[Rejected]Cull turning lemmings around in teleporters? [EXP-PLAYER] [DISCUSSION]

[Strato Incendus]

In my point of view I am doing exactly that: Instead of culling teleporters completely, I am fixing the problem and slightly improving them by removing the side-effect of lemmings turning around.

Why would anyone even think of culling teleporters completely? I get the feeling you make that comparison to make your suggestion seem less "dramatic" again .

How is simply removing stuff "fixing"? You might "fix the teleporter" as an object, according to your view, but you most definitely destroy levels in doing so. A "fix" shouldn't destroy anything.

In this case, the most obvious proposed fix would require adding something , i.e. additional information visible in clear physics mode.

I am not using this as an argument for culling, but to counter the argument "will destroy much content" for keeping.

No one claims it will destroy much content. But it is certain it will destroy content. Content you personally may find confusing, and which you personally probably did not create. And several people seem to have gotten the impression now, that if you consider a feature to be unimportant and hence want to remove it, it doesn't matter whether they have used it or not.

Even if the overall damage of this specific measure regarding teleporters might be small (again):
- not removing the feature: no harm at all, especially not with adding IchoTolot's "turn" label
- removing the feature: slight harm to some levels by other content creators than you
--> slight harm is still more than none!
- and let's not forget little things add up over time .

Have you calculated the total number of levels you have made worthless for the new formats version during the past weeks through the removal of radiation, slowfreeze, anti-splat pads, and now possibly the removal of the teleporter-receiver reversal feature? Can you make a guess how high it is for all level creators added together?

I can give you my numbers: 9 from Pit Lems, 11 from Paralems, and that's still leaving out those where anti-splat pads could potentially be replaced through updrafts (but are still present in the level). That's pretty much an entire rank worth of levels in total, just for one person. And I've only been here for a couple of months! I can't imagine how much content the older members have created featuring any number of these objects.

I should have said this already when IchoTolot suggested this, but unfortunately forgot: This would force the player to look at both the teleporter and receiver (or at clear physics mode), instead just at the teleporter. Not sure whether I prefer that...

I honestly don't get these minor tweaks about "comfort for the player". We create huge mind-boggling levels that deliberately confuse the player visually all the time, we demand pixel-precision from them and slam tight time limits on top of all that to boot. A single good puzzle might tie the player to the screen for an entire hour. So I believe we can expect this much patience from the player to look at the teleporter and the receiver, which shouldn't take more than 2 seconds, should it?

Arguments like "It's a feature, so let's keep it" won't cut the mustard.

I think it's evident that this is not just about a possibly interesting option being removed, but about actual levels being on the chopping block. But even if it were only about a feature, I agree with Dullstar here:

A possible reason the turning behavior is not used much could be a lack of awareness about it. I certainly didn't know it existed until this thread was created.

Same for me. Becoming aware of it will just naturally make more people want to use it. Thus, making people aware of something by suggesting to remove it is somewhat predestined to backfire .

Replace the current teleporter/receiver pair indicator in Clear Physics with a line drawn between them (when the user hovers their mouse over the teleporter, of course - not always!) - it would work better for pairs that are far apart.

From an ergonomics perspective, this should certainly be much easier to understand than the current letter-coding! The only situation I could imagine this being problematic is when a lot of these lines cross each other. Perhaps just use the letters in addition to the connecting lines, just to be on the safe side?

[namida]

I would say that "not many people use it" is a valid reason for culling a user interface feature. This won't destroy any content, and can fairly easily be re-implemented later (possibly more tidily than it was before) if need be. However, a much stronger reason needs to exist IMO for culling gameplay features. In the case of gimmicks, there were several - relatively low usage, huge mess in the code, etc. Zombies, which were kept, didn't complicate the code too much (they did add a lot of code but the majority of it was seperated, or at least seperatable, from the main code), and had seen high usage, including a couple of entire packs specifically dedicated to them. In the case of two-way teleporters, while they didn't complicate the code much, they had (as far as I know) literally no usage except in converted-from-Cheapo content - which was already going to be incompatible with the newer versions anyway. The same goes for self-contained teleporters, which also could have their functionality perfectly replicated with other, still-supported content (specifically, a regular teleporter / receiver pair that's graphically designed to look like a single large object).

