Re: MobiLems II --- released!

[mobius]

The long awaited MobiLems 2 is here!

available by dropbox:
download:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72760678/MobiLems%20II%20v4.zip

(not on this site because the file is a little large)


INSTRUCTIONS
-Download latest version of NeoLemmix player.
-After downloading my game; put the files anywhere
-Open NeoLemmix and select the MobiLems2 nxp file.

Replays, comments, and such are welcome.

Included with each level is a replay [in the solutions folder]

big thanks to all the people who helped and test and such.
In particular; recent testers (mostly for the newer levels) were Nepster, DynaLem and Akseli) GigaLem made the title icon and gave me the rank names.

[namida]

Completed the first rank. There's a few levels that were a tad annoying, but overall, nice pack!

As I mentioned in the previous topic, I'm doing a video playthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVWvcY0oGEFw5Q6HQyLy9PwBWfun67Nmn
If you'd rather just watch the replays, I've attached the ones for Cake here.

[IchoTolot]

Completed the pack (V2) and I must say it's one of my favorites

A lot of levels of the last 2 ranks really had my brain smoking really hard

[Wafflem]

Here are my replays! I did not beat all the levels, but I have to say overall that this pack is a mix of excellent, very challenging, and fun!

You've made very excellent usage of the NeoLemmix objects and skills. I wasn't sure of your plan to include levels from MobiLems at first, but I felt that worked really well in the end! I also liked how you changed some levels to have pre-placed lemmings, pickup skills and zombies!

Some detailed comments on some levels:

Cake

Cake 1 "How do we get up there?" – this still doesn't seem like an easy level to start the rank, as you only have five of each skill and you have to find another way up. I would switch this with Cake 3 "The Lost River Canyon" since Cake 3 has 10-of-each skill, is a larger level and has a lot more room for error.
Cake 2 "Pigeon Holes" – very excellent use of pre-placed lemmings only. I also LOVE the Bowser Road music you used there – fits perfectly! I also like the small challenge of preventing one lemming from burning and finding a way to save the other lemming on the bottom right
Cake 7 "Merry Christmas Mr. Lemming" – should be maybe Cake 2 – this level is way too easy and much more so than others.
Cake 10 "Walkabout" – beat it thanks to your hint! This should be Cake 25 or early Crafty.
Cake 11 "Deep Undercover" – has a very neat solution
Cake 14 "Lemming's Cry, Heaven's Smile" – seems too easy for its position as well and should be early Cake.
Cake 15 "The Rineman Exchange" – might work in late Cake, due to that you need to find ways to rearrange the lemmigns and I felt the skills seem limited. Great job with the pre-assigned trapdoor and teleporter markers!
Cake 16 "Hobby Lobby" – hm....I have mixed feelings about the time limit...
Cake 17 "Playing Horse With a Billy Goat" – may work in late Cake to early Crafty, the one-of-each-skill and the level structure are tricky.
Cake 18 "A Minor Variation" – I didn't like the precision involved at the left of the level to build to the ball. Maybe this should have at least 11 of each skill instead?
Cake 20 "Lemmings in the Woodwork" – wow, you've made this harder by adding flamethrowers, steel blocks and only 10 of each skill!
Cake 25 "Pyramid Scheme" – this one is even trickier with only three minutes.

Crafty

Crafty 2 "Blocks of Various Sizes and Shape" – as I said, an excellent and non-easy 2-of-everything level.
Crafty 3 "Hard to Port!" – might work in mid-Crafty. My solution may be a backroute.
Crafty 4 "The Cliffs of Insanity" – hmm...not sure about my solution.
Crafty 7 "Turnstiles" - not sure if my blocker compression trick is intended.
Crafty 8 "Peter Paul and Lemmy" - a simple Tricky-difficulty level that I enjoyed.
Crafty 9 "The Kobayashi Maru" – I loved the solution to this one.
Crafty 11 "Enemy at the Gate" – not sure if this is one of the intended solutions
Crafty 12 "Road to Nowhere" – that's another cool trick!
Crafty 14 "Transit Timing Variations" – another favorite level as it uses some neat tricks! Though it may work in around late Crafty?
Crafty 15 "Oh Lemming, where art thou?" – with not enough builders, the only other option would be to bomb one of the one-way walls.
Crafty 19 "Here comes the flood..." – I didn't pick up all the skills, so not sure if this one is intended.
Crafty 20 "The Fall of the House of Lem" – with the instant bomber mechanics, I'm not sure if this one is intended either.
Crafty 21 "The Midas Touch" – another interesting solution!
Crafty 24 "Operation Barbarossa" – when it was in Brouhaha, I wasn't sure if it would work in Crafty. Turns out, it does with an not overly-hard but interesting solution! Then again, I never beat all of the first MobiLems, so...
Crafty 25 "The Icarus Agenda" – great use of the pre-placed lemming!
Crafty 26 "The Whole Kit and Caboodle" – another great used of pre-assigned trapdoors!
Crafty 27 "Almost Like We All Fall Down..." – this one is a very cool locked-exit level! Nice to see one other than Unstoppable!

