Author Topic: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga  (Read 11760 times)

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Offline platon42

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Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« on: November 16, 2012, 04:31:49 PM »
Hi there,

I somehow came across this board when I stumbled upon Lemmings custom levels on YouTube. In 1996 I had written a Level Editor for Lemmings 2 The Tribes for the Amiga. A friends of mine, my sister and I had created a good bunch of levels with it and the 2.0 release in 1997 included 33 custom levels. I also had patched the game to allow selecting different level sets and the ability to just paint levels with a painting program (and of course you would still need to add some standard objects).

Way back when Hermann Schinagl wrote a converter (DOS tool) for those levels which fixed the big endian / little endian conversion between the Amiga and PC versions. I never owned a PC until 2008.

Anyway. I found an archive on my harddrive with the Lemmings 2 game, the Level Editor and the custom levels. I never had published it in this form due to copyright reasons regarding the original game. The archive (2 MB) can be extracted to any harddisk image of an Amiga emulation with basic Workbench installation and should be running both the game and the editor nicely from the Workbench.

I would be happy to provide the archive here to you, if anyone's interested. It's been a while, but it would be a shame to see the stuff getting lost after such efforts.

Let me know what you think and where to send the file to.

Cheers

Chris

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2012, 01:32:23 AM »
Hmm, I haven't done much with Amiga emulator lately, but I would love to take a look at your custom Lemmings 2 levels ported to PC version. 8)  You can email files to my ccexplore address at yahoo.

Offline geoo

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #2 on: November 17, 2012, 03:24:11 AM »
I'd be curious about those levels as well.

Also curious to see how the editor worked, even though it's unlikely that I'd use it, as I find the DOS version of L2 more comfortable to work with.

Offline platon42

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #3 on: November 18, 2012, 02:47:29 PM »
Hmm, I haven't done much with Amiga emulator lately, but I would love to take a look at your custom Lemmings 2 levels ported to PC version. 8)  You can email files to my ccexplore address at yahoo.

When I tried to find the binary of the converter, I found that Hermann Schinagl still maintains his website already with an archive of the PC converted levels. I've attached the ZIP file.

Offline platon42

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #4 on: November 18, 2012, 02:54:06 PM »
I'd be curious about those levels as well.

Also curious to see how the editor worked, even though it's unlikely that I'd use it, as I find the DOS version of L2 more comfortable to work with.

See the other post for the levels. I've attached two screenshots and the LHA archive, in case somebody wants to try out the game and editor on an WinUAE installation...

Offline EricLang

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #5 on: November 19, 2012, 01:02:14 PM »
Interesting! As soon as I have written the code to import Lemmings 2 for Lemmix I will have a look at them.
Of course this stimulates me to write a game-engine-clone for Lemmings 2!
(which will be quite difficult, ccexplore whenever you are ready :))

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #6 on: November 19, 2012, 01:50:52 PM »
Of course this stimulates me to write a game-engine-clone for Lemmings 2!
(which will be quite difficult, ccexplore whenever you are ready :))

I better set some expectations upfront now.  Sorry but I don't foresee getting into any reverse engineering of Lemmings 2 anytime soon.  I simply don't have as much time as I used to, plus with Lemmings 2 we're talking about over 50 different skills (some of much higher complexity) versus the original's 8.  For the foreseeable future, people will have to stick with using the actual Lemmings 2 game to play custom levels.

Offline EricLang

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #7 on: November 19, 2012, 10:32:23 PM »
Just joking cc :)

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #8 on: November 20, 2012, 02:43:34 AM »
Just joking cc :)

Maybe so, but still want to make sure no one reading the thread has unrealistic expectations around emulating Lemmings 2 game physics. ;)

Offline platon42

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #9 on: November 20, 2012, 01:06:55 PM »
Of course this stimulates me to write a game-engine-clone for Lemmings 2!
(which will be quite difficult, ccexplore whenever you are ready :))

I better set some expectations upfront now.  Sorry but I don't foresee getting into any reverse engineering of Lemmings 2 anytime soon.  I simply don't have as much time as I used to, plus with Lemmings 2 we're talking about over 50 different skills (some of much higher complexity) versus the original's 8.  For the foreseeable future, people will have to stick with using the actual Lemmings 2 game to play custom levels.

I never liked x86 assembly, but the Amiga MC68000 code was pretty easy to read (well, for me, at that time). Didn't take me long time to patch the game so it had the custom levels selection screen and later on, the ability to load custom (fully hand-drawn) graphics instead of using the block-based levels (of course, these levels cannot be played on the PC version). So no need for fiddling with files, just select your custom world inside the game and off you go...

The funny thing I found in the Lemmings 2 game was the implementation of some liquid/sand filling object that never had been used in the included levels (I used this object in a couple of levels, e.g. "Good Luck, Jim"). Okay, the game crashed when the liquid reached the object opening, but that's something you can circumvent...

Offline EricLang

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #10 on: November 21, 2012, 12:06:16 PM »
Do you have some code somewhere?

Offline platon42

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #11 on: November 22, 2012, 12:03:57 PM »
Quote from: EricLang on 2012-11-21 06:06:16
Quote
Do you have some code somewhere?
Of Lemmings 2? I'm afraid I must have deleted my Resource file for it (that's a pretty good disassembler from that time). I can attach however, the asm source code of the patch for the main game binary and my personal notes on what I found during reverse engineering. There are also a few routines at the end of the file. Supplied as is. You might need an text editor that supports LF-only newlines. Charset it ISO-Latin1.

The source of the editor itself consists of about 320 KB of 68000 assembly language files (excluding includes / headers). It was my last assembly project of that size. I used C for most stuff afterwards.


Mod Edit: Restored attachments.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2014, 09:39:02 PM by Prob Lem »

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #12 on: November 23, 2012, 09:56:17 AM »
Finally got a chance to try the levels on PC DOS Lemmings 2, but now I wonder if some levels got broken as a result.  For example, I wonder if first level in Egyptian has some background tiles that turned into real terrain in the conversion.  Third level in Egyptian also had me mystified and wonder if the trampolines on DOS L2 lead the same path as on Amiga (it may very well not, I seem to remember seeing some subtle differences for example when I played Sports 1 of the original game in the two versions).

Still, pretty cool, and will try more of the levels when I have more time maybe during Xmas break. :thumbsup:

Offline platon42

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #13 on: November 23, 2012, 04:31:29 PM »
Hmm... I can't really tell... Really never tried the PC converted levels myself. It could be that the conversion does not correctly cater for all bits and pieces.

I spent this whole day creating a nice stand-alone HDF harddisk image file that you can boot directly into a nice RTG workbench with WinUAE. It contains both the editor and the Lemmings 2 game. You only need a Kickstart 3.1 rom image (preferably A1200) to run it, but other than that no need to configure anything.

There you should be able play all the levels (to be able to select all levels, click in every of the four corners in the title screen) and create new levels, too.

Enjoy.

Offline Leo

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Re: Lemmings 2 Level Editor for Amiga
« Reply #14 on: November 23, 2012, 07:31:37 PM »
You know, platon42 there is no need for HDF file at all? I you want, I can send you (as an example) RAR archive with just a plain folder with all the files available from the Windows, and all necessary for playing the game included in it. All you need to start the game is double-click on icon, and all you need to do at the end is to click on the EXIT button. So, this can be played without even be aware of the emulation.