However, a lot of the more recent culls seem to have nothing beyond "They aren't used that much, and some of the community doesn't like them" - most of these don't even go very far towards simplifying the code. The problem is that they are used enough that a significant amount of content needs fixing, and some becomes outright unusable and must be discarded. For example - fake or invisible objects would be revealed very quickly using clear physics mode, and while a few levels did exist that used them solely to troll the player, the majority of cases were for graphical effect - as one example, the locked exit in the Machine graphic set relies on fake objects existing, and the best workaround (with minimal breakage, although some manual effort would be needed for conversion) is in fact to introduce a second copy of the regular exit object that simply has no effect - which in turn shows that the ultimate result isn't that fake objects have been culled as such, they've just been made a bit trickier to use.

[Strato Incendus]

Excellent point! I barely use the machine tileset, so I wasn't conscious of it either, but this is a prime example of how removing something can also cause indirect damage, consequences one wouldn't foresee from implementing the change itself.

[Simon]

UI.

• Each teleporter's and each receiver's graphical design shall be required to have a small square-shaped blank space, visible in normal view = not clear-physics.
• Fill each receiver's blank square, at runtime/level editing time, with a different colored square that contains a symbol to aid the color-blind. Like blocks in Tetris Attack.
• Fill each teleporter's blank square, at runtime/level editing time, with the same symbol as the target receiver. (Teleporters-receivers is an N:1 distribution, therefore color-code receivers first.)
• At runtime/level editing time, on mouse hovering over a teleporter, draw the connecting line on the map from teleporter to receiver; always a single line.
• At runtime/level editing time, on mouse hovering over a receiver, draw the connecting line between this receiver and each connected teleporter; this may be several lines at once.
• No UI idea for turning teleporters.

Thanks to Dullstar for good UI brainstorming.

Gameplay. I don't want to recommend anything because it's backwards-compat vs. clean design. In a completely new game, I'd implement no teleporters at all, or teleporters without turning. Teleporters, and especially turning teleporters, hamper my mental pathfinding.

-- Simon

[Proxima]

• Each teleporter's and each receiver's graphical design shall be required to have a small square-shaped blank space, visible in normal view = not clear-physics.
• Fill each receiver's blank square, at runtime/level editing time, with a different colored square that contains a symbol to aid the color-blind. Like blocks in Tetris Attack.
• Fill each teleporter's blank square, at runtime/level editing time, with the same symbol as the target receiver. (Teleporters-receivers is an N:1 distribution, therefore color-code receivers first.)

This is a pretty good idea to get round one of the problems with teleporters/receivers -- not knowing which is paired with which. However, it doesn't help with another major problem -- not knowing which object is the teleporter and which is the receiver. In most styles they look identical or very similar (Space is a welcome exception, with clear "IN" and "OUT" indicators). Clear-physics only adds up and down arrows as indicators, which doesn't help much as it's not clear which arrow goes with which object type (and I'm not saying this just because I'm new to NeoLemmix; Flopsy frequently gets confused in his videos).

[Simon]

major problem -- not knowing which object is the teleporter and which is the receiver

Idling animations may help? Can have radio waves moving away from an antenna, or moving towards.

Hard to realize with still images. You'd want icons to resemble (moving out of), and (moving into), those must be more elaborate than standalone arrows. If the clear physics mode shows arrows instead of clear words, that's a second issue. English text outside of clear physics feels like a nasty hack in any game about pattern recognition.

-- Simon

[IchoTolot]

We came to a very good compromise in IRC today that I personally think will work for both sides:

Distinguishing teleporters from receivers in general

We will change the sprites of every teleporter/receiver pair to include a writing like the L2_Space ones with either "IN/OUT" or "I/O" depending on the sprites size. This will be added to the guidelines of creating a new tileset with teleporters.

