Experimental Releases

[namida]

Experimental Player V10.13.16:3256064.

http://www.neolemmix.com/download.php?id=98

Not much new stuff that's overly visible, but quite a lot of behind the scenes work. Let me know if you notice any bugs. The skill panel works a tad better now (for example, the issue with the replay indicator not changing between blue and red while paused is fix); I've actually rewritten a significant portion of its code.

[namida]

Experimental Player V10.13.16:788B9C0.

http://www.neolemmix.com/download.php?id=100

Fixed the bug that was causing crashes on levels with zombie-spawning hatches. Have not yet fixed the related bug that causes the "lemmings to spawn" and "alive lemmings" counters to include not-yet-spawned zombies on such levels; I've only prevented it from crashing on such levels.

Also done more behind the scenes changes. Let me know if there are any issues in particular with frameskips, pause or fast forward.

Also, for a long time now, NeoLemmix has made changes at runtime such as "If the level only has preplaced lemmings and no windows, set the lemming count to however many preplaced lemmings there are". These were previously only done when the level's preview screen was loaded, so (for example) they'd be skipped entirely when dumping LVL files. This is no longer the case; the fix is immediately applied when the level is loaded.

[namida]

Experimental Player V10.13.16:CCB90A0.

http://www.neolemmix.com/download.php?id=101

Fixed the following bugs:
- Weird stuff might happen if a level had a number of preplaced lemmings greater than the lemming count.
- Infinite skills were treated as having a quantity of 100.
- Athlete info cannot be made to appear for lemmings performing certain actions.
- Lemming blink and timer blink not working.
- Lemming blink and timer blink's blinking pauses when the game is paused.
- Sketches show up during gameplay.
- Lemmings to spawn and lemmings alive display wrong numbers in levels with zombie-spawning hatches.

Added the following feature:
- In clear physics mode, the level border will be colored red.

[namida]

Experimental Player V10.13.16:9387328.

http://www.neolemmix.com/download.php?id=103

Fixes the following bugs:
- Objects are invisible in Clear Physics Mode.
- Upon completing a level while the "Auto-Save Replays" option is active, the game crashes.
- Fencer sketches are visible if left in a level.
- Sound panning does not work correctly.

Adds the following features:
- Save state now works more like an actual save state, rather than just "remember frame number" and "jump to remembered frame number".
- Can assign a hotkey to jump to previous skill assignment. ( Default key is [ )
- Can assign a hotkey to jump to the next shrugger. ( Default key is ] )

[IchoTolot]

Adds the following features:
- Save state now works more like an actual save state, rather than just "remember frame number" and "jump to remembered frame number".
- Can assign a hotkey to jump to previous skill assignment. ( Default key is [ )
- Can assign a hotkey to jump to the next shrugger. ( Default key is ] )

Well, [ and ] is not working for me as to type these I need a key combination (Alt Gr + 8 or 9). I've changed the layout to Page Up + Down and that works as expected.
By assigning the new keys they are labeled as "Time Skip: Jump X frames to Previous Assignment" and "Time Skip: Jump X frames to Previous Assignment to next shrugger" and this description doesn't seem right to me as the default hotkeys are labeled as "Release Mouseskip to previous Assignment" and "Release Mouseskip to previous AssignmentSkip to previous Assignment" which is just as confusing!

I think there is still something fishy here with the descriptions.

[namida]

Found the cause of this and fixed it.

[Nepster]

When moving from V10.12 to the experimental version, I enounter the following problems with the options:
1) Despite having selected windowed mode with 3x zoom in V10.12, the experimental version starts with fullscreen.
2) When I disable full-screen in the experimental version, the window shrinks to 945x196 pixels! There is no way at all to enlarge the window again, apart from changing the .ini file directly.
3) I then disabled smooth resampling, kept 3x zoom and manually set the window size to 960x600 (which is even a few pixels larger than 3x zoom in V10.12 for some reason). When starting a level in the experimental version, the skill bar is now only zoomed to 2x, not 3x. Instead I get an unused black border at the top and bottom of the screen.
I attached my V10.12 option file. Screen resolution is 1366x768.

Moreover I want to mention that even the menus get noticable slower when using smooth resampling. I can even count the number of fade-out frames when exiting the game.

PS: Why is "MusicVolume=100" in my option .ini file, when I have disabled music and the volume counter for music is set to the very left edge in the options menu?

EDIT: Added point 3) above.

[namida]

1. Will look into config issues when migrating from 10.12.
2. This is a bug. It should shrink to (not including borders / title bar) 960x600 in this example (formula is still highest multiple of 320x200 that fits on screen). However, there is a way to enlarge it: click and drag on the borders, like with any program. (If this isn't working, that would be a bug.)
3. The skill bar's zoom is not tied to the level area's zoom completely. Even if you adjust the zoom lower via in-game zooming, the skill bar will never shrink below what you've set as your zoom setting. And the skill bar won't be zoomed to a larger size than can fit in the window. (In the case that these conflict, the "won't be larger than..." rule has priority, for obvious reasons.) If you're using a 960x600 window, there is not enough space to fit the skill panel at a 3x zoom. Your window would need to be at least 1248px wide, and at least a certain value which I don't remember exactly tall (120 + a certain amount more to display at least some level area, I don't remember what I set the minimum as).
Black borders, this means the skill panel + level, at the current zoom settings, isn't enough to cover the full available space. There is an option - which should be on by default, can be turned off, but looks like I may have forgotten to actually have written to the INI file so in current exp you'd have to turn it off again each time - that will, at the start of a level, set the zoom such that it's as high as possible without any vertical scrolling, with the exception that this setting will not set a zoom lower than the one you have configured in the config menu (you can still manually in-game-zoom out further, of course). However, with the setup you've got, zooming the level area (I'm assuming a level with a height of 160px here) to 4x would result in vertical scrolling, but zooming it to 3x does not completely fill the screen area. Discussion with someone else (IIRC, IchoTolot) lead to the decision to prefer black borders over vertical scrolling for this setting, as well as to only pay attention to whether vertical scrolling will be involved rather than both directions.

