[SUG] Swimmer skill upgrades

[Floyd Brannon]

It would be cool to make (all water) levels. with no ground. Someone will probably do this even if it is just a simple level. But the more complexities we can add within water the more levels we can make.

[WillLem]

Revisited the idea of assigning Blockers to Swimmers today.

Previously, the sprite-swap was the only thing holding this back. It required an additional "Swimblocker" lem state, which was piggybacking regular Blocker code for its implementation whilst relying on the real-time sprite swap for its visual effect - messy, and the Renderer really didn't agree with what I was trying to do.

So, this time around I've opted to simply equip the existing Blocker with the ability to "tread water" - we draw the sprite behind the water object and have it move up and down slightly, achieving more or less the same effect as the previous Swimblocker sprite-swap:



Very happy with how this has turned out. Let's give it a try in 2.7 and see if we like it; we can always revert back if not.

[jkapp76]

I think it looks pretty awesome!

[WillLem]

There's a known bug in 2.7 where Blockers are always drawn to the lower layer, even when not in water. This is now fixed (Commit 646ae1c03); I'll get a hotfix released in due course.

[Strato Incendus]

Thinking about it, Swimmers being able to jump out of water should really have been a feature in the Lemmings clone for Linux, named "Pingus" ...
Because while we were wondering about how this is physically possible, penguins can definitely do that!