DireKrow L3D/LP3D Playthrough Unresolved Bugs

DireKrow · February 15, 2022, 08:09:23 AM

- ~~The OWW in Redirect Loop can't be bashed from the expected direction, instead acting like steel. This renders the level unsolvable by its intended solution.~~

- ~~The 2nd spring in Steps to Success causes the lemmings to splat against the cross-beam in the middle of the level. This renders the level unsolvable.~~

- ~~Changes to the trampoline physics render Breaking the Routine unsolvable. See discord message here for details. Tl;dr Lemmings bounce slightly too high.~~

- ~~The 3rd bomber in Entanglement is pixel-perfect in Loap, where as there's slightly more of a window in L3D, due to physics differences.~~

- ~~In L3D you can place blockers directly in front of the exit. In Loap, they exit the level if you try this.~~

- Several levels have cameras that are stuck in ceilings at the start of the level. Most common on indoor levels like Alilemms and Infinite Lemming Drive, but it can also be seen in That's Right for instance. The camera is also practically unusable in Catacombs.

- On rare occasions, attempting to assign a skill to a lemming will instead assign it to one behind the camera or way off in a different part of the level. It's unclear what causes it (possibly rewinds? Might be a coincidence). When this happens, strange behavior can be observed from the indicator in the bottom left that says what skills the lemming you're hovering over has (such as saying WALKER despite the mouse not being on any lemmings), which suggests that the bug exists in detecting what lemming the mouse is pointing at, rather than the skill assignment itself.

- Loading a replay on the preview screen with L causes the camera to rotate when you start playing the level, as if L was held down, until L is pressed again.

- ~~Rope slides look visually bugged down their length, but otherwise function correctly.~~

- The pharaoh lemming heads are visible on the flame traps in Firewall, where as they're invisible in L3D.

- Missing sound effect: In L3D, when you reach the save requirement in a level during gameplay, it plays FANFARE from the sound rips. The rip is noticeably faster and high pitched than it is in-game, so I suspect it's played back at half speed.

- ~~Extraneous sound effect: frame stepping forward should be silent instead of playing a sound.~~

- Not a bug, but playtesting indicates that making it so you can't assign blockers/turners inside of splitter blocks (as in L3D) is probably a good idea, as the currently behavior lets you trivialize certain levels like Spaghetti Junction and 3D A Lemming Odyssey

- Also not a bug, but many in-game cosmetic animations seem to play too fast, such as the wall monitors in Lemlab themed levels and the mud. L3D on DOSBox already seems to play these too fast so it can be misleading, but I'm pretty sure they're meant to be slower.

- Unlike L3D, the engine doesn't seem to tint top and bottom faces, which gives some levels confusing visuals, where walls, deflectors and platforms blend into each other. Firewall is an example. See discord messages starting here for details.

namida · February 16, 2022, 09:07:01 PM

Quote- The OWW in Redirect Loop can't be bashed from the expected direction, instead acting like steel. This renders the level unsolvable by its intended solution.

Fixed in commit 4230bc0. (Will be included in V0.0.16.0.)

Quote- The 3rd bomber in Entanglement is pixel-perfect in Loap, where as there's slightly more of a window in L3D, due to physics differences.

Adjusted the relevant physics a bit in commit 61d4e90. (Again, for V0.0.16.0.)

namida · February 16, 2022, 09:14:11 PM

Quote- Missing sound effect: In L3D, when you reach the save requirement in a level during gameplay, it plays FANFARE from the sound rips. The rip is noticeably faster and high pitched than it is in-game, so I suspect it's played back at half speed.

- Extraneous sound effect: frame stepping forward should be silent instead of playing a sound.

Fixed in ec4cc0b and 5f22c75 respectively.

namida · February 16, 2022, 09:25:41 PM

Quote- Unlike L3D, the engine doesn't seem to tint top and bottom faces, which gives some levels confusing visuals, where walls, deflectors and platforms blend into each other. Firewall is an example. See discord messages starting here for details.

It does, but very subtly. However, I've increased this so that it's now equivalent to L3D in terms of how many steps of the level-data-based shading it's equivalent to (though that itself is not exactly in line with L3D's behavior) as of commit 42b1064.

