Nepster visiting Simon & Icho, March 2016

[Simon]

Hi folks,

3-player rodent meeting in Göttingen: Nepster from Munich is going to visit IchoTolot and me in Göttingen.



(The 4th porcupine is in spirit of geoo or Ramond, who would have liked to join, had this been closer to Vienna.)

We'll meet at the train station at 10 a.m. local time on Friday, then head over to my place. IchoTolot is taking a programming course in C at our university, but Friday is a free day for him. So we'll do Icho's homework together. Will too many rodents spoil the broth, or are we going to write excellent code?

Come online in IRC (irc.quakenet.org #lix) tomorrow to find out!

-- Simon

[RubiX]

You guys will be sharing bodyheat to keep warm I see.
Interesting, yet also disturbing  





jk have fun

[grams88]

Those porcupines look just like you Simon. I bet you had some fun that day.

[Simon]

Thanks. :-) We've had 4 days of condensed Lemmings action. IchoTolot was with us every day, and Nepster has left earlier tonight.

There's lots to write, here are my loose thoughts.

I've been busy with the D Lix terrain browser.

Icho works exclusively with NeoLemmix, and Nepster too plays much more NL than Lix. Naturally, our meeting saw more NL play than Lix.

Nepster converts old Custlemm packs to NL. We've seen beautiful landscapes, jumbled terrain, hidden exits, and tedious clicking.

Waffle Express -- nice artwork by Dullstar
water maze -- others were still practising artwork
Solid blocks -- Where's the exit? Where's steel? Quote by Nepster: "I left this as-is on purpose."
It's up there, but where?
Building day! Can you solve? Yes! -- I remember geoo joking about a "one-hundred-builder-level human" once.
Crystal remakes of L1 levels -- out of everything possible, the selection fell on all 4 versions of WAFD.

These packs are 15 years old. Level design theory has advanced by leaps and bounds since. Yet it's exciting to take turns playing these levels, guess where the secret exits are, and laugh at who loses lemmings to hidden traps. No Peeking in LemEdit!

Icho: I should contain the crowd. But I have 99 builders. I will stall everybody while building the route.

Nepster: You can't simply bash through this wall.
Simon: What are the trigger areas that cover the entire wall? One ways?
Nepster: No. Traps!

Nepster: I can't believe how often I've seen "Stepping Stones" without stepping stones today.
Simon: Every time, the solution is the ceiling route?
Nepster: Yeah. Everybody had the same idea.

We've found and reported several bugs in NL. Yet we've recognized how much NL has raised the bar in Lemmings software. Icho is happy to show it in Youtube videos. There are no breaking bugs, NL doesn't crash when you bash the ceiling. While NL spawns new windows all the time, which can be problematic for video casting or Wine, the problem is under namida's radar.

Bow before the Holy Cow is a bug-showcasing level, complete with screenshot and solution.

Simon: You must have put seven million tiles into the cow.
Nepster: Only six hundred!

Voli, a Lemmings fan from from France, has joined #lix, and we've played some multiplayer. We haven't seen new players in months, it was a coincidence to show Nepster some 3-player matches live.

-- Simon

[Nepster]

And here an example of the high quality content we produced.