Suggestions for a new Cheapo Copycat game

[Essman]

About multi-style levels: Wouldn't it be simpler just having separate files for the different elements? Example: Having a graphics set file, with just the terrain and the interactive objects, and a lemmings graphics library, with only information about the character animations, and a sound library, which defines a sound effects theme for events.

The way you are describing it is one possible way that style files can be created. Also, all of those things can be included in a single style file. It's up to the style designer to decide how his content is distributed. I want to reduce the number of files that need to be distributed, so I'll probably put everything core to the game in a single style file (characters, sounds, music, tools, and graphics). Then terrain and objects will be grouped into their own separate style files. It's all very flexible.

One problem will be that you'll start playing a level and not have all of the style files that the level requires. I'm thinking of showing a dialog that refers the player to the websites that contain all of the missing style files. It would be possible to automatically download the missing styles, but I'm not sure if I want to do that yet. People know how to download things themselves.

When creating a level, you could simply load these files individually, rather than linking one element with another in a theme. Then, when loading the level, the game would only load the elements used in that level, and not every element associated with every theme used.

You're making assumptions about my implementation that are incorrect. If a level uses a single object from a style that contains 1000 objects, only that one object will be loaded. Just like if you were to play a level within a set of 30 levels. Only that one level is loaded, not all 30.

About up and down one-way walls: Does that mean a down one-way wall can only be dug by a lemming the right way up, and an up one-way wall can only be dug by an upside-down lemming, but they can both be bashed in either direction?

Yes, that sounds correct. Also, if a tool is created that shoots upward (like the laser beam in Tribes) then that can shoot through up one-way walls.

This is a bit of a long-shot, and I'm not sure how easily it could be programmed. How about repeating levels, like in Lemmings Revolution? Not 3D, but where the level and all the lemmings repeat their pattern to infinity, so you can scroll a level with no edges. This can be applied horizontally or vertically, or both. And it can obviously be turned on or off by the level designer. This could also afford many possibilities.

That's not very hard to program, it could be a future addition to the game.

[guest]

Guest, that last suggestion could get VERY confusing. It could render certain areas completely dark, so you can't even see the lemmings.

Well, you'll never get the level editor to prevent a moron from creating moronic levels. Obviously there would be a difference between adding a subtle tinge of darkness versus making everything totally invisible.

For the ancient topic of the technicalities of on-way terrain: It should be fully penetrable, including by bombing, but only by lemmings walking or facing (if they're a blocker) in that direction.

That is interesting but I don't think most people would've expected that bombing only works in one facing direction, since normally the bombing explosion is completely independent of which way the lemming faces (ie. only the position matters).  Maybe this could be yet another type of one-way wall, but again I have some reservations about making a proliferation of one-way walls.

As for giving the position of a bomber five seconds before it explodes; this would be completely impossible without giving many false readings.

I think the brief discussion on this boiled down to:  #1 with some effort the game can provide a completely accurate reading assuming of course that no additional input happens in between the 5 seconds; #2 the level designer should be able to disable the feature on their levels.

I do agree though that if you are going to make precisely timed bombing a feature in your level, you probably didn't intend to make things easier for the player to begin with.  And there's always replay to do essentially the same thing.  So overall this feature is probably not very useful.

About up and down one-way walls: Does that mean a down one-way wall can only be dug by a lemming the right way up, and an up one-way wall can only be dug by an upside-down lemming, but they can both be bashed in either direction?

I think so.  What is still missing however is how they interact with miners, as well as whether they can be bombed or not.

How about repeating levels, like in Lemmings Revolution? Not 3D, but where the level and all the lemmings repeat their pattern to infinity, so you can scroll a level with no edges. This can be applied horizontally or vertically, or both.

Oooh, I like this this is neat. B) You can now potentially have a wrap-around build bridge or miner tunnel (if you enable horizontal wraparound).

Verticall wraparound levels would be quite wacky and interesting, as lemmings falling off the bottom will show up on top.

[okmot]

Yeah, let's scrap that suggestion. &#A0;In fact, what we really need I guess is savepoints/checkpoints

CLONES has this feature.  We based it on the same module that handles the savegames for playback at a later time.  When used in checkpoint mode the playback is performed behind the scenes.

New suggestion: Have the possibility to see the number of Lemmings that are under the cursor.

