Game glitches

[wysiwyg]

Could someone give me a list of the glitches in the game, I've seen some in the replays so I know about these ones:

1) Steel bashing/digging where the 'steel area' isnt quite covering the steel.

2) High jump glitch

3) Nuke percentage glitch

4) Miner turning to bomber, as seen in Flow Control replay

5) Steel exploding

6) Lemmings trapped in terrain and climbing

7) Assigning a Miner skill to cross 1 pixel gaps

Are there any others?

[EricLang]

Yes, there are more. Maybe (if others are interested too) we could set up an official glitch-list. It would be nice to have a detailed description of every glitch and how to execute it. Maybe we could even create levels to demonstrate them easily (as ccexplore did with the Giant Leap Jumper Bug).
Some of the bugs/glitches are version-related.

[tseug]

It would be nice to have a detailed description of every glitch and how to execute it.

Now that's a tall order. Some glitches are very difficult to explain, and some of them are used as the main part of a level (actually i think all known glitches have been used). And of course... there are always ones that nobody knows about. :winktounge:

I don't mind if the ones used in replays are explained, because they've been demonstrated.

[Proxima]

Not this again.

I wish you and ccexplore would realise that your elitist attitude about these glitches is exactly what's putting me off taking any further interest in Lemmings.

[wysiwyg]

The trouble is that the levels that use the glitches are impossible unless you know them, and there is isn't much chance of them being guessed.

I used to think I was an expert at lemmings when I was younger, but there are so many levels being designed that I have absolutely no idea how to complete that I've totally changed my mind lol.

[ccexplore]

You guys are way overplaying the importance of glitches.  I can tell you from personal experience that even when you know all the glitches you don't always remember to use them--that just happened to me on one of tseug's level for example.  (Oh, and you can already see that glitch in action in one of my Lemmix challenge replays.)

Just because you can't complete a level doesn't mean it uses glitches.  For example I know for sure that tseug's #2, #5 and #7 can be solved completely glitch-free.  (And no, that doesn't mean the rest all requires glitches.)

Off-hand, there are actually very very few glitches left that haven't been revealed.  In fact I can think of maybe only one, but some people don't even see that as a glitch.  There is another one or two where I didn't reveal the trick directly, but gave out enough clues such that other people figured it out anyway on their own.

I will agree though, that perhaps it is sensible to include a text file listing which levels in your set requires glitches and which ones doesn't.  Assuming we can agree on what's a glitch and what isn't.  You may recall that Nuntar used to see the ability for blockers to turn miners as a glitch, until it was explained that blockers can turn just about anyone not just walkers and builders.  And look at my replay for the 4-builder solution to Crazy 8:  the bashing stops on its own and definitely looks very fishy to the untrained eye.  Yet, it is simply take advantage of the exact way the game determines when to stop bashing or not.  So is that a glitch or not?  Still, having this "glitch-required" indication can help some people in avoiding "wasting" too much time on certain levels.

[ccexplore]

The trouble is that the levels that use the glitches are impossible unless you know them, and there is isn't much chance of them being guessed.

I can't say I'm entirely in agreement with you there.  Indeed, some of the glitches I didn't directly reveal have proved to be an interesting experiment, the result showing that others nevertheless managed to encounter and in some cases even figure it out on their own.  It's true though that in most cases they chance upon it accidentally, but then again I did the same with many of the glitches, such as the miner glitches and the glitch you seen in the lose-3 Mayhem 10 solution.

Still, I agree that it might be a good courtesy for level designers to provide a note indicating which levels require glitches.  I know I would never read that note myself, especially given recent experience with tseug's level showing that even when you know "all" the glitches you don't necessarily remember to use them.  It would certainly detract greatly from my experience if I read a note that told me that level uses a glitch.

[ccexplore]

Not this again.

I wish you and ccexplore would realise that your elitist attitude about these glitches is exactly what's putting me off taking any further interest in Lemmings.

My guess is that even if I do told you the entire details of the game mechanics, you still would have trouble solving the levels.̆ (No seriously, want to take me up on that?)

Anyway, I would think the proper response is to create some great levels showing how it is possible to create great levels without using glitches, rather than to shun the game itself, but I guess that's too hard.