Distinguishing turning teleporters/receivers

We will merge the turning with a sprite flip, so that it is visible from the start that the direction is flipped. The new "IN" and "OUT" writings will make this possible ("NI" and "TUO" for turning ones). This way we can keep the behavior intact while it also being visible from the start.


I think this is a fair compromise that hopefully acts like a sign of new found unity and eases some of the frustraition with all the recent critical culling changes.

[Yung Gotenks]

Noob question: What does culling mean? what is it?

[Nepster]

Noob question: What does culling mean? what is it?

Removing a feature.

[namida]

We came to a very good compromise in IRC today that I personally think will work for both sides:

Distinguishing teleporters from receivers in general

We will change the sprites of every teleporter/receiver pair to include a writing like the L2_Space ones with either "IN/OUT" or "I/O" depending on the sprites size. This will be added to the guidelines of creating a new tileset with teleporters.

Distinguishing turning teleporters/receivers

We will merge the turning with a sprite flip, so that it is visible from the start that the direction is flipped. The new "IN" and "OUT" writings will make this possible ("NI" and "TUO" for turning ones). This way we can keep the behavior intact while it also being visible from the start.


I think this is a fair compromise that hopefully acts like a sign of new found unity and eases some of the frustraition with all the recent critical culling changes.

This sounds like a very good solution to me.

[Simon]

"NI" and "TUO" for turning ones
is a fair compromise

This is tasteless and ugly as hell.

It may be better than no change, but that's not a hallmark since (no change) means obscuring physics. Writing on the gadget was already a major hack before the mirroring.

-- Simon

[mobius]

my usual, unusual opinion:
I don't see what's so confusing and I don't need markers. Just play the game and test things out and see how they work. Take some time and figure it out. I don't need the game spoon fed to me.

"NI" and "TUO" for turning ones
is a fair compromise

This is tasteless and ugly as hell.

It may be better than no change, but that's not a hallmark since (no change) means obscuring physics. Writing on the gadget was already a major hack before the mirroring.

-- Simon

If this was only displayed in true physics mode I wouldn't care at all; as I personally find true physics mode hacky and ugly too and don't use it much.

[mobius]

about teleporters in general:

I think teleporters should always at least try to look unique so you can recognize it as a teleporter or at least recognize it as an object that lemmings can enter to do something. Some objects I've seen don't resemble anything recognizable and I have no idea at first glance what the heck they are. If it looks like a teleporter I wouldn't need labels telling me what it is. And good distinguishers* could be made between the receiver and the output.

Lemmings Revolution did weird things with teleporters: They had two sides each but whatever direction the lemming was facing it would exit the side of the  exit teleporter in the same direction. ...Most of the time. At least one level had all receivers going to one exit and this exit turned the lemmings. I'm not certain on that. But I liked this format as well.

Why can't we just alter the image of a turning teleporter? (if it is a separate object from an ordinary teleporter; I'm not certain how they work). If it isn't then add an arrow of some kind on the top then when flipping it will automatically tell you which direction no matter what; without true physics mode. Also I agree that idling animations might help this issue too. Also really like Simon's suggestion about how to associate which teleport leads to which.

*I know that's not a word.

[Simon]

tasteless

This was a personal attack. I apologize.

I'm happy that you're pushing along for improvement. The discussion is already getting somewhere with mobius's ideas.

-- Simon

[nin10doadict]

Using words like IN and OUT to mark teleporters may not be the ideal solution, but it does work. With so little space to work with in the sprite, it's hard to make a distinguishing marker that isn't just a word.
Unless the teleporters could have idle animations... That could give us some more room to work with to make it clearer what they are. If they have an idle animation it's clear right away that it's an object, and sprited correctly then telling teleporters and receivers apart should be a simple matter. The animation could then be made so that when mirrored there's a visible difference, so you can tell if the teleporters are going to change the lemming's facing or not.