CLONES also has this  A simple bit o programming but it really helps in multiplayer since you can decide to blow up a pocket of clones if there are more opponents clones than yours to be killed.

As for giving the position of a bomber five seconds before it explodes; this would be completely impossible without giving many false readings.

It depends what you mean by 'false'.  Of course the engine can only go on what it currently knows so the future of a walker is shown assuming that all other guys keep doing what they are doing.  This causes the 'future clone' in CLONES to change it's position in real time quite a bit if there is a lot of action going on nearby, which is the expected and desired behavior.  However, i find that the only times i use that feature are to time a walker or a flyer and usally there is nothing else going on around them to change their path.

I liked your 'repeating level' idea, i'm going to try to add it to the next build of CLONES.

rt
www.tomkorp.com

[guest]

&#A0;For the ancient topic of the technicalities of on-way terrain: It should be fully penetrable, including by bombing, but only by lemmings walking or facing (if they're a blocker) in that direction.

After some thought I started to see where you're getting at, but I'm afraid your approach is too simplistic for what you intuitively might have in mind.

I think what you're trying to do is to prevent a situation like this:  there's this large rectangular one-way block, say with arrows pointing left.  You send a bomber to the left edge of the block.  It explodes, and takes out a chunk of the block.

You cried, this isn't right.  If I can't bash the block from the left, why should an explosion from the left be able to take the same pixels out?

But here are some problems with using the facing direction as an attempt to fix this issue:

1) okay, so I re-timed my bomber so that he hits the left of the block first, turns around, and then immediately explodes.  Now the lemming is facing left, and so by your criteria his explosion will take out a chunk of the block.  And yet to the average player that is just bizarre:  it's basically the same explosion at the exact same place, involving exactly the same pixels, only that the lemming has turned around.

2) let's say I send a climber up to walk on the top of the block, and make an explosion happen up there.  Again, you now have the weird situation that simply due to the facing direction, the same lemming in the same position, with the explosion affecting exactly the same pixels, will have different outcomes.

3) But wait!  If we are to be 100% consistent in this, diggers should be affected too.  Now things get truly absurd:  the digger can only dig when he faces left when up on the block.

You say, no, diggers shouldn't be affected because digging occurs in a vertical direction, not horizontal.

But then what about the explosion at the top of the block?  Can you really say that the explosion occurs in any particular direction?  The player can also say this:  if I bomb at the same horizontal position multiple times, I effectively can bomb my way vertically down the block, which is just like digging vertically down.  If digging down does not depend on facing direction, why should bombing down does?

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The real issue here is that, a truly consistent intuitive model of one-way walls in effect requires you to think in terms of forces.  Namely that when bashing/mining/digging/bombing removes a particular pixel, it is applying some force in some direction to the pixel in question.  For skills like bashing, mining and digging, they are strongly directional (with the direction tied to the lemming's facing direction, for the case of bashers and miners) and so you can assign each pixel the same direction of force, and therefore it's possible to say that either all pixels affected are removed, or none of them are.

But with bombers, the bomber's explosion intuitively is really applying different force vectors to different pixels.  In effect you can say the direction of the force is the arrow going from the center of the explosion to the pixel in question.  And so for some pixels, the arrow points in one direction, while for others the arrow will point in the totally opposite direction.

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This however does suggest one relatively simple way to handle explosions affecting one-way pixels.  Suppose we decided that any force vector who has a component (however small) of direction that is opposite the direction of the one-way arrow, then the pixel affected should not be removed.

What that statement boils down to is then this:  when the explosion occurs, the left half of the explosion area cannot take out one-way pixels pointing right, and the right half of the explosion area cannot take out one-way pixels pointing left.  This seems to me to be the best way to deal with this technicality without introducing problematic inconsistencies.  And it will solve the case of the bomber exploding a chunk of one-way wall from the wrong side, no matter which way the bomber faces when exploding.

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That said, I think we still need to think about what it means to introduce, in affect, a new type of one-way walls, since we already have one type from original Lemmings and another type from Cheapo.  Do we really want a third?  O_O

[guest]

Speaking of one-way walls, here's a truly bizarre idea for a new game element:

an arrow switch

It would be an interactive object that, when "activated" in some fashion by a lemming, will swap the arrow directions of all one-way walls, so left arrows becomes right and vice versa.

As for how to activate the switch:  one idea is to have it look like a push button coming out of the ground.  To activate, a miner has to hit the button with his hammer.

