Lix 0.10.26 released

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.15 released.

• Fix a performance bug: In insert mode (e.g., when, assuming default user options, the tweaker was open), new assignments would always recompute all physics since the beginning, even if nothing needed recomputation. Now, we recompute only as necessary.
  
• Fix #448: Prevent tumblers from repeatedly crying "Ouch" when they're trapped in a permanent flinger.
  
• Add user option: Allow blurry zoom. It's on by default. If you deactivate this, you force Lix to use only crisp integer zoom factors (1x, 2x, 3x, ...) that won't always fit the level to the screen size.
  
• Re-label the tweaker's [◂], [▸] buttons with "−" and "+". Reason: These buttons move assignments to a different tick, not left or right. It was confusing with left-facing walkers.
  
• Narrow the tweaker to fit more level on the screen.
  
• Allow .mp3 in the music/ directory. This works out of the box on Windows. On Linux or Mac, you must build Allegro 5 with the MiniMP3 library to hear the .mp3 files that you put in music/.
  

Still contains 0.10.13's physics bug (overlapping blocker fields on a slope) that will be fixed in 0.10.16.



-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.16 released.

• Physics: Fix a bug with walkers in overlapping blocker fields that appears only in Lix versions 0.10.13, 0.10.14, and 0.10.15. The bug was: Trap a walker between two overlapping blockers on a slope, observe the walker bop up and down (0.10.13 through 0.10.15) instead of staying fixed on its height (0.10.12 and earlier). This bug triggered an assertion failure in debugging builds. This fix reverts the walker behavior to 0.10.12 and earlier. See images in the next post.
  
• Fix a crash in the editor: When you copy-pasted a tile on a torus map, resulting in an offset copy that went beyond the torus seam, then moved the resulting tile, Lix crashed. Now, copy-pasting wraps coordinates correctly.
  
• Enlarge number displays for large resolutions, e.g., 1920x1080. Now, numbers won't be abbreviated anymore. The bug was, e.g., that the tweaker displayed a four-digit tick count of "...4" instead of "1234".
  

This fixed the physics bug. See next post for a discussion of the physics bug.



-- Simon

[Simon]

Left: Walker bops when trapped on a slope between two blockers. This is a bug in 0.10.13 through 0.10.15.

Right: Walker stays on same height on the slope. This has been correct until 0.10.12 inclusive, and is fixed in the 0.10.16 that I released today; see post above.

Even though this touches physics, why do I still call this release 0.10.16, not 0.11.0?

Reason 1: This fixes a bug that I introduced in 0.10.13, thus we revert to the 0.10 physics that we've already had nearly for a year. The bug has only been in 3 releases. Few people will use the three buggy versions for a longer time.

Reason 2: The physics bug is rare to impact your play. It took over a month to find it even though it was right in the walker, the most common activity, and even though I've played a lot of Lix recently. It's unlikely, although possible, to desynch networking games with it.

Reason 3: I want to fix basher-walks-into-terrain and the heart bug (basher/miner hit blocker, then walk through terrain), therefore 0.11 shouldn't be that distant anyway. I'd like to fix these within the next months or in early-mid 2024.

Overall, yes, there is the danger of having potentially-desynching 0.10.x's in the same networking room. If I had only one of the reasons 1, 2, or 3, I'd call this a 0.11. But because I have all three reasons together, with each independently reducing the likelyhood of the desynch, I'd rather spare you from frequent updating.

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.17 released.

• Reword the lix-identifying panel text when you hover the cursor over a lix. Before, when one lix platformed with 9 bricks left, and two lix walked past, it read "3 Platformers [9]". Now, it reads: "Lix #7 is platforming [9] + 2 lix"
  
• Remove "(RCF)" from the lix-identifying panel text for the permanent abilities: runners, climbers, floaters. We already show permanent abilities directly on the main map as little icons above the lix. (Let me know if you start missing this text ...)
  
• Translate skill names. In English, a builder produces the lix-identifying panel text "Lix #13 is building [9]", which translates to the German text "Lix #13 baut [9]".
  
• Translate keyboard key names. E.g., in German, if you bind the Insert key, the keybinding button will read "Einfg". Before, it read "Insert" even in German.
  
• Reword the in-game tooltip "Replaying. To play, click into air." to "Replaying. Click to play from here."
  
