Timer blink option: What is it for? Should this be kept?

[Simon]

If you wish to ax options, redesign the blinking time limit.

Reasoning: Warning at 30 seconds is far too late. What good does it do? If there is any goodness, why wait until 30 seconds left instead of doing the goodness in the beginning? Why hit at 30 seconds instead of at 5 seconds, or even at the very end, because only then physics are affected?

Blinking text is problematic: We want to emphasize information. The worst we can do is hide that information temporarily, but blink is exactly that. At least blink in different color than transparent.

Some platforming games make your character blink transparently during invincibility frames. Massive problem. Much better to flash in a different color.

List of NL options
Option survey results



General rambling about options. The ideal reason to ax an option is a redesign that combines the goodness of old-yes and old-no. Let's assume the option exists for a reason, it covers a need. Unless we can explain why the need is covered otherwise, we shouldn't axe options.

People like what is familiar, and sometimes perceive that as simpler.

The Lemmings community shares familiarity of L1. As irrational as this may sound, it might be correct to design purely for this familiarity devoid of any other reason. E.g., make overproportionally many options for this. The SI/SR option is of this very nature already.

Compared to physics, options just for fun incur less permanent damage; if you grow really sick of something, could axe it later.

-- Simon

[ccexplore]

Warning at 30 seconds is far too late

Perhaps, then again in general, I think a time warning is always kind of arbitrary, and can probably be argued that in most games is mostly just to build up tension to the player, and not really particularly "informative" per se.  At the moment of warning the player could be practically a second from finish, or be so far from finish that you might as well restart, and in many games you might not even know yet what's ahead to tell the two case apart.

It may be especially not useful in a Lemmings-like game because time limits (and how forgiving they are) can vary a lot from level to level.  30 seconds might actually be a bit soon for a 1-minute level--you may need to wait a bit even after halfway point before it's good to crank up the release rate.

Blinking text is problematic: We want to emphasize information. The worst we can do is hide that information temporarily, but blink is exactly that. At least blink in different color than transparent.

Haven't seen it myself, but sounds like the transparent portion of the blinking may be too long?  You don't need the transparent portion to last very long for the human eye to register.  That said, blinking in a different color than transparent is certainly a sensible option.

Some platforming games make your character blink transparently during invincibility frames. Massive problem. Much better to flash in a different color.

Are you thinking of Super Mario?  IIRC blinking was only used for the fairly brief moment after the transition from big Mario to small Mario triggered by touching an enemy, where they intentionally allow small Mario a brief moment of not getting further harmed from enemy contact.  (Otherwise obviously he would die right away.)  It's likely intentional that they chose blinking to depict this, probably to emulate a semi-transparent ghost-like state that would fit the behaviors rather well.  Also contrast it with the proper invincibility granted by the invincibility star, which is actually more powerful and grant Mario the ability to kill enemies on touch.  That state is depicted by flashing to white or some bright color IIRC.

I've never had problems seeing Mario in that brief transparent-flashing state, even on relatively primitive systems like Nintendo and GameBoy.  Perhaps other games do the transparent flashing in worse ways.

I will grant you that objectively speaking, transparent blinking is effectively equivalent to dropping some frames on the animation, so in that sense it is suboptimal, though the degree of impact also depends on how fast the thing is moving.

[Simon]

sounds like the transparent portion of the blinking may be too long?  You don't need the transparent portion to last very long for the human eye to register.

The 50:50-show/hide period is either 1 second (thus don't show for 0.5 seconds) or even 2 seconds, I don't remember perfectly either. It's very long.

Are you thinking of Super Mario? I've never had problems seeing Mario in that brief transparent-flashing state

Jazz 2. I believe 2D Marios, old Sonics, and Jazz 2 all have a 50:50 blink. The Sonics alternate every frame at 60 fps (unsure? geoo will know), which is very good. I think the Mario games blink similarly fast.

Jazz 2 seems to have a much longer period than 2 frames, it looks like 6 or 8 frames at 60 fps. I've found that too much already. It doesn't look like much in the gif because we don't do much, but it got in my way several times. Any dents in the framerate would worsen the blink.

