[DISCUSSION][PLAYER] Neutral lemmings vs nuke

[ccexplore]

Just to clarify (and it's maybe my fault as I talk too much and probably confused some people with a lack of clarity in some phrasings), Simon's proposal #5 is not to remove nuke altogether, it is merely to make it purely eye-candy with no exploitable effects for level solutions.  Specifically he proposed that exits be disabled upon initiation of a nuke.  Then as far as solution goes, initiating a nuke vs aborting the level instantly will have no difference to the solution, as no additional lemmings can be saved past initiation of nuke.  His proposal would also make all details of nuke behaviors wrt to neutrals (and other cases) all be only eye-candy differences as well, and you can basically freely decide on the details of nuke behaviors knowing that no choices can affect level solutions.  You can in fact with Simon's proposal, also decide that nuking will explode everyone equally just like many of us are leaning towards now.  The only difference is, any solution that uses a nuke is exactly the same as instant-quitting the level at point of nuke initiation.

It is a cull of nuke solutions, not of nuking itself.

[Nessy]

My bad. I completely misread everything I'll edit my post.

[Simon]

I'll be fine if any solution (#1-#5 or anything new) reaches good consensus. I'm not pushing particularly hard for #5 (make nuke eye candy = remove nuke solutions).

#5 (make nuke eye candy) is merely an elegant, striking alternative to everything else. It belongs in the discussion even though I feel that it will be dismissed. If we actively dismiss #5 with a reason, we can happily pick something else without regret of overlooking the simplemost design.

-- Simon

[Turrican]

First of all ,  I agree that the best solution is to have nuking afecting everything including zombies and neutral lemmings ,  that gets my vote ! But please , don't remove nuke solutions !

The argument that originally meant to be just a way to end the level ,I don't consider it strong enough! If we use the same logic , release rate also in many cases doesn't used nowadays as originally intended. In the Amiga version it's just meant to be a fast forward option because the Amiga version didn't feature a fast forward option like the modern players have. (onml with levels like havoc 10 released later).

And the most important is that some very creative, unique and impressive levels have been relased that use very smart nuke solutions. Some of these are amongst my favourites ever, and one of these is so iconic, that it has currently 4 different versions. So now it will be playable on Lemmix and not on the new formats Neolemmix? It would be a shame imo if we would lose levels like these.

So in conclusion, make the nuke affect everything, keep the nuke solutions, and also keep the countdown counter on nuking, because it makes levels as the ones I mention playable, and also it adds a sense of tension before the nuking.

[ccexplore]

#5 (make nuke eye candy) is merely an elegant, striking alternative to everything else. It belongs in the discussion even though I feel that it will be dismissed. If we actively dismiss #5 with a reason, we can happily pick something else without regret of overlooking the simplemost design.

To be fair, it's not that I'm trying to sneakily dismiss it, even if I imagine it might look like that sometimes.  My thinking is that because the proposal effectively broadens the scope of change to also affect existing physics (as opposed to new physics directly related to the new feature being implemented), it might be more controversial.  Certainly more concerning for some as a few existing, neutral-free levels can be affected.  And so I'm less certain whether namida is willing to entertain potentially holding up release of the new element longer, in order to wait for a decision affecting broader physics changes to settle down.

On the one hand, if you manage to get broad support for #5, then despite the potential longer wait and hold-up, it does make the ultimate decision about neutral's nuking behavior a lot freer, and might even potentially change how some people would otherwise vote.  Although at the moment I don't think it's changing anyone's votes (I expect getting support for #5 would mainly just affect the votes that were going towards "don't make neutral's nuking be exploitable, maybe don't nuke them at all" to perhaps switch to "hey now that it's definitely not going to be exploitable, go wild and make the neutrals do triple fireworks for all I care".  On the flip side, we actually could also delay the decision on the broader change of no nuke solutions, leaving it for later final decision well after neutrals are implemented and officially released.  Sure, delaying that decision might potentially increase the number of levels depending on behaviors that could then later become culled, but it's already the case anyway (ie. there probably already exists a few custom levels featuring nuke solutions), at the same time the number of such levels had been low and tended to grow only slowly over time.

[Turrican]

(ie. there probably already exists a few custom levels featuring nuke solutions), at the same time the number of such levels had been low and tended to grow only slowly over time.

