Constructive skills cut off by the ceiling?

[Strato Incendus]

A lot of my converted levels need re-working, of course, due to the deadly ceiling in New Formats. A strange / funny thing I noticed on one particular level, though, is a stacker dying to the deadly ceiling.

Stackers, as we all know, in contrast to builders remain next to their stack in NeoLemmix, rather than climbing it, like in Lemmings 2: The Tribes. Of course, if a stacker is also a climber and the stack reaches all the way up of the ceiling, the climber will kill itself.

In this case, however, the stacker clearly wasn't a climber. To my understanding, it 6-pixel-jumped / "ascended" onto the stack, rather than climbing it. Usually, this doesn't work with a stack, of course, because it's 8 pixels high.

So I guess the ceiling automatically cuts off any terrain that reaches beyond the level borders?

With builders, this never becomes an issue because the lemming is always on top of the staircase.

[namida]

Correct. Any pixel outside the level boundaries is treated as non-solid even if a constructive skill tries to place one there. The stacker in such a situation is an interesting edge case, because what you describe is the result of it following the letter of the rule perfectly, but the resulting behaviour doesn't feel right. (A similar case could also result with stoners, but as you explain, not with builders or platformers).

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks for confirming this!

Yes, I had started to write a line about stoners in my original post, because I know their shoulder height is six pixels, which allows lemmings to step over them, but only if a stacker is used to clow the gap between the stoned lemming's hands and feet. So I thought it wouldn't be immediately relevant to this question.

But yes, if the stoner's head is outside the level borders, if the shoulders reach up to the ceiling, the lemmings should turn around on the stoner while there's still the iconic gap between the stoner's hands and feet - but once you close it, the lemmings can step up onto its shoulders (the stoner's head doesn't prevent them from going on either way). And if that takes them above the ceiling line, they'll die.

[namida]

It's worth noting that, if I'm not mistaken, Lix implements a different behaviour here: Any pixel outside the border is treated as the same solidity as the closest pixel inside the borders. So in a similar situation in Lix (assuming I'm correct here), as soon as the stacker brick at Y=0 was placed, the stacker would act as a wall, even if that was its very first brick.

It's debatable which is really "correct" (or if there's even such a thing as "correct" here), but I think the last thing anyone wants is for NL's level edge behaviour to change again. (Perhaps the truly "correct" behaviour would be to have some margin area around the level that's never displayed, but is functional, and kills lemmings that step into it.)

[Simon]

Lix implements: Any pixel outside the border is treated as the same solidity as the closest pixel inside the borders.
It's debatable which is really "correct"

Yes, Lix 0.9 has the highest-pixel-duplicating deadly ceiling. I haven't changed physics in 2 years, but I want to change to always-air deadly ceiling.

Discussion in Lix: Ceiling, how to check terrain beyond?

Icho, Forestidia, and nin10doadict preffered the always-air deadly ceiling. ccx wasn't clearly in favor of either (higest-pixel-duplicating deadly ceiling or always-air deadly ceiling) over the other.



For fun, the NL discussion between steel ceiling and always-air deadly ceiling:
Reconsider solid ceiling in view of addition of shimmier?

-- Simon