Usefulness of runners

[mobius]

Note: this is not a request of any kind. This is only to state my opinions for the record.

So many people have said that runners are not that useful: here is a little topic to explain simply why I wholly disagree:

Most notable useses for the runner (from experience in Lix, minor experience in L2):

1) Separate lemmings/a worker from crowd. Yes this can be achieved many other ways. So what? More ways to do that (a very important thing in the game) the better.

2) Does other things in conjunction with other skills. This, which is sort of unique to this skill I find quite a cool feature of the game. It adds another level of complexity which can lead to lots of other interesting things. Which Lix and L2 demonstrates to some degree. I think there is even more potential there.

the most important one
3) Makes timing and precision a LOT nicer/easier to achieve. If this was the only use runners had I would still like this skill; this is a VERY useful feature!!! See many lix versions of Lemmix levels with runners in them; they are made so much more fun and nice to pull off while in Lemmix they could've been a major pain; even with all the user-friendly features. And this leads to a tangential point:


I like this kind of feature/user friendliness much better than the actual "user friendly features" (clear physics mode etc). While I like these user friendly features; they take you out of the emersion of the game and feel like cheating*. They feel like using outside tools to play and can be cumbersome. My favorite levels are ones that don't feeling like I need any outside help like this at all.
The kind of help runners offer in this vein is different:

to put it another way: A poor level can be made barable or trivial with user friendly features. But a similarly poor level could be made more interesting or elegant with a feature like runners.

*I've read other people saying this as well.


-Another point; I think there is more potential here; with timing tricks that have not been imagined yet. Also in Lix; tricks in regards to jumping and etc that have not been utilized yet.

So for the record; I would be very sad if runner skill was removed from Lix and if it was ever on the table for addition to NeoLemmix I'd be up for it.

Another possible suggestion: I'd have to see this in action to actuall decide if it's a good idea or not. But what about runners causing the lemming to do everything fast; not only walking. That is; they bash, build etc, faster too. This would certainty make the skill have more impact, whether good or bad.

Lemmings Revolution barely demonstrates this idea with "speed-up" pads. Lemmings entering those do everything quickly for a brief time. They are not used well in that game but I could've seen a lot of potential there.

[Strato Incendus]

Personally, I'd welcome any new skill just for the sake of it ^^. However, with the recent tendency of culling everything which doesn't see much use and/or adds execution difficulty, I'm inclined to argue against the runner in favour of other skills, simply because I fear the runner would get the axe one day soon again and it hence wouldn't be worth anyone's effort - neither for those implementing it by programming, nor for those implementing this skill into their levels. Like with radiation and slowfreeze, it certainly will be possible to find some cool and unique uses for runners, perhaps in combination with other skills. But you and me both know these couple of cool levels won't matter when it comes to cutting stuff again .

Unfortunately none of the three arguments you mentioned really convince me, and I'm going to tell you why:

1) Separate lemmings/a worker from crowd. Yes this can be achieved many other ways. So what? More ways to do that (a very important thing in the game) the better.

Here you say it yourself: Many other skills can do this, too. "The more the better" doesn't make sense, a skill needs to have some own ground it covers uniquely. I consider the differences between floaters and gliders or stackers and stoners pretty minor already (depending on release rate, both stacker and stoner can cause lemmings to slip by the barrier they create). But at least the glider interacts with updrafts and has an angle to it, and stackers and stoners differ so far that one can be assigned in mid-air, is lethal, and climbers can't go over it, whereas the stacker has both the upside and downside that climbers can go over it.

A skill however which only does something other skills can do as well, without covering its own specific territory, doesn't justify its inclusion on its own.

But wait, why do I say "only"?

Because this doesn't do much for me either:

2) Does other things in conjunction with other skills. This, which is sort of unique to this skill I find quite a cool feature of the game. It adds another level of complexity which can lead to lots of other interesting things. Which Lix and L2 demonstrates to some degree. I think there is even more potential there.

This is the same argument I made for timed bombers ("they're cool with cloners!"), and yet that didn't cut it . Because once again, a skill needs to be able to stand on its own. Timed bombers may be cool with cloners indeed, yet if they're used consistently they require blockers to be part of the skill panel too (and you only can choose a maximum of 8, after all) if they're not supposed to become an execution-based annoyance.

This is the same for the runner: While it may create specific interactions with e.g. the jumper, it's the jumper skill doing the actual work here, with the runner merely being an amplifier which doesn't contribute anything to the level by itself. This means that anytime you wanted to have this effect of the lemming jumping further, you'd have to make two of your eight skills jumper plus runner right from the getgo.

the most important one
3) Makes timing and precision a LOT nicer/easier to achieve.

Ehm, no, most definitely NO. Timing and precision are made easier by framestepping, that's it. Because Lix has this feature, that may be the reason why the runner is not as annoying there.
If you play original Lemmings 2 however, most of the levels I've seen which feature the runner are horrible timing-messes - I remember at least one each from the Cavelem, Egyptian, and Sports tribe ("Take up archery"). A tiny timing mistake, i.e. the runner being too slow or too fast, and you had to restart the whole level (with L2 not even having a replay feature). Also, assigning another skill to a currently running lemming was very fiddly and, if you wanted to be on the safe side, basically always had to be done in pause mode (which was switched off as soon as you picked a skill).

