[Discussion][Player] Complex talismans

[Proxima]

In Lemmings Plus I, the Medi 1 talisman doesn't display correctly in-game because it has too many requirements (it has a maximum allowed number for every skill). It does display correctly in the talisman list, but it's not ideal to have to exit play to go and look at that.

Another concern is that the more requirements a talisman has, the harder it is to remember exactly what the requirements are; and it's not much fun if you have to keep exiting play to check them. Maybe there should just be a limit on how many requirements a talisman is allowed to have?

[ccexplore]

To clarify, when you said displayed in-game, you are referring to the level preview screen correct?

Seems like the real solution is to make it easier to see the full list of requirements of the talisman in-game, ideally in-level.  It could be something as quick-and-dirty as a popup window that can be activated with a hotkey or something (and would automatically pause the game as well before showing the window).  A popup window with a single multi-line text box with vertical scrollbar would make it possible to read all the words of a very wordy tasliman.

It's a fair point that even when they can be displayed properly, very wordy tasliman requirements are still annoying to look at.  But also probably not happen too often assuming the level author isn't intentionally trolling the player.  Maybe there's a case to try to optimize in particular for the "N of everything" case, so that when that case is detected, it could just display "at most N of each skill" or similar shorter wording, instead of calling out every type of skill.

[namida]

There is a special case for X of each skill, IIRC. The case Proxima refers to is not quite that - it's (IIRC) 4 builders, and 2 each of everything else, which is a bit trickier than NL has the ability to simplify.

Forbidding such talismans is off the menu. I'm putting my foot down on that one now.

However, I'm definitely happy to discuss ways we can improve the UI around them. One possibility could be to make it graphic based (one thought is to display something similar to a skill panel, that displays the talisman restrictions instead of the normal stats) instead of text based. Likewise, an option to display - or maybe even enforce - the requirements in-game could also be considered.

EDIT: A seperate topic has since been created that covers potential UI improvement: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4661.0
As such, I'm closing this one.