Madness

Madness 1 "The Bridge Between" – not sure if this one is an intended solution.
Madness 7 "The High Dive" – not sure if this is intended.
Madness 10 "Lemming no climb hill" – this one may work better in Crafty if this solution is intended.
Madness 17 "Way down in the hole" – another very interesting solution!
Madness 20 "Stein's Gate" – I'm not sure if this one is intended either
Madness 22 "Unstoppable" – as I said, I loved the concept used in this one – I feel it's very original! Insane 10 "Comradical" does something very similar to this too.
Madness 27 "Tribute to R.L. Burnside" – this one also has an interesting solution with the pre-placed disarmers!

Grueling

Grueling 5 "Fractures" – this level really belongs in Crafty. I found it to be way easier than even a lot of Madness levels.
Grueling 10 "En Garde!" – haven't beaten this, but I feel the Bowser's Road music suits this one far better.
Grueling 27 "The Rineman Exchange (part 2)" – may be a backroute.
Grueling 28 "Over the Top" – this one has a very interesting solution too for a non-builder level!

Anarchy

Anarchy 1 "Ballad of the Flexible Lemming" – pretty sure that's a backroute.
Anarchy 16 "Also Sprach Zarathrustra" – not sure if this one is intended; if so, that's too easy for an Anarchy level.
Anarchy 23 "Lemming Overboard!" – not sure if this one is intended.

Replays attached! I had a wonderful experience with this pack and you put a lot of effort into it!

Also, I'm curious about the music. I know most of the musics come from modarchive (Revenge of the Lemmings, MobiLems, Lemmings Reunion), Lemmings Chronicles as well as Super Mario 64 and Metroid, but what are the names of the musics from these levels:

Cake 5 "Tiny-Huge Island"
Cake 16 "Hobby Lobby"
Cake 22 "Samson in New Orleans"
Cake 24 "Babylon Fading"
Crafty 12 "Road to Nowhere"
Crafty 26 "The Whole Kit and Caboodle"

[namida]

Ooh, I haven't encountered any non-zombie preplaced lemmings, or pickup skills, yet. I'll be interested to see how they're used!

[mobius]

thanks so much everyone for all the feedback.
Thanks for commending my usage of the new features. Honestly; I was disappointed in myself on this because I clamored to people for a while for adding new features to a Lemmings game and then when it finally happened I found making good use of them was a lot harder than I expected, or maybe it was just because I started running out of ideas.

I'll look at backroutes eventually; not sure when. I expect a lot on the new levels, not so much on the older ones since they've already been tested quite a bit now. But I won't be surprised to see them; it doesn't matter how much you revise sometimes they keep creeping up.

I expect the order of difficulty to be wonky. Nepster and some other people gave me an idea on how difficult the levels they tested were then I completely forgot to look at their advice.

I did not choose a specific music for every level; it's randomized. I wanted to, but do not have the time

@DynaLem:
some of these songs were original MIDI files I did not get from modarchive but another site I don't remember, and I converted them myself; which is why they sound a little off. There of slightly better quality in their original format.

Cake 5 "Tiny-Huge Island" -- from Legend of Kyrandia, I think the title is "Wheel of fortune" or something like that.

Cake 16 "Hobby Lobby" -- is called Space Debris. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly but this is either a remix of a song from some video game or an original composition which came from modarchive. It's the only song that's not from a video game.

Cake 22 Samson --- "FairyTales" from Legend of Kyrandia. I believe this is the opening theme or credits theme.

Cake 24 "Babylon Fading" --- this is a song called "moondog" from modarchive. There was absolutely no info about it at all. I searched for this hoping to find some remixes of actual songs by a composer from the 1930-1960's whose nick name was Moondog. This could be a remake of one of his songs but I don't know.

Crafty 12 "Road to Nowhere" -- Space Harrier, an arcade game called Space Harrier

Crafty 26 "The Whole Kit and Caboodle" Legend of Kyrandia; I think this is a song played near the beginning of the first game.

Pieuw used a bunch of Kyrandia songs in his old videos and I really liked them but I could only find wrong formats of the songs and couldn't find most of what I wanted.

[Nepster]

Here is another bunch of replays. Please note that I used your original release from the other thread, without the levels added later (and my level numbers refer to this older version as well).
I especially loved how you took some of your older levels and added another twist to them!

If you don't want to watch all my replays, I suggest looking at least at the following levels, because I suspect backroutes there:

Spoiler

Cake 21, Crafty 9, Mad 16, Mad 24, Mad 26, Gruel 17, Ana 5, Ana 16.
Moreover Gruel 9 and Gruel 21 have the same solution. The same goes for Gruel 12 and Ana 21.

