Replay archive ?

[LJLPM]

Does a replay archive exist in this board or somewhere else on the net?
(a place where links to download level replays/solutions are gathered).
Thanks!

[mobius]

unfortunately I don't think so.  This sure would be very useful though.

People (at least in the past) have been very secretive/private about their replays. Why I do not understand at all.

[ccexplore]

The closest I can think of is the archive web interface Mindless made a while back, waaaaaaay before the lemmingsforum.com incarnation:

http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/lemmingswelt/

In the "directory" dropdown list you can find "replays" and "challenge_replays".  After selecting from the dropdown, click the "Directory" button to refresh the file list to the selected directory.

Given its ancient history, you might find it somewhat lacking in terms of any solutions or custom levels that are more recently made.

People (at least in the past) have been very secretive/private about their replays.

I don't think that has been the case for a long time now.  However, for various reasons the replay archive had never quite achieved universal usage, and it had become common for people to simply attach replays in forum posts or share them out via dropbox links.

[namida]

All my challenge solutions to official games are posted throughout the challenge topics (but indeed, maybe we should make some kind of collection ZIP of these on a per-topic basis?).

All solutions to my own level packs are released a short time after the pack themself and can be found alongside the download on my DropBox.

[Clam]

I actually had this in mind for the ill-fated Wiki, for official levels at least. Each level's page would have a list of challenge scores (max %, fewest skills etc) with replays as evidence.

Replays aren't secretive any more? That's news to me.

[namida]

It does really vary from author to author, but I've never withheld mine for very long, nor worried if other people reveal theirs before I reveal mine. At the end of the day, people who want to actually work out the level for themself aren't going to watch the replays until they've solved it anyway.

[LJLPM]

Thank you for your input (I wasn't aware of http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/lemmingswelt/)!

There are pages/topics that compile level download-links:
- Lemmings Level Database: http://lemmings-db.camanis.net/levelpack/list
- Lemmings Plus Series: http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=1922.0
- Lemmix Level Pack Topic: http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=943.0
- Lemmini Level Pack Topic: http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=1535.0

I think it would be convenient, too, to have a single page to bookmark in order to find all the replay download-links (the Lemmings Replay Database? )

edit: http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2000.0

[namida]

If no one else plans to do something like that, I might look into it at some point.

[geoo]

I have a huge folder of replays (about 2000 I think?), challenge replays and replays to custom levels, that is somewhat, but not fully, organized. With regards to challenge replays, I used to download every single one of them for a while, but at some point I lost interest and stopped that. I don't know if anybody else has been rigorous about downloading all the challenge replays.
I've given this archive to mobius, but I'm fine with anybody else having it if they want to organize it a bit better. Either way, if there's a database, however it may be organized, it should definitely support downloading whole folders of replays or even the complete content of the database.

[namida]

Hmm, so we may as well gather information on what people would like to see in such a thing... I might try and make this. Shouldn't be too difficult.

If so, I'd obviously want to support replays for all four engines (Lemmix, NeoLemmix, Lemmini, SuperLemmini - though does regular Lemmini even have them?). I don't know about Lemmini vs SuperLemmini, but a Lemmix replay can easily be told apart from a NeoLemmix replay just by examining the file - there's a 3-character text string in the header which is "LRB" in traditional Lemmix but "NEO" in NeoLemmix.
For NeoLemmix, it could also be double-checked that the replay is indeed for the level in question (apart from custom standalone levels / DAT level packs, but it can be done for Flexi-based players). This isn't possible for traditional Lemmix, however; though it can be detected which mechanics set was used.

For that which it's possible to do so, I'll probably also include automatically-calculated challenge data. At the very least, any challenge based solely on skill counts can be done (minimum skills, skills you can't live without, etc).


EDIT: I've started working on this. Not going to give a "release date" yet, as I obviously have to do it from scratch, and with that kind of project, I'm the kind of person who could have it done within a day or could take forever.

[namida]

Progress: The database structure is set up (though not the code to actually utilize it, yet), and I have logging in and logging out working.

Accounts there are integrated with the forum, instead of requiring seperate registration. However, seperate login is required (ie: if you have selected to stay logged in on the forum, that won't carry over to the database; and you can be logged into a different account on each at the same time if for any reason you needed to be).

[Clam]

Hmm, so we may as well gather information on what people would like to see in such a thing...

I imagine a table, with the list of levels running down the page and challenge types across the page.

Level	Max Saved	Min Skills	[...]
FUN
01: Just Dig!	10/10	1	[...]
02: Only floaters can survive this	10/10	1	[...]
[...]

If needed (eg. for "skills you can't live without") you could squeeze multiple replays into the one cell.

[ccexplore]

Challenge types across the page can get unwieldy I think; just look at how many topics we already have on the challenge board.  I was picturing more of just a "challenge" column that describes common challenge types (plus an "Other" for everything else), a "results" column for things like the "10/10" in Clam's example, and a "description" or "notes" column that provides whatever additional textual details about the replay(s) as the uploader so chooses (eg could be what the challenge is if it's a special custom type of challenge).

If the web page provides the ability to sort and filter by column values (and maybe also choose which columns to display), then it should be good enough to support most of the different arrangements of data that different people may want at different times.

[namida]

I was only considering including some of the most basic challenges, basically the ones I was going to include (at least at first - and I probably won't even do these until the basic functionality is up and running fine) were:

- Highest number of lemmings saved
- Minimum skills
- Minimum uses of each skill (which the combined results would give you "skills you can't live without")

This information would be displayed at the top (or bottom) of a level's page; then for each individual replay listed, I'd put how many lemmings were saved (this would need to be manually entered, it can't be automatically determined from a replay file without actually running it), how many of each skill were used, and how many skills total were used.

More challenges could possibly be added later, though a lot of them would rely on user honesty when submitting the replay; pretty much only those based solely on skill assignments (be it type of skill or which lemming they're assigned to) could be determined from the replay's contents itself (at least for Lemmix / NeoLemmix; I'm not entirely sure on the format of Lemmini / SuperLemmini replays so I don't know what information they do or don't contain).

EDIT: Another thing I should mention, each replay can have a comment associated with it, so if it's for a specific challenge that isn't automatically handled by the database, that can be mentioned in the comments.


Anyway, to update on progress, I've now written the code to display the list of ranks within a game, and the list of levels within a rank. I haven't written a "list all games" page, but I'm having all the official games listed on the front page. (Just for reference, I am indeed making it accept replays for custom levels too. To take this one step further, it has two different types of listings - one for small standalone level packs (think CustLemm(ix) type), and one for full game-sized packs (think Lemmings Plus or cLemmings))

[namida]

After a few days without touching this project, I've done some more work on it. At this point, the only features missing that are nessecary to supporting the official games is the behind-the-scenes code to add levels/games to the database (though this could theoretically be done manually, but I'd rather have the code there), and the code to upload replays. (The download function is working, as tested with one manually entered into the database and uploaded.)

There's a bit more to go for custom packs and custom levels that aren't part of a full-size fangame; those that are would use the same code as the official games do so technically they're just as ready (except of course, they're a bit more dependant on the code to add them to the database).


In regards to geoo's suggestion about mass-download; I don't plan to implement that at first. But "at first" is definitely the keyword here.