Surprisingly, the devs had it right in Jazz 1: The blink greyscaled, then showed only the red component. You were never invisible. That blink was even slower, about 3 periods per seconds, but worked extremely well.

-- Simon

[nin10doadict]

The timer in NeoLemmix does blink a bit slowly when it runs low. Perhaps if it was invisible for less time (say, 1/15th of a second invisible, then 14/15ths visible or something like that) or if it just blinked a different color (could just invert the color of the text, seeing as how some packs actually change the text color) then it might be better.
At the very least it keeps blinking when you pause. If you could pause it when it was invisible then it would really be terrible.

[mobius]

I agree all of the blinking happens a little too slowly (minor complaint). If it was faster it would help. And pausing when it's presently blinked "off" is a real problem.

[ccexplore]

Yeah okay, even looking at the gif, the jazz 2 blink does feel a bit much compared to Mario, and could either be sped up or revert to the older style.

I wonder if it's Mario or some other, older game that started this apparent trend of "blinking == temporary invincibility during character state transitions".  The temporary invincibility itself is expected to be common across platformer games for the obvious reason--collisions typically triggers harm if not outright death, but then will take the player some small but finite amount time to move out of being in contact with the harmful thing, and therefore require a small period of invincibility or else the player might as well have been killed immediately.

As I speculated, it might possibly started off as the only feasible way (given the hardware of the time) to depict semi-transparent sprite, and then somehow set off a trend emulated by many other games.

[Colorful Arty]

Personally, I couldn't care less for the timer blink; I honestly didn't even know it blinked to begin with.

[Ryemanni]

Personally, I couldn't care less for the timer blink; I honestly didn't even know it blinked to begin with.

Same here.

[Nepster]

Ok, it seems that the timer blink option really is not that useful, so it will go in its current form. This also solves the issue with pausing the game while the time isn't displayed.

However I feel that the upwards-counting time for unlimited time and the downwards-counting time in timed levels are too similar at the moment. Simply inverting the colors isn't going to work, because in the standards style we have currently white numbers on black background. I think adding some reddish component to the numbers might work, though.
If noone has a better suggestion, I will try to implement this for the next new-formats version, with the (high) possibility that's not yet perfect and needs further discussion and tweaking.

[mobius]

this is purely a minor psychological opinion/request but; I've found I never use/rely on the upwards-counting clock for untimed levels. Honestly I'd prefer it wasn't there at all or had horizontal lines like a digital clock displaying nothing. Some sign letting you know this level has infinite time.

I have however, occasionally used it for when making a timed level in the editor to measure how much time something takes (even on untimed levels actually just to measure times). But I wouldn't care if it's gone. Does anyone else use this?

[Simon]

upwards-counting clock for untimed levels
Does anyone else use this?

For debugging physics, counting physics updates is handy. geoo wanted a stopwatch earlier this week, but that was for the first time this year. Counting physics updates is rarely useful, but when it is, it's worth gold. I'll probably show physics updates whenever I show the FPS, which is disabled by default.

I removed the stopwatch from Lix to unclutter the interface. If you remove the NL stopwatch, a time limit will stand out more.

-- Simon

[IchoTolot]

I actually like the upwards counting clock and look on it regulary. It helps setting up timings as you have also the clock as a reference. Also I like to measure my time taken on a level.

I really love the clock and would like it to stay.

[Proxima]

Same. In any case NL displays your time taken and best time when you complete a level, so it's good to have the clock so that during play, you have a feel for whether you're on track to beat your record. And some levels have time-related talismans.

[Nepster]

The red timer for levels with time limit is implemented in the newest experimental version. Please try it and speak up if it doesn't meet your approval.
I will probably close this topic in a few weeks, if noone complains.

[Ryemanni]

I actually noticed the red timer while playing Deceit Lemmings earlier. I think it's a very good idea and separates the down counting timer from the harmless up counting timer.