Of course for this to work well, the ground underneath and nearby the switch should probably be steel, although it's not a necessity.  One change though would be that when a lemming is on steel, it should be possible to assign him the miner skill if he's close enough to the switch button.

As an extension to this idea, we could allow one-way arrows to carry different colors, and have the arrow switches also be colored, so that one-way arrows of one color can only be affected by switches of the same color.

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Even if you think the one-way arrow switch idea stinks, I think it's at least interesting to consider the miner-activated switch/button object, with the button's effect being other things.  It gives a new life to the miner skill, and I think the idea of buttons activating things can be useful for the concept of creating goal-directed levels as someone else has mentioned earlier.

[Proxima]

I liked your discussion of the one-way walls, guest, but Conway is simply factually wrong. In the original Lemmings, a bomber can explode one-way wall no matter which way he is facing.

(I used this on a version I did of 8 Mayhem, which has a very high left-arrow wall. My version required ten climbers to be sent over the wall and bomb down the other side to make a safe all, so it's obvious that they can explode the wall even facing the "wrong" way.)

I love your switch idea though! Maybe not miner-activated; why not activated simply by a lemming walking past it? Or have other kinds of switch as well (gate-opening and gate-closing a la Prince of Persia, for instance) and have a general "switch-pressing" skill?

[Conway]

Okay, I was wrong about the 'only lemmings walking that direction' idea. I really like your idea, Guest, about only exploding half the terrain depending on the direction of the arrows. This seems the most logical solution, in fact, I was just about to suggest it before reading that part of your post.

  I also like the idea of the switch to change the direction of the arrows. Maybe have one type of switch to change a specific wall, and another type of change every one-way wall. It's also a better idea to simply trigger this switch by walking onto it rather than mining.

[guest]

It's also a better idea to simply trigger this switch by walking onto it rather than mining.

After some thoughts I agree.  Originally I didn't want to have the trigger activated simply by walking, because I was worried that the switch might hard to control when you have a crowd heading its way.  But for the arrow switch that probably doesn't matter (since it only affects where you can bash/mine, something you're likely to do with your trailblazer first before the crowd comes through), and for other types of switches where you might not want the switch to be activated inappropriately, the fact that walking can be a problem actually means you added a new puzzle element, namely that of (say) building bridges over the button to prevent the rest of the crowd from touching it.

[namida]

You could simply allow the level designer to choose how the switch is activated. Another idea could be lemmings falling onto it from a set height - and an option of whether floaters can activate it or not.

Also. I don't like that idea for the one-way walls. Maybe if you give the level designer the choice, again.

[Conway]

We shouldn't leave too many things for the level designer to choose, especially things like how one-way walls should work. When a player first previews a level before playing it, he doesn't want to have to try every interactive object to see how it will function if he's already familiar with the game. I for one like to be able to predict how a level will play out to some extent.

[DragonsLover]

Here's another suggestion: I thought about a new animation for the bomber skill when a lemming is climbing and have to explode. So, when a lemming is climber and have to explode, it could be nice to have the lemming to stop climbing and put his frontpaws on his head (like the normal bomber). What do you think about this idea?

[guest]

So, when a lemming is climber and have to explode, it could be nice to have the lemming to stop climbing and put his frontpaws on his head (like the normal bomber).

I'm confuse.  I thought it does that already.  When the climber is about to explode, it will stop climbing and "stand" at the wall with his arms up, just like when a walker is about to explode.  At least I think that's the case with Cheapo.  It certainly is the case with the original Lemmings game.

[DragonsLover]

Yeah, I haven't explain correctly!

I don't want to see the lemmings that is stand up in the air, this isn't good =8O ! The legs and feet must stay on the wall. Only the head and forepaws should be animated!

Also, for the fallers and floaters, when the number of the countdown would be to 1, it could be nice to hear the "oh no!" at this moment! It could be more realistic!

[Essman]

I don't want to see the lemmings that is stand up in the air, this isn't good =8O ! The legs and feet must stay on the wall. Only the head and forepaws should be animated!

I'm currently working on the character graphics, so I'll try to add that animation. It makes sense to have it.

By the way, I finished the level editor and added many of the suggestions from this thread. The coolest one is Undo/Redo, but I would've added that anyway. You can undo the previous 32 changes that you made to the level.

[Conway]

Sounds cool! Is there an estimated release date?