And here a list of levels that I found out of place difficulty-wise:

Spoiler

Too easy: Crafty 4, Crafty 26, Mad 7, Gruel 27, Gruel 28
Too hard: Cake 15, Cake 20, Gruel 26 (not yet solved!)

[mobius]

thank you for all the replays guys. I'll start looking through them sometime soon. Namida already found two embarrassingly stupid backroutes in Turnstiles and Quantum Non-Locality which probably all of you did as well or find similar routes.

I may change the level order around some in the next update. I don't care about backroutes in the first rank.
One big problem with ordering my levels by difficulty is I tend to see a lot of them as equally difficult so two or three whole ranks of basically equal difficult levels may be the scenario.

[namida]

Finished Crafty now. Less annoying levels here, and the difficulty is starting to pick up a bit - though I felt the middle of the rank was harder than the end.

[Wafflem]

Noticed something as a result of the NeoLemmix upgrades - many of the levels in MobiLems II now play Amiga musics instead of the custom ones. I'm not sure why this happened.

[namida]

I'll take a look at that later today and see whether it's a problem with NeoLemmix (probably more likely) or with the pack.

If it started happening only with the V1.42n update, it's almost certianly a result of something to do with the new music loading code. If it started happening earlier than that, it could be simply a result of that I don't put too much effort into maintaining backwards-compatibility for purely cosmetic features such as music, in which case the pack would need to be updated to how the newer versions handle it. This is more likely if the pack uses a rotation rather than specific tracks for each level, especially if it predates the switch to tracks by names rather than by numbers (I don't remember exactly whether this pack was released (or updated) before or after that.)

[namida]

I took a look at the contents of the NXP and, indeed, it's missing any "music.txt" file, which would suggest it was put together before music-by-name was supported. For a few versions backwards-compatibility was kept in this regard, but it was removed (or rather, not re-implemented) when rewriting the file writing code.

All that needs to be done to fix this is opening it in a recent version of the Flexi Toolkit, clicking "Edit Music Rotation" on the Musics tab, and specifying the track names to use. While I recommend giving the tracks names other than "track_01" etc, it will work fine if you leave these names and just specify them in the rotation list. You don't even need to do that. When you open a pre-music.txt project in new Flexi Toolkit versions, it automatically fills out the music list this way. So just rebuilding with a new version of the toolkit will fix this issue.

Another issue I noticed - which is the reason for the HUGE size of MobiLems II's NXP - is that it literally contains a copy of Lemmings Reunion's music pack. You should not have any DAT files - including music packs - in the folder, other than graphic sets / vgaspecs, LEVELxxx.DAT (and that's only if not using V1.10), SYSTEM.DAT and TALISMAN.DAT (and with older versions, MAIN.DAT, but that isn't a thing anymore). By removing this and rebuilding the NXP, it's cut down from over 100MB to about 17MB. I should probably modify the code so that it doesn't pick up irrelevant DAT files in the first place (in fact, it does clear them out of the folder, but it has a specific exemption for music packs); this would have been quite a difficult task when the tool was first made, but some modifications to the library that packs it together, as well as to the structure of NeoLemmix packs in general, since then, would make it a fair bit easier - the current code mostly just does a single "pack in any DAT files", even though it tends to be a bit more selective with other files.

I've put a temporary fixed version here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rwzjunr0jo34eou/MobiLems%20II.nxp?dl=0
However, all it does is fix the music problem and remove the embedded copy of the LR music pack. In particular, it doesn't restore the customized graphics. I encourage mobius to do a proper updated / fixed version when he gets a chance.

[mobius]

so far I've updated a ton of levels, backroute fixing mostly but also reordering some. I'm up to middle of Grueling now. Thanks again everyone for the feedback! [I have been watching almost all of them btw]
Most of the levels Madness and below I'm not doing much with regarding backroutes. All these levels can have multiple solutions as far as I'm concerned. Even some later levels have more than 1 solution.

Also with the big updates to NeoLemmix I think I'll rework the music a great deal. Not sure exactly what I'll do yet but I'll definitely fix all the issues. Again, would like to select tracks for each level but doubt I'll have time/patience to do it. Except maybe some levels.

Regarding my solutions that come with the pack: please note all replays are named for the title of the level. In case I forget to reorder them exactly correctly you can always find a replay by searching in your file browser.

[mobius]

Good Job Dynalem in spotting some very interesting backroutes! For example, I'm sort of surprised no one else found the ones to Anarchy 1 and  16 and 23!

IchoTolot gets the reward of a nugget because he mostly found all intended solutions! Namida helped to find the most embarrassing solutions.
From mid-Madness onward most levels have been altered in some way.

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Does anyone have the music files from Lemmings Revolution handy?

[Wafflem]

Does anyone have the music files from Lemmings Revolution handy?

So far, the closest thing I can find is Codie Kitty's site, but he/she tends to leave out musics just because he/she doesn't like them, so this list is incomplete. I know that the Main Menu music of Lemmings Revolution isn't on there either.

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On another note, what's the name of the music in this level?