What I think that applies here is quality > quantity.  As I said in my previous post , some of these levels are really unique, brilliant , well thought and iconic! And also they add a nice diversity in the custom levels scene. And also personally are amongst my favourites. Personally I woudn't like to see them gone!

[Strato Incendus]

I'd be fine with either instant gameplay termination if only Neutrals remain (i.e. suggestion 1), or with nuke also nuking them. Whether Nuke also affects Zombies shouldn't really destroy existing levels - it might just lead people to create more nuke solutions, now involving the deliberate nuking of Zombies .

Conversely, locking exits when nuking is a change of existing physics with lots of damage to existing content, therefore comparable to a cull, therefore sets off my alarm sensors. Big no to that from me! The same would happen with instant nuking (=without oh-noing first).

Sorry, Simon!

[namida]

So in conclusion, make the nuke affect everything, keep the nuke solutions, and also keep the countdown counter on nuking, because it makes levels as the ones I mention playable, and also it adds a sense of tension before the nuking.

My instinctive reaction to this was "removing the countdown wouldn't actually break anything, as long as they still OhNo first; it may break replays but those could be patched automatically just by delaying the nuke 5 seconds". I then realised I'm wrong (and I'm explaining this because I suspect others might have the same reaction): This change would remove the feature "stop lemmings spawning, and 5 seconds later any existing lemmings start exploding", and add the feature "stop lemmings spawning, and lemmings start exploding immediately" - so this could have an effect on levels that require nuking before all lemmings have spawned. (Indeed, I can think of one level that might break due to this - albeit only a talisman solution, not the regular one.)

[IchoTolot]

My instinctive reaction to this was "removing the countdown wouldn't actually break anything, as long as they still OhNo first; it may break replays but those could be patched automatically just by delaying the nuke 5 seconds". I then realised I'm wrong (and I'm explaining this because I suspect others might have the same reaction): This change would remove the feature "stop lemmings spawning, and 5 seconds later any existing lemmings start exploding", and add the feature "stop lemmings spawning, and lemmings start exploding immediately" - so this could have an effect on levels that require nuking before all lemmings have spawned. (Indeed, I can think of one level that might break due to this - albeit only a talisman solution, not the regular one.)

Of course this would break stuff and the not spawining effect would be the minor part. The 5 second delay for the first lemmings to explode is significant (also lemmings can still reach the exit) and between the first and the last lemming there is quite the delay where later spawned lemmings can still act while the first already explode. Example (spoiler for those who have not experimented with the nuke and never faced such a level):

Spoiler

Deceit lemmings second last level

I also did my own experiments on this, which were quite fruitful.


For the general topic, I am with: Drop the nuke -> everyone explodes after the usual timer.

[namida]

The 5 second delay for the first lemmings to explode is significant (also lemmings can still reach the exit) and between the first and the last lemming there is quite the delay where later spawned lemmings can still act while the first already explode.

I was envisioning this in the sense of that they still explode one by one, not all at the same time, just without a 5 second countdown first. However, yes, even with this there can be edge cases where it makes a difference (because there's fewer lemmings left, so indeed, there'll be effects on the exact timings).

However, such an idea isn't really under consideration at the moment anyway. Absent any really strong argument / consensus for something else, I'm going with "nuke affects everyone, aside from that it remains as-is" as the solution here.

[Simon]

"nuke affects everyone, aside from that it remains as-is" as the solution here.

We should define the order of nuking then, assuming you still want one exploder assignment per physics update. For maximum replay backwards compat, let's explode player lemmings first, only then neutrals, then zombies.

-- Simon

[namida]

"nuke affects everyone, aside from that it remains as-is" as the solution here.

We should define the order of nuking then, assuming you still want one exploder assignment per physics update. For maximum replay backwards compat, let's explode player lemmings first, only then neutrals, then zombies.

-- Simon

The order of nuking is already defined: First lemming to spawn, first to start counting down. I don't see a particularly strong reason to have a special "normal then neutral then zombie" rule here.

[namida]

It looks like there's no further discussion on this, so from V12.7 onwards, the new nuke behaviour is that the nuke affects everyone - zombies and neutrals included.