This doesn't help so much on Firewall, because the colors there are already extremely dark. It helps more on, say, Arctic Obstical Course (the deflector blocks).

namida · February 17, 2022, 01:54:23 AM

Quote- Several levels have cameras that are stuck in ceilings at the start of the level. Most common on indoor levels like Alilemms and Infinite Lemming Drive, but it can also be seen in That's Right for instance. The camera is also practically unusable in Catacombs.

After some testing, I've determined that L3D has a far smaller distance from camera at which it performs the solidity check than Loap. However, the flipside is that L3D also has a higher minimum height. This is why in L3D you can't slip the camera through the gap in Claustrophobic even though you can fit it through 2-slab gaps elsewhere (eg. in The Hanger).

It's not as straightforward as just reducing the distance + increasing the minimum height though. L3D's camera looks only at "is there a solid-to-camera block at this location", whereas Loap takes the block's shape into account. Therefore, the reduced distance ends up allowing the camera to break out of its confinement area in some other levels that usually contain it (eg. "The Prisoner", "The Mansion", "Blazing The Trail")...

namida · February 23, 2022, 08:25:48 PM

Quote- In L3D you can place blockers directly in front of the exit. In Loap, they exit the level if you try this.

Fixed in commit e1c77c2; with a bug in the fix (namely, that the blocker/turner would turn around rather than immediately exit when freed) fixed in commit a040c14.

Quote- Not a bug, but playtesting indicates that making it so you can't assign blockers/turners inside of splitter blocks (as in L3D) is probably a good idea, as the currently behavior lets you trivialize certain levels like Spaghetti Junction and 3D A Lemming Odyssey

Fixed in commit 1754178.

namida · February 23, 2022, 09:50:08 PM

Quote- Unlike L3D, the engine doesn't seem to tint top and bottom faces, which gives some levels confusing visuals, where walls, deflectors and platforms blend into each other. Firewall is an example. See discord messages starting here for details.

I've made some improvements - realistically, probably "as good as it's going to get" - in commit 1ceea74.

namida · February 23, 2022, 09:56:04 PM

Quote- Also not a bug, but many in-game cosmetic animations seem to play too fast, such as the wall monitors in Lemlab themed levels and the mud. L3D on DOSBox already seems to play these too fast so it can be misleading, but I'm pretty sure they're meant to be slower.

This actually is a bug. They should update every two Loap frames (= every 1 L3D frame), but they're currently updating every Loap frame. Fixed in commit 467ebe8.

namida · February 23, 2022, 10:44:43 PM

Quote- Rope slides look visually bugged down their length, but otherwise function correctly.

Fixed in 467ebe8.

namida · February 24, 2022, 01:06:01 AM

Quote- On rare occasions, attempting to assign a skill to a lemming will instead assign it to one behind the camera or way off in a different part of the level. It's unclear what causes it (possibly rewinds? Might be a coincidence). When this happens, strange behavior can be observed from the indicator in the bottom left that says what skills the lemming you're hovering over has (such as saying WALKER despite the mouse not being on any lemmings), which suggests that the bug exists in detecting what lemming the mouse is pointing at, rather than the skill assignment itself.

This is the kind of bug that's really hard to tell for sure if it's fixed, or just altered / mitigated, but I can't reproduce it in a few common scenarios I was previously using to investigate it as of commit f3f6267.

namida · March 10, 2022, 06:17:34 PM

Quote- Loading a replay on the preview screen with L causes the camera to rotate when you start playing the level, as if L was held down, until L is pressed again.

Okay so, this one seems to be something pretty low-level in how the framework and the file-select dialog interact with each other, so I'm not sure that I can fix it. Putting them on different hotkeys should help, of course; beyond that, I likely need to find a better cross-platform solution to open a file dialog, or failing that, write platform-specific code each for Windows and Linux here to handle it properly without interfering with keyboard input. This is likely to become one of those minor "stuck" bugs that doesn't get fixed for a long time, unfortunately.

For this reason I'm splitting it into its own topic: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=5957.0

Quote- The pharaoh lemming heads are visible on the flame traps in Firewall, where as they're invisible in L3D.

This is more a situation where L3D renders things in an unexpected order, and I take advantage of this to hide the pharoah heads in favor of a different graphic. Loap actually splits the trap and the head into two seperate entities anyway, and it's unique to this level, so ultimately - I'll likely just fix this one once I move to using a Loap-specific file format.

At this point, that's everything in this topic either resolved or split into its own topic (aside from that Firewall one which is more a specific-level issue at this point), so I'll close this one now.