[POLL][NeoLemmix Player] 2-Player Mode?

[WillLem]

2-Player mode, as I imagine it:

Local and Networking possible, so you can play with friends, family and forum buddies at home or online.

You'd be able to choose a 2-colour scheme for your team from pre-existing options. This would basically involve different colour hair and clothes which swap when the lemmings are made into athletes. Each colour scheme would be very distinct from the others. For example:

Green & Blue team (i.e. like the default lems)
Red & White team
Pink & Purple team
Yellow & Orange team
Grey & Brown team

Zombies and Neutrals would not work in 2-Player levels, to prevent further confusion with colouring schemes.

Interested?

[ericderkovits]

I always vote yes for options. And it you think hard enough about it nothing is impossible to program. oh wait isnt that a title of one of your levels "nothing is impossible"

[WillLem]

I always vote yes for options. And it you think hard enough about it nothing is impossible to program. oh wait isnt that a title of one of your levels "nothing is impossible"

Pandemonium 15! Well remembered.

Have you played Lemminas, then? I thought you weren't into custom levels.

Anyway, if so - I'd like to see your replays if you have them & don't mind sharing them.

[ericderkovits]

I've downloaded and installed all custom ones but only attemped a few except for redux which is a collection of various ports of lemmings which I completed. also each level in redux uses its correct music even the nes or psp levels. but I removed the talismans, since they were not in the originals levels. This took a while to do, I wish there was a way to get music faster into neolemmix levels, much quicker in superlemmini.

[namida]

It'd be fun in theory, but it'd be an extremely large amount of work to implement even for local shared-screen (either by zooming out, or by restricting it to one-screener levels), let alone split-screen (which itself could extend fairly easily to one screen each in a one-PC-two-screens setup). Networked is completely out of the question, I don't have the faintest idea how to go about this.

I doubt there's really enough interest for local multiplayer to justify the work in implementing it - which let me be very clear, is still huge. To be honest, even if there was enough, I'm really not sure I would be willing to put in that work.

[ccexplore]

[note: written before namida slipped in his reply before I posted this, but doesn't really change anything]

Lix had multiplayer for years, it even supports up to 8 players.  It had some interest but overall, more people more often played singleplayer levels in Lix and in NeoLemmix compared to multiplayer in Lix.   Of course, the comparison is slightly unfair since anyone can play any singleplayer level any time they want, but multiplayer needs to get people together all at a given time to work.  Still, there is pretty much no one here who only ever played Lix multiplayer, but there are almost certainly people here who've been around for a while who had still only played singleplayer, and even more who might have once tried Lix multiplayer a few times and then stopped.

Given that people have played Lix multiplayer many times in the past, the interest exists.  But given the likely complexity of having to program all this from scratch in NeoLemmix (Lix in contrast had always supported multiplayer from day 1, in fact multiplayer has always been a primary goal of that project and singleplayer is almost secondary), and namida's desire for a "final" version, we're likely either talking about giving up all other requested features like a 20th skill, or to wait for someone else to take over NeoLemmix development, before there is any realistic chance for 2-player mode to come about.

One additional thing to consider is that the current skillset might not be optimal for multiplayer.  For example, early experience of multiplayer in Lix quickly found out some skills can be overpowered in multiplayer context, like the blocker.  The batter skill in Lix was specifically invented to help counteract this imbalance.  Similarly, in Lix some changes were made even to core skills specifically to avoid problems of abuse in multiplayer, for example the "basher staircase" trick cannot be done anymore in Lix (basher's stroke would instead remove terrain in one go without making any intermediate "step") as a direct result of observing it being problematic for multiplayer balance.  Perhaps the situation could be a little different for NeoLemmix with its expanded set of skills, perhaps some skills can simply be avoided when designing multiplayer levels, but ultimately and more generally speaking, if we are serious about this multiplayer thing for NeoLemmix, it'll almost certainly take multiple versions to "get it right".  (Just talk to Simon about Lix multiplayer, I'm sure he can gave you plenty of examples of challenges and complexities that simply don't exist for singleplayer, like dealing with effects of lag over the network.)  So again, not exactly in line with someone looking at a "final" version at this time.

If you want to experience multiplayer today, but for some reason don't want to do it through Lix (maybe because the graphics are not Lemming-y enough or something, whatever), you can try SNES Lemmings over emulator.  I could be mistaken but I believe a few SNES emulators can even simulate network play, although the experience might be suboptimal unless the network is consistently low in lag for both players, so perhaps not likely the case for trying to do it over the Internet (vs say within the same local network, like a computer lab at school).  SNES Lemmings should have most of the multiplayer levels that's in Amiga Lemmings with minimal to no changes.  If local play is an option for you, of course you can also try other versions that support multiplayer and have emulator support, including Amiga for example.

[grams88]

Neolemmix having a two player does sound quite good, would the two player be more like the two player, the amiga, atari st, snes, had or something completely different. I really do like those two player levels in the atari st, amiga (etc)

(Anyway a bit off topic here)
I might get back into playing the atari st two player mode in lemmings, I usually play that with my Dad, the original which has 20 levels and the oh no which has 10 levels, we've had a lot of good battles just in those levels alone. So many different tactics you can use.

Lix might be the way to go with the two player WillLem. I've not tried Lix myself but the battles do look kind of cool.

[namida]

Okay so - the more I think about this, the more I realise, it's just not a practical goal.

I've said several times that online multiplayer is not within my abilities. Yes, another user did drop a vague suggestion they could "look into what networking capabilities FPC could make use of here" - the problem is, NeoLemmix is not an FPC / Lazarus app, it's a Delphi app. Converting it to FPC / Lazarus would be almost as much of a task as figuring out and implementing the netplay stuff in Delphi would be - without the benefit of learning something new in the process.

Offline multiplayer is still a very, VERY big task. The audience for such would be very, very limited - few people on here regularly associate IRL with other Lemmings fans. It would almost certianly not be up to a standard that could be used as pseudo-online via screensharing / etc either. The effort vs audience thing alone is reason not to do it.

On top of that, the game needs different considerations for multiplayer. Not every element that works well in one does in the other, and vice versa. Indeed, multiplayer is - by necessity, for this genre - very action-focused rather than puzzle-focused, which goes against everything NL aims for. Even if we had some means - either in the form of another developer with better skills than me, or a magician - via which I could just describe how I want multiplayer to work and it magically happens, without me needing to make the effort to code it, I'm not at all confident that a "how should it work?" that fits in well with NL's core philosophy, while not relying on multiplayer-exclusive or singleplayer-exclusive skills / objects (which in turn tends to feel like an arbitrary restriction and I can guarantee that within no time at all we'd see users requesting that said features be made available in both modes) could actually be developed.

Ultimately, the conclusion here is: NeoLemmix's entire philosophy has been designed around it being a single-player game, and implementing any kind of multiplayer mode would harm that to an extent I don't feel comfortable with. As such, the only conclusion that makes sense to me is to definitively reject the idea of a 2-player mode - at least in the sense of how Amiga and other versions have it.

And on top of all of the above: We already have another good engine that excels at multiplayer, namely Lix.

Now on the other hand, we have a very different kind of 2-player mode that unpins NeoLemmix's very existance: That where one player creates the puzzles, and the other players try to solve them.