And please don't call me an elitist when so much has been revealed with the Lemmix replays of many of my challenge solutions.̆ In fact I'm the one who pushed EricLang behind the scenes to implement the replay feature--I'd think that if I'm indeed such an "elitist", none of that would have happened.

[Shvegait]

"Warning - while you were typing 3 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post."

Hehe, guess I'm slow. Well I don't have time to edit this at all so :tongue:

I wish all the levels that required glitches were together in a "glitch pack" and all the levels without separated from those. Then I would know which levels not to bother with and which can be figured out logically. (Edit: ccexplore's idea of the text file for glitch or non-glitch levels is a good idea.)

Glitches, by definition, involve unexpected behavior. The heart of Lemmings is, in my opinion, figuring out situations that seem difficult at first but can be solved with completely expected behavior. There's not much satisfaction (for me) in solving a level by using glitches. For example, one of tseug's levels requires 3 glitches, and there's nothing more challenging about the level. So you either solve it or you don't. And don't expect people to learn 3 glitches at once!

Glitches ARE important for people to know, to prevent backroutes. One of my levels was backrouted with a glitch that was one of those "withheld" ones. So of course I found out about it only during the Custlemm Level List game.

I will admit that two of my levels require the use of a glitch. One of them is a well-known blocker glitch (blockers can push lemmings through walls). The other is maybe a lesser known climber glitch (if there is just a one-pixel gap between the wall a climber is climbing up and a floor on the other side, when the climber falls, he will fall on the floor. i.e. When a climber turns around, it is moved one pixel in its facing direction.) So there's two more for your list, wysiwyg  :smiley:

Now it depends on what you define as a "glitch" and what you define as "behavior". If a faller falls through a blocker's area of influence, should it turn around? Or not? In Lemmings, it does, but in Cheapo it does not. If a bomber blows up on a one-way wall, should it blow up the wall, or should the wall be unaffected? Again there are differences here.

I think the difficulty in learning the behavior should have a correlation to how "glitch-like" it is. Also, how well does the behavior tie in with the intended behavior of the tools? For example, a blocker turning around fallers does not seem strange. It's the blocker's job to turn around lemmings, and this is what they do. A blocker pushing lemmings through walls? Not logical. Is a miner supposed to be able to fall through terrain? This seems far-fetched.

Should a builder turn around when it hits its head? Should a builder be able to build through a ceiling if its head is above the ceiling? These are things we take for granted but they are not obviously defined behaviors. The difference is that they are easily learned. They are also extremely useful behaviors for designing/solving many levels, making their learning automatic and natural.

So anyway, here are a few more I think you should add to the list:

8) Blocker pushing lemmings through/into walls.

9) Climber landing on floor across one-pixel gap.

10) Blocker making steel area breakable.

11) Digger freeing blocker AFTER turning around from said blocker (only works during one frame and only in 1/4 of possible blocker positions, making this one very annoying to execute).

There are many more!

[ccexplore]

1) Steel bashing/digging where the 'steel area' isnt quite covering the steel.

2) High jump glitch

3) Nuke percentage glitch

4) Miner turning to bomber, as seen in Flow Control replay

5) Steel exploding

6) Lemmings trapped in terrain and climbing

7) Assigning a Miner skill to cross 1 pixel gaps

Are there any others?

- bottom 4 rows of pixels of one-way-wall doesn't function.̆ You can see that in play on the replay I posted for lose-1 Wicked 1

- If the steel area extends from ground level (where the lemming stands) up to only 7 pixels, you can bash through it.̆ This is implicitly used in some challenges where you bash through steel in the ceiling.

- If you take out the terrain a climber is climbing on, the game interprets this to mean "he reached the top that's why there's no more to climb", and so the climber will execute the transition to walker in mid-air, with one frame where the lemming is a walker and not yet turned into a faller.̆ You can assign him a skill at that point.̆ This is used in the 72/75 Mayhem 10 solution whose replay I had posted.̆ You can also see the first part of this behavior (without the assigning skill on mid-air part) if you observe my 79/80 solution to Tricky 23 carefully--one of the climbers "follows" the basher without turning around in the tunnel, due to this behavior.

- You can disable steel detection with blockers--the field of the blocker throws off the steel detection.̆ I mentioned half a year back that Tricky 9 can be solved without builders and it seems that just that piece of information is enough for everyone to figure out what the glitch is and how to do it, starting with Shvegait.