• Don't show the tooltip "Rewind time or quit" after the single player has nuked. In this case, he wants to exit to menu, not rewind.
  
• Don't show tooltips in multiplayer. This works around bug #473: When you have both tooltips and the big score board, the tooltips don't erase the score board from screen properly. Until we solve the root cause of those drawing/undrawing races, let's hide tooltips altogether in multiplayer.
  

Bonus picture with stamps of Porcupines and Manuls. This release of Lix 0.10.17 fixes two bugs about internationalization, and this picture with many different animals from Asia was the best candidate, but it's too big to inline here. Instead, the Bengal cats above are still appropriately exotic.

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.18 released.

• Solobattle: From the singleplayer browser, you can start a multiplayer map and you will control all teams (= all colors). Spawn order and timings will be as if you played the map with its intended number of players. Hover the mouse cursor over lix of different colors to see other teams' skill panels.
  
• Prevent accidental cutting of replays: To cut, you must click where no lix are on the map. It's not enough anymore to click on left-facing lix while you filter for right-facing lix (via rightward directional select).
  
• In singleplayer, after you nuke, the skill panel shows your remaining skills even though you can't assign them anymore. In multiplayer, after you nuke, you see zero leftover skills to make it clear that you cannot assign.
  
• When you observe a multiplayer battle, all of your skill buttons are unchosen (not highlit). You still can't switch teams, which would be nice.
  
• Hide the Windows command line console when you run Lix after you've built Lix from source with DMD. Reason: Newer DMD versions link with lld-link, not with optlink, and need different linker flags.
  
• Add over 60 of Flopsy's new multiplayer maps. Remove over 70 weaker maps by Flopsy according to Flopsy's own choice.
  
• Fix a backroute in Continuum Hypothesis (lemforum Hopeless).
  
• Fix player counts for Group Therapy and for One for Me, One for You.
  
• Update Catalan translations, thanks to Rampoina.
  

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.19 released.

• Fix #480: The networked game wouldn't start even though everybody was ready. The bug was: When a new player joined a room, the existing ready players became unready only on the server, not on each client. Now, the server and the clients agree that, after a new joiner, everybody becomes unready. The fix is client-side and doesn't affect physics. If the server starts the game at all, all 0.10.x clients start playing regardless of this fix.
  
• Add Eggs in One Basket, a new multiplayer map by geoo for 3-8 players.
  
• Add Hopscotch, a new miniature by geoo.
  
• Fix entrance order in the 6-player version of Rescue Ranger Trolls.
  
• Remove Cascade Squared 6p and 8p according to Flopsy's recommendation.
  
• Remove a zealous assertion that prevented you from re-entering the options menu after you've accidentally set an overly tall resolution, e.g., 300x800, when you ran a debug build of Lix.
  
• Update Allegro DLLs to 5.2.9.0 for the Windows 64-bit release.
  
• Rewrite the Windows 32-bit build notes. Offer DLLs/LIBs for building 32-bit Windows Lix and for linking with lld-link. (Both DMD and LDC now link with lld-link, not with Optlink. I still recommend everybody to choose 64-bit Lix.)
  

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.20 released.

• New in-game panel button: Rewind your previous skill assignment. You can then click air to erase the assignment, or unpause to let it replay. If there are no earlier skill assignments, the level restarts from the beginning. This button has no default hotkey; you can assign one in the user options.
  
• Rename the options tab "Replay" to "Game Controls". Moved the splat ruler, tooltip, builder queuing, and batter priority options into this tab.
  
• Eye of the Needle (lemforum Hopeless): Fix my backroute. Now, the exit platform is thin, you can't mine and then platform to turn there. Eye of the Needle is also shorter horizontally.
  
• Fix #479: Fix a crash in the editor. The crash required five ingredients: You had to run a debugging version of Lix, the map was cylindrical or toroidal, you had many tiles on both sides of the the torus seam, you grouped the tiles, and you used the editor's undo feature to undo the grouping across the seam.
  
• Fix #481: In the main menu, print the version of the Allegro DLLs detected at runtime.
  
• Change the tree structure of internal images: Now each scalable image has a directory, which contains the different scalings (1.png, 1.5.png, 2.png, ...) of that image.
  

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.21 released.

