scary as possible, and they succeeded. I think my least favorite thing about them, aside from the scream, is how utterly *still* they are before you encounter them. Even if you hit them with a boomerang or an arrow or whatever; they just sit there. It makes a dull thud, and they turn only their head to look at you with their empty eyes. Then they turn away again silently. On a sidenote, what evil developer decided to stick one of those in the labyrinth under your cabana house? I wouldn't mind if I could at least turn the fireplace back on, but since I can't, I always have this irrational fear that once the fireplace it out, a ReDead could come out of the hole in the floor any time. Once the fire is out, playing the puzzle game makes me nervous. It forces you to stand with your back to the fireplace hole for an extended period of time. I know it's just a game, but once the fire is out, I don't like playing the wall puzzle... That fireplace is just wide open, and there's a ReDead in the basement. For all I know the thing is right behind me at any moment.

Also here's updated versions of the levels themselves! Most of the changes were made just to accommodate the new steel terrain, but there's a couple changes I made to make a couple things less tedious, particularly in the later levels. I'm attaching replays too this time!

Also, there's 4 "Bonus" levels in this pack; I wanted to make a level pack which would exclusively use pieces from the Chicago terrain set, and I *almost* did; Walk-In Appointment and Promontory Point both use an outside entrance and exit, Overtruss Trek uses a "construction" set hatch, and in 4 levels I did use someone else's water. I came close though!

The bonus levels are just 4 more (Really 3, one is just a silly no-skill level) that didn't really fit into that goal!

Awesome!

Also, one more update; I was playing around with it and I noticed an issue with the hitboxes for the fire traps where the hitbox didn't quite extend to the bottom of the fire, much less below it. I think I forgot to make adjustments after adding pixels to make it 8-pixel grid compliant.

I did some hitbox testing and made some adjustments; the Lix can survive having their hair or feet singed a bit, but if they decide to befriend the fire too much, they go up in flames as expected.

EDIT: One more tiny fix; literally 3 pixels the *slightly* wrong color on two of the trains. I reuploaded the zip!

Make truss squares 48x48, or possibly make two versions; one 48x48 and another 32x32...
Fix steel tiles to be more obviously steel
I ended up doing a bit of a compromise here; I decided I couldn't really make the steel obviously steel without scaling it up a bit in terms of thickness, so I went ahead and did that, which also resolved the 8-pixel overlap tiling issue. The resulting steel piece is 48x48!

I do still really like the thinner square truss though, and I like the idea of having a generic square truss that *isn't* steel, so I did just add it separately under the "truss" section as a non-steel square truss piece with the same size. That one doesn't tile with the same 8-pixel overlap, but it would tile with a 4-pixel overlap, and it's still 48x48. If you needed to tile them on an 8-pixel grid, it would still work, you'd just have double-trussed vertical and horizontal bars. Let me know if that sounds like an acceptable solution!

Add 7 pixels to Forney type
I mixed this up; I needed 7 pixels to the *side* to adhere to the 8-grid. That's more palatable than a bunch of empty space at the top. This is done!

Fix level pack up for new sizes - Still need to do this part!

Fix "Up" arrow key on keyboard, since it's decided it doesn't want to work anymore - Ordered new machine. This one is starting to do some interesting things anyway, aside from the key failure. This has been an outstanding machine for several years, but I think it's time...

Alright... In that case, then after much deliberation, being distracted by other things in life, and pain thinking about 15 pixels of empty space, I think I'm going to go ahead and make the Forney have *7* pixels of extra space at the top. That will be less than half as painful as 15 extra pixels.

Still still to do:

Make truss squares 48x48, or possibly make two versions; one 48x48 and another 32x32...
Fix steel tiles to be more obviously steel
Add 7 pixels to Forney type
Fix level pack up for new sizes
Fix "Up" arrow key on keyboard, since it's decided it doesn't want to work anymore

Also, thanks 607!

Well this is cool and unexpected; thanks for coming out here and joining us! And thanks for helping create something that's become a cornerstone of my childhood/adolescence/adulthood!

Done so far:

Made closed crossing gate into a small detail terrain piece; "crossing_gates_closed_1"
Renamed "open_crossing_gates_1" to "crossing_gates_open_1"
Removed "Trap_CTA_2400_car_1.T"
Removed "Trap_CTA_2400_car_2.T"
Removed "Trap_CTA_4000_car_1.T"
Removed "Trap_CTA_4000_car_2.T"
(Now the only remaining railcar trap variants are the ones that act as water)

All traps, hatches, and exits are now 16 pixels tall (or a multiple; one is 32)

Left to do:
Make railcars multiples of 16 pixels tall where possible (The Forney is *17* pixels tall right now and I can't really take a pixel off the height... Debating whether I should make it 24px, or just go all-in and make it 32 pixels tall with 15 pixels of empty space?
Fix steel tiles to be more obviously steel
16 pixel horizontal alignment... Would be a lot trickier for the hatches and such, but might also be worth looking into. The hatches/exits/traps are already 8-pixel compliant; debating whether or not to add 8 pixels of empty space, or if I should just leave 'em as is... It would mean 8 pixels of blank space on a graphic that's already a multiple of 8 pixels. Pros: Would align to 16-grid. Cons: Would bug me... I should just go ahead and make it align, shouldn't I?

Thanks for looking these things over! I appreciate you taking time out of your day to inspect my silly train tiles!

I figured there was a pretty good chance the perma-trains and crossing gate would go that way, but I'll keep a local copy for nostalgia, and in case there's ever another place to use them!

I'm thinking I'll turn the static crossing into terrain then, and keep the animated crossing attached to a dedicated "Trap with crossing" object which will also be water. I initially made it water just as a placeholder, but when I saw it in action I realized that the drowning sound can also kind of sound like a crushing sound if your brain hears it while paired with the visual of a Lix getting pulled under a train. If you're ok with it, I think it'll work out ok!

As for the 16 grid, I think I know why that is... I might not be 100% clear on what the misalignment is until I can look at it in the Lix editor again, but I'll take a look at that on a per-object basis too and try to optimize for 16- or 8-grid compliance.

I was kind of having the same thought myself about the steel tiles towards the end too. It's pretty obvious when they're compared to the non-steel beam variants, but when it's just the steel ones standing alone, the bolts don't stand out as much as I would have liked.

I am glad you liked the police trap, also!

's Tea!

Hope it helps, and he feels better soon...

I hadn't considered a git repo, but I do have a github account... I might do that eventually, but for the time being I haven't made any changes to the tileset, so you've still got the most up-to-date version.

Also there's absolutely no rush!

I know everyone knows the holidays themselves are busy, but I feel like the post-holidays are frequently underappreciated for how busy they are. You've got just... Lots of stuff to put back the way it was, and you're already tired, and work things all pick up at the same time as people rush to be like 'What was I doing...', and you have to deal with that after this kind of emotional de-escalation of everything, because the 'big events' are over, and you're basically not running on adrenaline anymore. I feel like January is often a mess in that way, and it goes unrecognized.

I'll keep checking back and stuff. I was gone for a while, but now that I'm here again I want to remember to check in and hang out here with at least some regularity even if I'm not in a highly active phase of a specific project. It's just a good place, and a good group of people to stay in contact with.