Lix and Lemmings 2: How essential is the Jumper?

Strato Incendus · September 22, 2019, 08:47:01 AM

The Jumper is no doubt one of the main distinctive features of Lix and Lemmings 2: The Tribes compared to other engines. This distinctiveness may lead me to overestimate the frequency of its usage in those games, though.

Now while working on Lemmings Open Air, I notice that a lot of my levels feature the Shimmier - the newest skill as of now, obivously. There are barely any new levels I create where it isn't present, and I need to somewhat force myself occasionally not to include it, to prevent that skill from being completely overrepresented in the pack. That said, there were quite a few levels I created for that pack before the introduction of the Shimmier, and since those naturally couldn't include it (eycept for one or two where I pre-designed Shimmier-friendly terrain in advance), those levels reduce the overrepresentation of the Shimmier skill in the pack.

Since I don't want the Jumper to be overrepresented in Lemmings Hall of Fame, I'm considering creating some levels for that pack in advance of the introduction of the Jumper to "protect them"

from too much Jumper influence.

So to the Lix creators (and also kieranmillar and other people who have created levels for L2):

How often (just a rough estimate) do you use the Jumper in your custom levels for those engines?

I suspect it's a little more frequent in L2, because most styles don't feature the Blocker, but the Attractor, and the Jumper is one of the main ways to release an Attractor again (although pretty much any other skill would also work).

Lix, on the other hand, has no skill-type restriction - you could have a level include one of every skill type, and the level would still work. So there's less of a cost to including a single Jumper in a level than in L2, which at this point has a tighter skill-type number restriction than NeoLemmix. So a Jumper in L2, if only required at one specific spot, reduces the number of other skills available for the rest of the solution to seven. Maybe that makes it more inviting to base more of the remaining solution on the Jumper as well, once again increasing Jumper usage in L2 compared to Lix.

What's your stance on this?

Simon · September 22, 2019, 10:18:14 AM

Quick statistics: Lix 0.9.29 levels/single/ contains 736 levels, and 257 of these offer jumpers. 527 offer builders.

It's up to you to interpret the stats. Some levels are N-of-everything.

-- Simon

Strato Incendus · September 22, 2019, 11:56:34 AM

Wow, thanks a lot, Simon! I didn't know that could be determined so quickly in Lix, due to all levels being in the same folder.

So that makes it about a third of the levels in Lix.

Anyone who went hardcore on Lemmings 2 and can provide some numbers on that?

ccexplore · September 22, 2019, 12:32:26 PM

Quote from: Strato Incendus on September 22, 2019, 11:56:34 AMWow, thanks a lot, Simon! I didn't know that could be determined so quickly in Lix, due to all levels being in the same folder.

Actually it's probably more due to the Lix level file format being completely text-based. I think it's pretty easy to find utilities in Linux that you can chain together to, say, find every file under one or more folders, find the ones that have the word "jumper", and then count them.

Lemmings 2 unfortunately does not have a text-based level file format, so the counting may need to be more manual. My impression is that they do throw in the jumper skill pretty often in Lemmings 2. It would not surprise me if more than a third of Lemmings 2 levels (excluding Classic tribe) have it. Now, whether it's "essential" to the level is another matter. Even with an attractor, you could always free the attractor using any other spare skill.

kieranmillar · September 22, 2019, 02:16:37 PM

Here's a breakdown of number of levels I use the Jumper in in my own levels. Bear in mind that a tribe consists of 10 levels:

In QFK2's Circus Tribe the Jumper shows up in 7 levels (one of which is a one-of-everything for that Tribe)
In QFK2's Outdoor Tribe the jumper shows up in 9 levels! (one of which is a one-of-everything for that Tribe)
In QFK2's Space Tribe the jumper shows up in 6 levels (one of which is a one-of-everything for that Tribe)
In QFK2's Lost Tribe, jumpers show up in 1 level.
In Holiday Lemmings 2017, they show up in 4 levels, but it is completely unnecessary in some of these levels and was thrown in for fun.
In Fun With Blockers the Jumper shows up in 2 levels, but one of those is specifically to show off how they interact with blockers.
In Lemmings ... In Space! They show up on 1 level.

What can we gleam from these statistics?
When I forced myself to have a limited skill selection and included the Jumper in that skill set, I used it a fair amount, but when I have no such restrictions, I don't use it much at all, but still more often than a number of other L2 skills. Holiday Lemmings 2017 is an exception because the Tribe was meant to be easier and more forgiving (despite having the worst execution level I've ever made, heh) so I threw it in unnecessarily in some levels. Interesting that it has shown up in at least one level in every pack I've made, so I use it in 10-20% of the unrestricted L2 levels I make.
In L2 in particular, there are a lot of skills that can do the same job without having to dedicate another skill slot to the jumper. L2 has a lot of individual lemming transporation skills. Of particular note is that the L2 shimmier's initial jump is identical to the jumper in every way except what it does when it hits the ceiling, so if you already have the shimmier in your level in L2, you might not add the jumper too.

My personal opinion of the Jumper in L2 is not that high, but the stats seem to claim otherwise. I wonder what my least used skill would be. Roller? Skater? Hopper? At least the Skier has a unique property.

I might boot up the official L2 DOS levels and see how many levels include the Jumper.

kieranmillar · September 22, 2019, 02:30:08 PM

Official L2 jumper stats:
Beach: 9 levels!
Outdoor: 7 levels.
Egyptian: 7 levels.
Medieval: 7 levels.
Classic: 0 levels. What a shock.
Circus: 5 levels.
Highland: 9 levels!
Polar: 8 levels.
Space: 8 levels.
Cavelem: 6 levels.
Shadow: 5 levels.
Sports: 7 levels.

So if we ignore Classic, the Jumper appears in 78/110 = 70.1% of all official levels.

What can we gleam from these statistics?
The official L2 developers though the chain was worth including so quite frankly their opinion is worthless.

kieranmillar · September 22, 2019, 02:36:19 PM

For completeness, the Jumper shows up in 100% of Lemmings 3 levels!

Strato Incendus · September 22, 2019, 09:26:56 PM

Thanks a lot for taking the time and effort to create this overview, kieran!

So it seems like my impression of the Lemmings 2 stock levels was correct, that I assessed the Jumper as an archetypal skill of the game, as well as in my guess that the comparatively tight skill restriction in Lemmings 2, with both Lix and now also NeoLemmix having more, may have forced you to exchange the Jumper for other, similar skills when making custom levels for Lemmings 2. Add to that the fact that you personally don't seem to fancy the Jumper all that much, and we have quite a few explanations for the difference in Jumper frequency between QFK and L2 original levels.