- You can't mine through a one-way-wall pointing right, even when facing the right way. ̆As far as I know this glitch isn't something anyone manage to exploit, it seems more like an annoying problem that level designers need to be aware of. ̆It's DOS-specific so I'm actually tempted to get rid of it when we release the Remake version of Lemmings.

- blockers can push lemmings into walls.  I just added this one here as I read Shvegait's response, posted while I'm still editing this one.

[ccexplore]

A blocker pushing lemmings through walls? Not logical.

That one's debatable.̆ I mostly agree that it is a glitch, but if you interpret the blocker's behavior as forcing other lemmings to take on only one possible facing direction while in the blocker's field of influence, then this pushing-through-wall behavior results logically from that.̆ (And indeed that's how the glitch comes about in the actual game mechanics.)

Should a builder be able to build through a ceiling if its head is above the ceiling? These are things we take for granted but they are not obviously defined behaviors. The difference is that they are easily learned. They are also extremely useful behaviors for designing/solving many levels, making their learning automatic and natural.

This seems like circular logic.̆ So if I started designing 100 levels using the giant-leap glitch, then it becomes automatic and natural to learn that glitch?

Nevertheless, I guess it's true that there some levels even in the original game that allows you to accidentally see the behavior you quoted, such as Tricky 8.

Your point about the builder is in fact a great case of how difficult it can sometimes be to say whether something's a glitch or not.̆ My prime example is the basher in my 4-builder solution for Crazy 8, which was posted in the challenge replay portal.̆ The fact that the basher stops on its own falls completely out of how the game determines when there's "nothing more to bash" (and now that I posted the replay, you too should know how the game determines that), yet the result is quite unexpected to the untrained eye.

[Shvegait]

EVERY glitch flows logically from the game mechanics, otherwise it wouldn't happen. Now pretend there is no code and just some ideal Lemmings concept. Would you expect a blocker to be able to do that? It doesn't happen in Cheapo. Is that a bug in Cheapo? (I realize blockers are handled very differently in Cheapo, but should the player have to know this detail of game mechanics?)

This seems like circular logic.  So if I started designing 100 levels using the giant-leap glitch, then it becomes automatic and natural to learn that glitch?

Yeah I guess I misspoke there.  :sad:

I wasn't trying to justify the (builder) behavior. But have you ever seen anyone complain about that behavior? My point was just that the behavior is known by more people and more easily and that is why it is not normally viewed as a glitch. Various level designers use it often in their levels. This is evidence that the behavior is generally accepted. Should it be or not? I was trying to raise the point of ambiguity.

[Proxima]

My guess is that even if I do told you the entire details of the game mechanics, you still would have trouble solving the levels.̆ (No seriously, want to take me up on that?)

Well, that's kind of my point, though I'm sorry I lost my temper about it. I've been here what, two years now? If not then nearly -- and I'm still crap. I've got a bit better at designing levels, but that's not surprising considering I was only just starting when I joined the board, and it would have been hard not to improve on that.

And I kind of hoped that things would work out like the other board I belong to, the ZBB, and the people who are really good at stuff would be able to help me get better. Instead, I've been getting the feeling more and more that this place is about the good people designing levels that only they can solve. "Elitist" was the wrong word to use, and I apologise for that; I'm sure it's as much my fault as anyone's that I haven't got anywhere. I'm just wondering, now that everyone's getting excited about Lemmini and that other new program (was it called Lemmix or something?) and Cheapo is pretty much old hat, how much point there is me staying on here.....

[Shvegait]

Everyone needs a challenge. The people who can seemingly solve anything need challenging levels, too. Or you don't think so? There is the most talk about these levels because they are insanely difficult.

Do you not think there are enough levels for your skill level? You can get DOSBox on your Mac, right? Then CustLemm should be open to you, with tons of easy/medium/hard/ridiculous levels. Gareth's (Garjen), Conway's, and Insane Steve's packs are all very good, and that's over 200 levels just with those three authors. Of course there are harder packs in tseug's, geoo's and some others, but there are also easier packs from other authors.