Smooth resampling - this depends on how powerful your PC is, which is also why there's an option to turn it off. On mine, the slowdown is only just noticable. Around the time I added the smooth resampling, I also modified the fade code to try and improve performance (at the cost of a slight bit of quality). I have an idea on how I might be able to improve this, which should help.

Music volume - because the new version tracks "what volume should the music play at" and "is the music on or off" seperately, although the settings aren't exposed as seperate ones in the config menu. In memory - and in the INI file - however, these options are seperate. This is so that, for example, if you turn music off in-game then turn it back on, the volume stays the same, without the need for a seperate "stored volume" variable.

[Nepster]

3. The skill bar's zoom is not tied to the level area's zoom completely. Even if you adjust the zoom lower via in-game zooming, the skill bar will never shrink below what you've set as your zoom setting. And the skill bar won't be zoomed to a larger size than can fit in the window. (In the case that these conflict, the "won't be larger than..." rule has priority, for obvious reasons.) If you're using a 960x600 window, there is not enough space to fit the skill panel at a 3x zoom. Your window would need to be at least 1248px wide, and at least a certain value which I don't remember exactly tall (120 + a certain amount more to display at least some level area, I don't remember what I set the minimum as).

I don't understand this. In V10.12 zooming it to 3x worked perfectly fine in 960x600, so why do I need 1248 now?

[namida]

I don't understand this. In V10.12 zooming it to 3x worked perfectly fine in 960x600, so why do I need 1248 now?

Because the skill panel is now wider (extra buttons and minimap are both always visible, and minimap is taller).

[Nepster]

Now I have to decide whether I want a skillbar with too small buttons or a too wide game screen that often has black borders at the sides and uses too much of the whole screen space.
I prefer the following rule:
- In the following "desired zoom" denotes the zoom level as specified by the player, or if there is not enough vertical space to display the skill bar in that zoom, it denotes the maximal zoom level that still fits.
- If the new skill bar fits into the game screen area in the desired zoom, then use the new skill bar.
- If the new skill bar would be too large, then use the previous skill bar, where the player can swap between minimap and additional buttons.

[namida]

You do have a third choice - vertical scrolling, by setting the initial zoom higher (or just manually zooming in). And this may not be as much of a burden with the improved minimap, especially if you use high quality minimap (although it's quite possible that if your PC doesn't handle smooth resizing in menus well, it won't handle high-quality minimap too well either, especially on larger levels).

In regards to switching skill panels - this could be tricky to implement. Since it's possible to both resize and re-zoom during gameplay, this could lead to situations where the skill panel needs to change between the two modes during gameplay (or alternatively, a system where regardless of resizing it won't change until gameplay is exited and re-entered), which would both be particularly tricky to implement and could be annoying to players - they might not want to have to choose between minimap or extra buttons, or to have a less-tall minimap region, just because they zoomed in. A config option to choose between switchable or everything-at-once skill panel may be more practical, though this still requires supporting both skill panel types.

[namida]

Experimental Player V10.13.16:304937E.

http://www.neolemmix.com/download.php?id=104

Changes:
- Fixed the bug where NL always goes into fullscreen mode if loading a config file from an older version (at least on actual Windows; while not tested, based on the code I suspect this bug would not occur under Linux+WINE*).
- Fixed the bug where the special skips (to previous assignment / to next shrugger) have weird lables in the hotkey config menu.
- Fixed the bug where part of the skill panel may end up outside the window when the window is resized to a smaller size during gameplay.
- Fixed the bug where the window's vertical size is much smaller than it should be when exiting fullscreen mode.
- Various performance improvements; in particular, the fadeout when leaving a screen should have much better performance now, even on weak PCs with the Smooth Resampling option on.


* For those wondering how a bug could possibly manifest on actual Windows, but not on WINE: NL can detect if it's running under WINE, and due to fullscreen mode sometimes having issues with certain Linux desktop managers (in particular, with Ubuntu's default one), NL's default setting when under WINE is windowed, whereas under true Windows the default is fullscreen. The cause of the bug wasn't that NL was "always going to fullscreen", but rather that when loading an older-version config file, if the file said windowed mode, NL would set fullscreen mode to the default value, rather than to "off". Based on the code, I'm fairly sure the reverse would not occur - IE: if the config file said "yes, fullscreen mode", then NL would indeed set fullscreen to on (regardless of default) - hence the final result being a bug that manifests under true Windows but not under WINE.

[namida]

Experimental Editor V10.13.13:D0BE595.

http://www.neolemmix.com/download.php?id=105

Changes:
- Window order editing has been removed. This should now be achieved by overlapping windows. When loading a level that uses window ordering, it will automatically be adjusted to use overlapping instead.

(The Player will also have the same compatibility workaround in the future - already does in the source code, just haven't yet included it in an experimental build.)

[Nepster]

Now I don't see any skill bar at all in V10.13.16:304937E, with 3x zoom and screen size 1248x600.