• Added geoo's new singleplayer pack with 106 levels. They're sorted by theme:
  
  • Wrappy puzzles on cylindrical/toroidal maps,
    
  • flowy puzzles about crowd control,
    
  • classy large-scale strategic puzzles,
    
  • loony puzzles about physics curiosities,
    
  • and sketchy outtakes.
• Added two new miniatures by geoo: Bridges, and Mini Cellar.
  
• During insert mode, change the tooltip "Replaying. Click to play from here." to "Insert Mode: Click to insert." (You're in insert mode while the tweaker is open, unless you reconfigure this in the options menu.)
  

Welcome to Space!

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.22 released.

• Fix #427: Reveal trigger areas during play: When you activate the splat ruler, you also see trigger areas of gadgets (goals, traps, flingers, water, ...) as cyan hollow rectangles.
  
• Fix #487: Whenever Lix saves your user options to ./user/options.sdl, Lix will also save unknown options that you happened to have in your options file from past or future Lix versions. This will be helpful in the future when you keep different versions in the same tree, e.g., for testing, and they're all version 0.10.22 or newer.
  
• Fix #472: In level and replay browsers, you can't simultaneously quit the browser and open the deletion confirmation dialog anymore. Before, the bug was: You returned to the main menu and still had the deletion dialog open.
  
• Fix tooltip font size. Now, the pause tooltip always shows in small letters. Before, the pause tooltip showed in the medium font when the mouse was at the screen edge in a scrollable level.
  
• Add three multiplayer maps by geoo: Pachinko (4-7 players), Zick-Zack Kunterbunt (4-8 players), Hanabi around the World (4 players).
  
• Reorder the singleplayer level directory: geoo's pack appears alphabetically among the other one-author packs.
  
• The Windows build script win-build.bat still prefers LDC, but now allows to build Lix with any compiler.
  

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.23 released.

• Keep visible land in-place when you open or close the replay tweaker. Before, when you opened or closed the tweaker, the land scrolled left or right.
  
• Fix #476: Chat messages appear in the chatters' player colors. Observers will continue to chat in white.
  
• On Windows, Lix shows a native dialog box when an exception flies out of main, e.g., when you lack important files that Lix needs to run. You can screenshot the dialog box or copy the error from user/log.txt.
  
• Move some multiplayer maps: For each player count (2p, 3p, ..., 8p), whenever an author directory held only only one map at player count, that that map is now in a directory other/ at that player count. See topic: Organizing Multiplayer Levels: Folder Structure
  
• Add Sunny Day at the Beach, a multiplayer map by Blitz for 2p-5p.
  

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.24 released.

• Shorten and easen Pipe Dream. It's now a better second introductory level.
  
• Change the author in Proxima's levels to Proxima. Existing checkmarks convert automatically whenever Proxima is the only author. Existing checkmarks become "?!" for Proxima's co-authored levels.
  
• Remove pack descriptions (_english.X.txt and _german.X.txt) from the level tree. Lix has never displayed them since 2016.
  
• Draw cyan trigger area rectangles one pixel lower. They now look like they match the lix's lowermost foot pixel. As before, cyan trigger area rectangles appear in the editor and during play when you activate the splat ruler.
  
• Many internal refactorings, e.g., to prepare multiple spritesheets for future physics changes.
  

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.25 released.

• Refactor the collision code between lix and goals a.k.a. exits. This speeds up rewinding and mass replay verification by at least 13 %.
  
• Refactor the world into a mutable and an immutable half to make savestates smaller and speed up rewinding. This brings only a small improvement.
  
• Add Rainbow Day, a 2-player and 4-player map by Miri.
  

-- Simon

[Simon]

Lix 0.10.26 released.

Download for Windows 64-bit -- recommended
Download for Windows 32-bit -- fallback for ancient machines
Download for Linux 64-bit
Source code
Changelog
Issue tracker

How to update

Quick and dirty: Extract over your old installation. Level moves will then result in duplicate levels that remain in your level tree.

Clean method: Extract to new directory, then copy these directories from old Lix into new Lix:
user/
replays/
...and any levels that you've built yourself or added manually.

• In multiplayer, when you've selected a spawn delay handicap, the in-game panel shows you the remaining time until your first lix spawns.
  
• Fix an animation regression from Lix 0.10.25: Amanda's occult-style hatch animated only through its first 25 % of frames, then disappeared. This didn't affect physics, the lix continued to spawn correctly from thin air. Now, all hatches animate correctly through all frames again.
  
• Refactor permutations to be allocation-free.
  

-- Simon