I'm not sure what Lemmini and Lemmix have to do with the point of your staying on here, unless you meant that you want more Cheapo-type levels rather than CustLemm-type. But you know, Peter Spada showed up and said he was continuing work on Dimwits, so while there hasn't been much announced progress on that, it should be coming.  :smiley:

Hmm...

[geoo]

Unless there is an official list of glitches, the term 'glitch' will always be very subjective, IMO. For example, I would consider a couple of things others would consider glitches tricks still. A possible approach for a definition could be 'behaviour the creators of the game weren't aware of'.

You guys are way overplaying the importance of glitches.  I can tell you from personal experience that even when you know all the glitches you don't always remember to use them--that just happened to me on one of tseug's level for example.  (Oh, and you can already see that glitch in action in one of my Lemmix challenge replays.)

I have to agree with ccexplore on that point. It is true of course, that, if you don't know the glitch for a certain level, you cannot solve it, but this is a rare case, now that most of the glitches have been revealed. (I have to admit, one of my levels is also that way, and another one was when it was new. More exactly, these were the last levels of my CustLemm packs each. One of those glitches has been revealed, and for the other one I might create a level which you could find it in.)
Therefore, the glitches are, in most cases, not the direct reason for the difficulty of a level. If they are used, they are, in most cases again, just used as a filler or help to set up something different, or they are the main trick, then the difficulty consists in the way of how to set up the glitch, which includes new uses, triggering methods or variations of a glitch.
The point is, you use tricks in exactly the same way: I could think of a couple of ways how to use the miner glitch (Havoc 10: Flow Control, 17/21), one could do the same even for simple tricks as well, e.g. you know how to create a step with basher letting him build during his stroke, right? Now, just think of some variations: Have him stop making him digger, or blocker, or even use a miner instead of the basher, or for Cheapo, have him stop automatically when he falls into a pit during his stroke.
Now, if you understand a little how the glitches work, you can do the same for those.
But then, if you hide the idea into the terrain, the level will get extremely hard, not matter if you use tricks or glitches. And that's e.g. what tseug does. For the 8 levels of his pack I solved, I can tell you, all information about the glitches used is provided in this thread. 3 - 5 (depending on your subjective view) of these 8 are definately glitch-free. You just need to know when and how to apply the tricks or glitches in which level, and that's the problem and also the key.

My guess is that even if I do told you the entire details of the game mechanics, you still would have trouble solving the levels.  (No seriously, want to take me up on that?)

Well, that's kind of my point, though I'm sorry I lost my temper about it. I've been here what, two years now? If not then nearly -- and I'm still crap. I've got a bit better at designing levels, but that's not surprising considering I was only just starting when I joined the board, and it would have been hard not to improve on that.

And I kind of hoped that things would work out like the other board I belong to, the ZBB, and the people who are really good at stuff would be able to help me get better. Instead, I've been getting the feeling more and more that this place is about the good people designing levels that only they can solve. "Elitist" was the wrong word to use, and I apologise for that; I'm sure it's as much my fault as anyone's that I haven't got anywhere. I'm just wondering, now that everyone's getting excited about Lemmini and that other new program (was it called Lemmix or something?) and Cheapo is pretty much old hat, how much point there is me staying on here.....

Oh come on, everyone (at least I think) has troubles solving levels like these. I can't say much about your playing skill as I'm rather new to the Lemmings forums, but you apparently solved most of Insane Steve's levels e.g., and recently most of SeriousGamer's levels, not everyone can say having achieved that. And, you don't want to call your levels mediocre, huh? I mean, your design is one of (if not) the best, and the levels are none you solve within 5 minutes either. (I think from our conversations you know very well how much trouble they gave/give me).
I'm currently working on a top secret (ok, just kidding) Cheapo project, so, stay tuned as with the five more levels to create it might only take a few month anymore. I've been distracted from everything by anything, therefore, and the fact that school's starting again, my progress on anything is so slow. Hehe, if ccexplore hacked Cheapo again to bug-freely record and save demos for Cheapo, my progress would be somewhat speeded up.
Anyway, did you try to change Zorn's lemming to require you to get up higher already? And another thing, in the old forum I found a not-working link from you to a 'Hard.zip', is it possible to get that anyway? Finally, if you need any help on whatever, feel free to ask me whenever you want and I'll try to help.

EDIT: Shvegait just made a very good comment. Strongly agree with that.