So you see, it's not the runner itself which creates these timing advantages, it's the engine it's used on. Depending on whether you have framestepping or not, the runner can simply accelerate levels, which you may enjoy, or create a total execution nightmare.
If you have more experience with Lix than with Lemmings 2, I understand that your focus in this regard is different. And of course NeoLemmix has all these features which can compensate for the original runner's drawbacks. But that still doesn't give the runner any advantages, it simply does less damage in NeoLemmix.

With framestepping, you can basically make an excuse for any execution-based stuff, because where's the problem if you can always rewind? ^^ This argument can be used for timed bombers, radiation / slowfreeze, and was also employed in the turning teleporters debate ("just let a lemming walk through, then you'll see the direction it's facing"). However, this is not the philosophy of the people in charge of NeoLemmix currently; they want to crack the code of the puzzle, not "waste time" (in their view ) with getting the execution exactly right. That's the reason why they want to rely on framestepping and clear physics as little as possible.

The runner however tends to make framestepping absolutely necessary in any level which is based on relative time and space between lemmings.

Which is why I think this is exactly the wrong way round:

I like this kind of feature/user friendliness much better than the actual "user friendly features" (clear physics mode etc).

The runner is not a user friendly feature; framestepping is . And it's framestepping which can make the runner acceptable. But "not annoying" plus "does something other skills can do, too" plus "is good in interaction with other skills" do not really speak for the skill itself, in my opinion. Hence, adding it to NeoLemmix is something I'd consider bottom priority of almost every other skill I could imagine.

When it comes to removing skills however, I'm completely on your side. The runner has been part of Lix for a while, there are levels which use it and are dependant on it, so it should stay. It's like the "height-gaining platformers" debate, where platformers keep their behaviour too this day, even if some of the Lix creators may regret having created the skill that way .

[Proxima]

Ehm, no, most definitely NO. Timing and precision are made easier by framestepping, that's it. Because Lix has this feature, that may be the reason why the runner is not as annoying there.

The situation mobius is envisaging is this: Two lemmings, A and B, need to be separated from the crowd at the correct times so that they are a particular distance apart at some point later on, for example, so that A can build and B reaches A at the correct time to block and the bridge.

With no runners, if you get the timing of releasing B wrong, you often have to go back, adjust the timing, and redo a chunk of the level, possibly more than once if your second attempt still isn't right. With runners, you have much more freedom to adjust A and B's relative positions without disturbing the rest of the solution.

I agree that this use of the runner only works with framestepping; without it, assigning the runner at the correct time would be just as annoying as adjusting A and B's relative positions by other means. Still, Lix and NL both have framestepping, so that isn't a problem.

[Colorful Arty]

Good points on both sides of the argument. Here is where I stand:

I think adding a runner as a skill to NeoLemmix is a good idea, provided it increases the speed of skill execution as well as walking. If all the runner does is speed up a lemming, I don't think that's strong enough to warrant its own skill.

In Lix, I really like the runner because of multiplayer. Runners give you an edge in multiplayer, potentially allowing you to sabotage others or fix others' sabotages on you before your crowd reaches it. Also, race levels are fun! But in single player, I see few uses for interesting solutions or puzzles, although they can be good for action stages.

However, because the runner moves twice as fast as other lemmings, this means a runner will skip over terrain, which I do not like, but there's also no good solution to this problem.

[Forestidia86]

The runner can be a dynamic and elegant means to finetune distances between Lix(/Lemmings). You can use it for

Spoiler

separation as well as for compression.

I agree with Proxima's example and think it's more annoying to redo a whole level setup than one precise assignment of a runner.

To be clear, I don't want to make a feature wish as well, only want to state assessment.

[geoo]

Following up on what Proxima wrote: Even simpler, sometimes you just need one Lix ahead of the pack to do some quick task to prepare for the crowd, and then there's not even need for frame stepping.
The Mon0lith and Eye of the Needle are examples where runners make execution significantly easier, and there's certainly no need for frame stepping there, just pausing maybe. If your timing is a bit off, you just go back a tiny bit and assign the runner differently. Without runners, you'd have to go back much further, and redo a lot of things to get a lix spaced from the crowd in some way which might involve some trial and error.
Mobius certainly has a valid point here. The fact that this wasn't employed in L2 doesn't automatically mean that runners make execution harder. You can make good and bad use of the runner.

Of course, runners are harder to control in multiplayer (where you can't pause) because by being faster they require more attention (less time between assignments). At the same time, as Arty remarked, multiplayer is currently the main use as there being fast is useful much more often.
The fact that runners move 2 pixels at a time also means that you can only assign to them on every other pixel. If a level requires such precise placement it's rather a drawback of the level than the runner, but nevertheless it's true that in general you only have half as much time to place an assignment correctly than with normal lix.

In Lix, the runner only interacts with the jumper, and so is not that powerful after all. Back in the day I was in favour of the runner not automatically jumping off ledges because I found it annoying, but now that I've played kieran's levels I feel like it's actually a big missed opportunity. Though I guess similar to outright removing the runner, changing the behaviour now might break quite a few levels. (Though maybe it's worth checking, not so many levels use it, and for some it might not matter.)